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US troops take 'Monroe Doctrine'
global
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- United States troops appear suddenly to be deploying
everywhere, and with very little notice. Perhaps it was
a coincidence, but on the same week that one of the
country's leading neoconservative writers called
explicitly for Washington to serve as "Globocop", the
Pentagon announced that it was sending 3,000 troops to
the Philippines for joint operations against a minor
Muslim guerrilla group.
On the same day, US
congressmen visiting Colombia hinted that hundreds of US
Special Forces training soldiers in the Colombian army
might soon take a much more direct role in the civil war
there as a result of last week's apparent abduction by
leftwing rebels of three US military contractors, after
their plane crashed in a rebel-held area.
Meanwhile, thousands more US troops are cruising
in the Mediterranean, waiting to hear whether they will
be invading Iraq next month from Turkey or with the main
invasion force of some 150,000 soldiers, who have
already deployed in or near Kuwait.
German
commanders of the international force in Kabul warned
that the US might have to beef up its 7,000 troops
continuing operations in Afghanistan in order to cope
with possible new fighting if Washington invades Iraq.
Thousands more US military personnel are on
stand-by in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, ready to
snatch suspected Islamic terrorists from Yemen to
Somalia, while 4,000 more reservists remain in Bosnia
and Kosovo to help keep the peace in the Balkans.
The Pentagon has put 24 long-range bombers on
alert for possible use in the ongoing nuclear crisis on
the Korean peninsula, where many of the 37,000 US troops
already deployed there are scheduled to take part in
joint maneuvers with the South Korean Army next month.
The military also plans to move one aircraft carrier
battle group off the US west coast to the waters off
northeast Asia so that another battle group can deploy
to the Gulf.
Welcome to Pax Americana. US armed
forces are on the move around the world in ways that
have not been seen since at least World War II, in what
is a dramatic illustration of the Bush administration's
national security strategy that was publicly released
last September.
"The United States must and will
maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by any
enemy - whether a state or non-state actor - to impose
its will on the United States, our allies, or our
friends," that document stated, in what has since been
called the Bush Doctrine.
But as pointed out by Max
Boot, a prominent neoconservative writer based at the
Council on Foreign Relations, it is really the
globalization of the Monroe Doctrine, or, more
precisely, the Roosevelt Corollary issued by Theodore
Roosevelt in 1904. It came two years after the end of
the Spanish-American War and the defeat of the bloody
Filipino insurgency against US annexation and one year
after Washington's own sponsorship of the Panamanian
secession from Colombia, which laid the groundwork for
the Panama Canal.
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine was
designed to assert Washington's exclusive sphere of
influence over the Americas. Unenforceable due to US
military weakness until the eve of the Spanish-American
War in 1898, the Doctrine warned European powers in
particular that any intervention in the hemisphere's
affairs would be presumed to threaten ''our peace and
happiness''.
Based on the Doctrine,
Roosevelt's Corollary asserted the additional right of the
United States to intervene not only against European
intervention, but against anything in the Americas that
Washington deemed a threat.
"Chronic wrongdoing,
or an impotence which results in a general loosening of
the ties of civilized society, may ultimately require
intervention by some civilized nation, and in the
Western hemisphere the adherence of the United States to
the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however
reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or
impotence, to the exercise of an international police
power," Roosevelt declared.
As pointed out by
Boot, who is very close to the neoconservatives - such
as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - who
surround Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Dick Cheney, his doctrine is now being applied
on a much grander scale than it was in Roosevelt's day.
"Today, America exercises almost as much
power everywhere around the world as it once had only in
the Caribbean," Boot wrote in a Financial Times column
titled "America's destiny is to police the world".
"Thus, by Roosevelt's logic, the US is obliged to stop
'chronic wrongdoing', for the simple reason that nobody
else will do the job."
Such a view appears
perfectly consistent not only with what US forces are
doing today, but also with the Pentagon's plans, which
amount to a major geostrategic shift in the way that US
forces are deployed around the world.
Much like
the Marines, who used bases in Puerto Rico, Cuba and
Panama as launching pads for their frequent invasions of
Caribbean Basin nations, so the Pentagon wants to scale
down its huge European army bases in favor of smaller
hubs on land and even at sea. Pre-positioned close to
likely hotspots, particularly in East and Central Asia
and the Gulf, they would feature fast deployment of
troops using lighter, but much deadlier, weapons.
Such a configuration, it is believed, would not
only save money by greatly reducing the number of big,
expensive army bases abroad and even at home, but would
also extend Washington's military reach to just about
every strategic point in the world, to the equivalent of
its military reach in the Caribbean almost a century
ago.
This month, a group of hawks called
on the White House to immediately increase the defense
budget, now almost US$400 billion annually, by at least
$100 billion in order to finance the Bush Doctrine.
The transformation to this strategy is ever more
urgent, according to its proponents, who note that the
country's military infrastructure - particularly its
manpower of only 1.4 million soldiers, sailors and
fliers - is already straining under existing demands.
With administration officials ruling out a
return to the military draft, many military analysts
believe that the US simply lacks the numbers that will
be needed to transform the entire world into the
equivalent of the Caribbean Basin. That is perhaps why a
prominent analyst at the right-wing Hoover Institution,
Peter Schweizer, proposed creating an American Foreign
Legion.
(Inter Press Service)
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