2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World

[Joanne98]

For OpEdNews: Rick Rozoff - Writer

January 1 has ushered in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.
Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.

The Afghan war, the U.S.'s first air and ground conflict in Asia since the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's first land war and Asian campaign, began during the end of the 2001 war in Macedonia launched from NATO-occupied Kosovo, one in which the role of U.S. military personnel is still to be properly exposed <1> and addressed and which led to the displacement of almost 10 percent of the nation's population.

In the first case Washington invaded a nation in the name of combating terrorism; in the second it abetted cross-border terrorism. Similarly, in 1991 the U.S. and its Western allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait and launched devastating and deadly cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties inside Iraq in the name of preserving the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait, and in 1999 waged a 78-day bombing assault against Yugoslavia to override and fatally undermine the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the name of the casus belli of the day, so-called humanitarian intervention.


Two years later humanitarian war, as abhorrent an oxymoron as the world has ever witnessed, gave way to the global war on terror(ism), with the U.S. and its NATO allies again reversing course but continuing to wage wars of aggression and "wars of opportunity" as they saw fit, contradictions and logic, precedents and international law notwithstanding.

Several never fully acknowledged counterinsurgency campaigns, some ongoing - Colombia - and some new - Yemen - later, the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003 with a "coalition of the willing" comprised mainly of Eastern European NATO candidate nations (now almost all full members of the world's only military bloc as a result of their service).

The Pentagon has also deployed special forces and other troops to the Philippines and launched naval, helicopter and missile attacks inside Somalia as well as assisting the Ethiopian invasion of that nation in 2006. Washington also arms, trains and supports the armed forces of Djibouti in their border war with Eritrea. In fact Djibouti hosts the U.S.'s only permanent military installation in Africa to date <2>, Camp Lemonier, a United States Naval Expeditionary Base and home to the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), placed under the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) when it was launched on October 1, 2008. The area of responsibility of the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa takes in the nations of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen and as "areas of interest" the Comoros, Mauritius and Madagascar.

That is, much of the western shores of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, among the most geostrategically important parts of the world. <3>

U.S. troops, aerial drones, warships, planes and helicopters are active throughout that vast tract of land and water.

With senator and once almost vice president Joseph Lieberman's threat on December 27 that "Yemen will be tomorrow's war" <4> and former Southern Command chief and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark's two days later that "Maybe we need to put some boots on the ground there," <5> it is evident that America's new war for the new year has already been identified. In fact in mid-December U.S. warplanes participated in the bombing of a village in northern Yemen that cost the lives of 120 civilians as well as wounding 44 more <6> and a week later "A US fighter jet...carried out multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen's northern rugged province of Sa'ada...." <7>

The pretext for undertaking a war in Yemen in earnest is currently the serio-comic "attempted terrorist attack" by a young Nigerian national on a passenger airliner outside of Detroit on Christmas Day. The deadly U.S. bombing of the Yemeni village mentioned above occurred ten days earlier and moreover was in the north of the nation, although Washington claims al-Qaeda cells are operating in the other end of the country. <8>

Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not the only battlegrounds where the Pentagon is active. On October 30 of 2009 the U.S. signed an agreement with the government of Colombia to acquire the essentially unlimited and unrestricted use of seven new military bases in the South American nation, including sites within immediate striking distance of both Venezuela and Ecuador. <9> American intelligence, special forces and other personnel will be complicit in ongoing counterinsurgency operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the nation's south as well as in rendering assistance to Washington's Colombian proxy for attacks inside Ecuador and Venezuela that will be portrayed as aimed at FARC forces in the two states.

Targeting two linchpins of and ultimately the entire Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Washington is laying the groundwork for a potential military conflagration in South and Central America and the Caribbean. After the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras on June 28, that nation has announced it will be the first ALBA member state to ever withdraw from the Alliance and the Pentagon will retain, perhaps expand, its military presence at the Soto Cano Air Base there.

A few days ago "The Colombian government...announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and has activated six new airborne battalions" <10> and shortly afterward Dutch member of parliament Harry van Bommel "claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao" <11> off the Venezuelan coast.

In October a U.S. armed forces publication revealed that the Pentagon will spend $110 million to modernize and expand seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, across the Black Sea from Russia, where it will station initial contingents of over 4,000 troops. <12>

In early December the U.S. signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, which borders the Russian Kaliningrad territory, that "allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish territory." <13> The U.S. military forces will operate Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) batteries as part of the Pentagon's global interceptor missile system.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/2010-U-S-To-Wage-War-Thr-by-Rick-Rozoff-100102-109.html

As our own people suffer and die for lack of almost everything they do shit like this. It's treason!

[Selatius]

1. They retooled the military after Viet Nam into an all-volunteer force.

By doing this, they decoupled the military from the daily experiences of the population. A citizen army was never suited to the whims of the wealthy elite, an army containing all the varied opinions and feelings of the population. A volunteer, professional army, however, can be wielded on the battlefield with less repercussions at home unlike the rioting and street battles between protesters and the police during the Viet Nam War.

[Peace Patriot]

2. War is now our only asset, our only export, our only value.

The war profiteers now rule us completely, as none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower--victorious general of WW II--warned us of, in the post-WW II era.

We soon lost our chance to become a peaceful nation, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who, after facing near armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, opened a backchannel to Nikita Krushchev, and began negotiations to END the "Cold War," ban nuclear weapons, stop all the proxy wars and "hammer swords into plowshares" for a peaceful and friendly competition between world economic systems.*

Instead, the U.S. proceeded with the Vietnam War--a disaster that Kennedy had decided that he must stop*--in which 2 million Southeast Asians and over 55,000 U.S. soldiers were killed before it was over. Although the U.S. made some fitful attempts to stop exporting war--the U.S. anti-war movement of the 1960s-early 1970s, the end of the military Draft, the efforts of one Congress to ban Reagan's war on Nicaragua, and, recently, the nearly 60% opposition of the American people to Bush Jr.'s war on Iraq**--war re-emerged as our main export beginning with Reagan, more with Bush Sr., and full-blown with Bush Jr., who easily overrode the will of the American people.

Our once fabled manufacturing capability has been outsourced to the cheapest labor markets abroad. Our farming communities and farm lands have been decimated by corporatization and corporate pesticides. Our natural resources have been exhausted and/or polluted by corporate profiteers, with no thought to the future, and no consideration of cumulative effects. Our highly touted environmental regulations have failed. And the same corporations who have done us in, have used our labor, our infrastructure and our liberty, to turn themselves into global corporate predators whom no one can control, and who are accountable to no one and loyal to no one. And they have now hijacked our last remaining asset--the U.S. military--for corporate resource wars.

Corporatization has profoundly affected our once free press--a basic pillar of democracy. Broadcast and print media are now controlled by a few corporate monopolies, that spew forth a relentless stream of pro-corporate, far rightwing, fascist garbage as political news/opinion, 24/7. But even worse than this, our election system, already grown putrid with private money and corporate 'news' illlusions, is now controlled by a handful of rightwing corporate voting machine corporations, and run on 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting code, with virtually no audit/recount controls. That this could occur in the USA, with no opposition from the press or the Democratic Party, is a symptom of how bad things have become. It is also the final-- the ultimate, the definitive--blockade to any significant reform. The final blow. The ultimate corporate insult. The definitive line between a troubled democracy and no democracy.

With transparent vote counting, we still had the chance to change things. They've done it in Latin America--and they have an even more vicious rightwing corporate press than we do. Despite that press, they have been able to elect good leftist leaders in most of South America and half of Central America--a rather amazing, grass roots, leftist democracy movement that has swept the region. The key is the hard civic work that Latin Americans have done on their democratic institutions, including fair and transparent elections, over the last decade. And this, of course, is why the U.S. is larding its "best friend" in the region, Colombia--a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth--with $6 BILLION in military aid, and why the Pentagon is moving into Colombia, with newly granted access to SEVEN military bases, and all civilian airports and an escalation mechanism for unlimited U.S. soldiers and 'contractors' who will have total diplomatic immunity; why the U.S. permitted a rightwing military coup in Honduras (to secure that U.S. military base); why the U.S. has reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (mothballed since WW II), and why the U.S. has led an intense psyops/disinformation campaign against Venezuela's democratically elected socialist government.

Democracy is the enemy of global corporate predators and war profiteers, here and abroad.

With 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting, now owned and controlled (70% of the U.S. "market") by one of the scariest rightwing corporations (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold), we, the people of the U.S., have no power to correct our country's course, no power to call off its wars, no power to curtail U.S.-based global corporate predators, and no power to direct our tax money to positive purposes--schools, health care, help to small business (the biggest employer in the U.S.), emergency services, infrastructure, protection of basic socialist programs like Social Security and Medicare, food and housing support for the poor, technical innovation (for useful products not war systems), and so on; no power to achieve FAIR taxation; and no power to direct foreign aid to positive purposes (billions in USAID money going to rightwing groups all over Latin America, for instance; and trillions for war, everywhere).

I would say that Step One, for restoring democracy in the U.S., is restoring THE most fundamental condition of democracy: transparent vote counting.

This is still doable--since control over voting systems still resides at the local/state level, where ordinary people still have some influence. Corruption--including "revolving door employment" and corporate lobbying--are the main problem, and this is easier to expose and to remedy, at the local/state level. (I'm afraid Washington DC is hopeless.) Transparent vote counting is such an obvious requirement of democracy, that ordinary people "get it" pretty quickly, and it is a bipartisan matter (except for nutball fundies and paid corporate operatives). I think we should probably give up anti-war protests, for the time being, and focus exclusively on picketing local voter registrars, who may live right down the street--and do this everywhere--until we have restored vote counting that everyone can see and understand. Until we do, we really don't have a democracy, and the Forever War will continue.

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*(See, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters," by James Douglass.)

**(Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the invasion of Iraq--Feb. 2003, all polls. About half of that 60% were against the invasion outright, on any terms. The other half would only support it if it were a UN peacekeeping mission--i.e., international consensus that military action was necessary, i.e., they didn't trust Bush. The UN refused to be bullied into that war. Major U.S. allies dissented on the necessity of war. The problem of Iraq WMDs had in fact been solved. Yet, despite this overwhelming set of facts and circumstances against invading a country with no air force and slaughtering a hundred thousands innocent people in one week of bombing alone, that is what the U.S. did, because war is now our only asset, our only export and our only value. Or rather--to be fair--war is now the only asset, the only export and the the only value of the war profiteers who rule over us.)

[clear eye]

4. I encourage DUers who want to learn how to restore election integrity

to sign up for emlev's phone session. Info here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=106x33884

[Peace Patriot]

5. Thanks for posting this link! nt

[Blue Owl]

3. We can be so preemptive in our so-called war strategy

Yet we can't be preemptive in stopping the collapse of our own country.

Shame.