This
article does pay tribute to the young Ms Cheney, who also received a nice
write up in the WP last week saying that she got her ambition from her
mother.
Juxtaposed
with the apparent international goodwill that might result in fostering
economic progress in the Middle East, is the other side of the equation, or
who has the bigget microphone, I believe Tom Walker keeps saying. The article below repeats some of the
readings shared earlier on FW re: The Gap nations and Barnett’s article in
Esquire. I am one of those who
believes that the Wolfowitz strategy preceeded any whitewashed economic
strategy, which Ms Cheney is now proceeding to implement. It’s the old which came first, the
chicken or the egg equation.
I
recommend that some of you go to the website from which this article came and
look around: -
KWC
Foreign
Policy in Focus (online
at www.fpif.org).
Pentagon Moving Swiftly to Become
"Globocop"
By Jim Lobe | June 12, 2003,
Editor: John
Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
Project
Against the Present Danger
Much
like its successful military campaign in Iraq, the
Pentagon is moving at breakneck speed to redeploy U.S. forces and equipment
around the world in ways that will permit Washington to play
"Globocop,"
according to a number of statements by top officials and defense planners.
While preparing sharp reductions in forces in Germany, Turkey, and Saudi
Arabia, military planners are talking about establishing semi-permanent or
permanent bases along a giant swathe of global territory--increasingly
referred to as "the
arc of instability,"
from the Caribbean Basin through Africa to South and Central Asia and across
to the North Korea.
The
latest details, disclosed by the Wall
Street Journal on June 10th, include
plans to increase U.S. forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa across the Red
Sea from Yemen, setting up semi-permanent "forward bases" in Algeria, Morocco,
and possibly Tunisia, and smaller facilities in Senegal, Ghana, and Mali that
could be used to intervene in oil-rich West African countries, particularly
Nigeria. Similar bases--or what some call lily pads--are now being sought or
expanded in northern Australia, Thailand (whose prime minister, Thaksin
Shinawatra, has found this to figure high on the bilateral agenda in talks in
Washington, DC this week), Singapore, the Philippines, Kenya, Georgia,
Azerbaijan, throughout Central Asia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar, even
Vietnam, and, Iraq.
"We
are in the process of taking a fundamental look at our military posture
worldwide, including in the United States," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz on a recent visit to Singapore, where he met with military chiefs
and defense ministers from throughout East Asia about U.S. plans there. "We're
facing a very different threat than any one we've faced
historically."
Victory
for Wolfowitz
Those
plans represent a major triumph for Wolfowitz, who 12 years ago argued in a
controversial
draft "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG)
for realigning U.S. forces globally so as to "retain preeminent responsibility
for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our own
interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously
unsettle international relations."
The
same draft, which was largely repudiated by the first Bush administration
after it was leaked to the New York
Times, also argued for "a unilateral U.S. defense guarantee" to
Eastern Europe "preferably in cooperation with other NATO states" and the use
of pre-emptive force against nations with weapons of mass destruction--both of
which are now codified as U.S. strategic doctrine. The same draft DPG also
argued that U.S. military intervention should become a "constant fixture" of
the new world order. It is precisely that capability toward which the
Pentagon's force realignments appears to be
directed.
With
forward bases located all along the "arc of instability," Washington can
pre-position equipment and at least some military personnel that would permit
it to intervene with overwhelming force within hours of the outbreak of any
crisis.
In that respect, U.S. global strategy would not be dissimilar to Washington's
position vis-a-vis the Caribbean Basin in the early 20th century, when U.S.
intervention from bases stretching from Puerto Rico to Panama became a
"constant feature" of the region until Franklin Roosevelt initiated his
Good
Neighbor Policy.
Indeed, as pointed out by Max
Boot,
a neoconservative writer at the Council on Foreign Relations, Wolfowitz's 1992
draft, now mostly codified in the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the USA,
is not all that different from the 1904 (Theodore) Roosevelt
Corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine,
which asserted
Washington's "international police power"
to intervene against "chronic
wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties
of civilized society."
Remarkably,
the new and proposed deployments are being justified by similar rhetoric.
Just
substitute "globalization" for "civilization."
Pentagon
Filling Globalization's Gaps
The
emerging Pentagon doctrine, founded mainly on the work of ret. Adm. Arthur
Cebrowski, chief of the Pentagon's Office of Force
Transformation,
and Thomas
Barnett of the Naval War College,
argues that the dangers against which U.S. forces must be arrayed
derive
precisely from countries and regions that are "disconnected" from the
prevailing trends of economic globalization.
"Disconnectedness is one of the great danger signs around the world,"
Cebrowski told a Heritage
Foundation
audience last month in an update of the "general loosening of the ties of
civilized society" formula of a century ago.
Barnett's
term for areas of greatest threat is "the
Gap,"
areas where "globalization is thinning or just plain absent." Such regions are
typically "plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and
disease, routine mass murder, and--most important--the chronic conflicts that
incubate the next generation of terrorists." As he wrote in
Esquire
magazine
earlier this year, "If we map out U.S. military responses since the end of the
cold war, we find an overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of
the world that are excluded from globalization's growing Core--namely the
Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central
Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast
Asia."
The
challenge in fighting terrorist networks is both to "get them where they live"
in the arc of instability and prevent them from spreading their influence into
what Barnett calls "seam
states"
located between the Gap and the Core. Such seam states he says include Mexico,
Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand,
Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Seam states, the logic goes, should
play critical roles, presumably including providing forward bases, for
interventions into the Gap. At the same time, if states "loosen their ties" to
the global economy, "bloodshed will follow. If you are lucky," according to
Barnett, "so will American troops."
On
the eve of the war in Iraq, Barnett predicted that taking Baghdad would not be
about settling old scores, or enforcing disarmament of illegal weapons.
Rather,
he wrote, it "will mark a historic tipping point--the moment when Washington
takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of
globalization."
Observers
will note that Barnett's arc of instability corresponds well to regions of
great oil, gas, and mineral wealth,
a reminder again of Wolfowitz's 1992 draft study. It asserted that the key
objective of U.S. strategy should be "to
prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would,
under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global
power."
(Jim
Lobe
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
is
a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus
(online
at www.fpif.org).
He
also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)
Here's a very interesting item from
today's FT:
<<<<
US eyes economic regime change in
Mideast
Edward Alden
Nearly 2,000 people, including Colin Powell,
the US secretary of state, gather in Jordan this weekend for a Middle East
conference that will try to focus on the low politics of economic reform
rather than the high politics of war and peace.
But if it is not
derailed by the continuing violence in Israel and Gaza, this extraordinary
meeting of the World Economic Forum will highlight a US initiative that is no
less radical than regime change in Iraq or the faltering road map for
Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Under the awkward rubric of the US-Middle
East Partnership, the US is hoping to use a combination of moral persuasion
and targeted foreign aid to foment a democratic capitalist revolution in a
region still dominated by autocracies and state-led oil economies.
The
driving force is Elizabeth Cheney, 36-year-old daughter of vice-president Dick
Cheney. Her appointment as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near
East in March 2002 raised eyebrows, but even opponents say she may be the best
person to lead President George W. Bush's vision of remaking the Middle East
in America's image.
Judith Barnett, who held the same post in the
Clinton administration and is now with PA Consulting Group, calls her
"brilliant", and says: "She is absolutely the right person in the right place
at the right time."
Ms Cheney came to the job with limited government
experience, including stints with the State Department and the World Bank, but
a long interest in development issues. As a college student she travelled
twice in the mid-1980s to famine-ridden regions of Kenya, only to be shocked,
she says, to see villagers cutting open bags of corn and using the bags to
build huts while leaving the food on the ground. "They had never seen yellow
maize," she recalls.
But unlike the generation who joined President
John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, Ms Cheney came back persuaded that governments
were a big part of the problem. "You've got the remnants of very
statist-controlled economies and the failed economic policies coming out of
the 1960s and 1970s which have completely stifled the potential for growth,"
she says of the Middle East. "Those are unsustainable."
In the
bureaucratic wars of Washington, Ms Cheney has already been able to increase
funding for the US-Middle East Partnership initiative from $29m (�24.5m, �17m)
last year to $100m this year, with a request for $145m next year.
"What
we're doing is really very new and important because it's the first time the
US has made such a commitment to these issues of economic and political reform
in the Middle East," she said in an interview.
"Through successive
administrations, both Republican and Democratic, there has been a real
tendency to say we're going to pursue and support reform in Latin America and
in Asia and in eastern Europe, but we're not going to deal with these issues
in the Middle East."
The initiative involves some very large steps -
such as Mr Bush's call last month for a US free trade agreement with the
region by 2013. That will involve persuading some of the world's most heavily
protected economies that their future lies in opening to international
competition and investment.
Ms Cheney is focused on a series of smaller
steps, which the US hopes will help push the region towards economic openness
and political democracy. One of her favourites is an increased political role
for women; she hosted a conference in Washington last year to help provide
resources for female candidates in the handful of countries where women can
run for office.
Legal reform is another priority. A survey of Arab
companies in 2000 found that weak legal systems that fail to enforce contracts
are considered the biggest obstacle to business. Sandra Day O'Connor, the US
Supreme Court justice, will lead a forum on judicial reform in Bahrain in
September.
The US will push these initiatives by reviewing its aid
programmes in the region, beginning with the largest - Egypt - which receives
$600m a year in direct US economic support. Washington wants to step up its
support for small businesses through micro loans, launch education pilot
projects that promote a new curriculum not tinged with Islamic fundamentalism,
and support girls' literacy programmes.
Sceptics say that by pushing
for such sweeping reforms in tradition-bound countries the US may raise
expectations that could backfire if Washington cannot carry through. "You need
to be very sensitive for the process it's going to take for these countries to
liberalise," says Ms Barnett.
"These steps provide a certain degree of
hope, and if we don't follow through on this it will leave the region in a far
worse state and our interests in the region in a far worse state," she
says.
Ms Cheney is sensitive to the charge that the US is trying to
impose its own model on the region. She refers often to the UN 2002 Arab Human
Development Report - authored by Arab economists - which contained a
devastating critique of the Middle East "freedom deficit" and embraced many of
the same steps now backed by Washington.
"This is not about imposing
the US model. Each country will have to sort out what works best for them,"
she said. "It is about looking for ways that the US can help to support those
in the region who are making the difficult decisions that are required to
undertake the necessary reforms."
>>>>
