US To Setup Military Base In Ghana
The United States plans to use Ghana as one of it's bases to boost its
military presence in Africa to respond to new threats. Ghanaweb first
reported this on the "Rumor Mill" page under the title: US To station 1000
Troops In Ghana .
In an article "Pentagon Moving Swiftly to Become 'GloboCop'", Interpress
confirms Ghanaweb's story
The Pentagon is moving at seemingly breakneck speed to re-deploy U.S. forces
and equipment around the world in ways that will permit Washington to play
''GoboCop,' 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 North Korea
The latest details, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, include
plans to increase U.S. forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa across the
Red Sea from Yemen, set up semi-permanent 'forward bases' in Algeria,
Morocco and possibly Tunisia, and establish smaller facilities in Senegal,
Ghana and Mali that could be used to intervene in oil-rich West African
countries, particularly Nigeria.
"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."
Those plans represent a major triumph for Wolfowitz, who 12 years ago argued
in a controversial draft 'Defence Planning Guidance' (DPG) for realigning
U.S. forces globally so as to "retain pre-eminent 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. defence 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 draft DPG also argued that U.S. military intervention should become a
"constant fixture" of the new world order. It is precisely that capability
towards which the Pentagon's force realignments appear 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-à-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 Neighbour Policy 30 years later.
Indeed, as pointed out by Max Boot, a neo-conservative 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 1903 (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 civilised society."
Remarkably, the new and proposed deployments are being justified by similar
rhetoric. Just substitute "globalization" for "civilization."
The emerging Pentagon doctrine, founded mainly on the work of retired
Admiral 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 region 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,' places 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."
"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 globalisation'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," Barnett wrote
in 'Esquire' magazine earlier this year.
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. Those nations, 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."
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