US Troops Take
19th-Century
'Monroe
Doctrine' Global
by
Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
February 23, 2003
U.S.
troops appear suddenly to be deploying everywhere, and with very little notice.
Perhaps it was a
coincidence, but in the same week that one of the country's leading
neo-conservative writers called explicitly for Washington to serve as
”Globocop'', the Pentagon announced it was sending 3,000 troops to the
Philippines for joint operations against a minor Muslim guerrilla group.
On the same day, U.S.
congressmen visiting Colombia hinted that hundreds of U.S. 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
left-wing rebels of three U.S. military contractors, after their plane crashed
in a rebel-held area.
Meanwhile, thousands more
U.S. 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 United States 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 U.S. 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 U.S. troops already deployed
there are scheduled to take part in joint manoeuvres with the South Korean Army
next month. The military also plans to move one aircraft carrier battle group
off the U.S. west coast to the waters off of northeast Asia so that another
battle group can deploy to the Gulf.
Welcome to Pax Americana.
U.S. armed forces are on the move around the world in ways that have not been
seen since at least World War Two, 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 neo-conservative writer based at the Council on Foreign
Relations, it is really the globalisation 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 against 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 civilised
society, may ultimately require intervention by some civilised 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 neo-conservatives - such as Deputy Defence 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,'' he wrote this week in a 'Financial Times' column, entitled
'America's Destiny is to Police the World'. ''Thus, by Roosevelt's logic, the
U.S. 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 U.S. forces are doing today, but also
with the Pentagon's plans, which amount to a major geo-strategic shift in the
way that U.S. 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 favour 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.
Earlier this month, a group
of hawks called on the White House to immediately boost the defence budget, now
almost 400 billion dollars annually, by at least 100 billion dollars 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 the United States 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''.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst Foreign Policy In
Focus (www.fpif.org), and a regular
contributor to Inter Press Service (www.ips.org).
Email: jlobe@starpower.net. Posted with author’s permission.