THE HANDSTAND

JULY 2003

 
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.
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>                             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
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>                             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.
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>                             "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."
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>                             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."
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>                             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. trategic doctrine.
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>                             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 he 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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>                              Source: Ghanaweb Correspondent
>  All Rights Reserved, 1994-2003, © Copyright GhanaHomePage
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THE MILITARY BASES OF TOMORROW:   
Behind all the froth and bubble of “rebuilding”, the imperial military machine of the US steadily expands.  In an article headed US SHIFTS TROOPS TO CAUCUSUS AND AFRICA,  The Australian Financial Review, (12/6/03) said:
   “The Pentagon plans to significantly shrink the US force of 70,000 troops in Germany, a military stronghold for half a century, and put far more American forces in Africa and the Caucasus region.
    The push, part of the most radical redeployment of American forces since the end of the Cold War, is driven by the increasing importance the US is placing on protecting key oil reserves in Africa and the Caucasus region near the Caspian Sea, as well as addressing concerns about fighting terrorism.
   Pentagon officials say they expect final decisions to be made in the coming months and that troops could begin moving in about a year…..
   In the Caucasus region, defence officials said the US was likely to have as many as 15,000 troops, some rotating through small, spartan bases in places such as Azerbaijan.  Most of them, however, would move through larger, but still relatively bare-bones facilities in Romania and Bulgaria near ports on the Black Sea.
   “In the Caspian Sea you have large mineral reserves …. We want to be able to assure the long-term viability of those resources” ….
   In Africa, the defence officials said, the US could increase its presence to as many as 5,000 to 6,500 troops from about 1,500 Marines and special operations soldiers based in Djibouti.  The troops would use as many as a dozen semi-permanent bases in Africa ….”
   The last great Imperial Power is stretching to span the globe, wherever oil, minerals and markets exist.  Like all great empires, they over-stretch themselves, goaded by the hatred and animosity they generate in the course of their expansion.
   The Money Empire, which controls friend and foe alike in the tentacles of its debt web, then moves to its next victim.   Jeremy Lee © On Target pickford@hotkey.net.au

Two Huge US Intelligence Centers Go Up In Iraq
Vol. 3, Issue 113, June 20, 2003
DEBKA-Net-Weekly
6-21-3

The Americans are secretly building two giant intelligence facilities in Iraq at a cost of some half a billion dollars, according to an exclusive report received from DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources. US engineering and construction units are setting up what amounts to an "intelligence city" on a site north of the oil city of Mosul in Kurdistan and a second facility in Baghdad's Saadun district on the east bank of the Tigris. Our military experts infer from the vast dimensions of the two projects and their colossal expense that it is Washington's intention to retain a large US military presence in Iraq in the long term, for a decade at least.

The new installations will greatly enhance America's military, intelligence and electronic command and control over Iraq and its neighbors, notably Iran and Syria. The Mosul facility will guard northern Iraq's oilfields and the pipelines carrying Iraqi gas and oil to Mediterranean terminals. Its instruments will reach into every corner of Iran and Syria, replacing America's electronic eyes and ears in southern Turkey. This facility will be activated a section at a time according to need. Upon completion at the end of 2005, it will employ an operating staff of around 4,000 American intelligence personnel and electronic engineers.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Middle East sources report that the intelligence center going up near Mosul is causing much nervousness in Damascus and Tehran. Both governments understand that when the first sections are activated in three months time, not a single military or intelligence move of theirs will go unseen by America's electronic spies - and that goes for terrorist activity as well.

That Baghdad station has been assigned completely different functions. While the Mosul center will provide early warning against external threats to the US military presence in Iraq, the Baghdad station will stand guard over America's political and military control of the capital and its satellite towns, including the Sunni enclave cities of Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit.

To clear a site for the giant facility, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources report the Americans have expropriated the luxury Baghdad Hotel complex that straddles Saadun Street to the east and Abu Nuw'as Street, which is a section of the Corniche along the Tigris, as well as the surrounding blocks between Firodos Square and the city's main bus terminal to the north at Naser Square.

Since the beginning of this week, an American airlift has been running large containers crammed with electronic parts from American army bases to Baghdad international airport.

Once the Baghdad electronic station is up and running it will aid US forces in their fight against guerrilla and terrorist assailants picking off GIs almost every day. These assaults are harmful but they do not detract from the overall American control over security in the broad expanses of a large country. There is every indication that the US civil administrator Paul Bremer is gradually pulling ahead of the difficulties. His recipe is simple. No Iraqi associated in any way with the overthrown Saddam regime or the outlawed Baath party is to be allowed to take part in government. Bremer equally bars from public service all Iraqis with foreign political connections, even American. This means that all political hopefuls from whatever party, ethnic group or religious sect will fight level for a place in government when the time comes - all standing at the same starting line.

This formula, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, pacified the rival Shiite factions who make up more than half the populace and who were on the verge of rising up against the American presence in the country. Now they are more ready to collaborate with the US civil administration, as are the Kurds under their rival leaders, Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Since Bremer took over in Baghdad, the two tribal leaders have decided to go for a merger to unite their movements into a single political entity. Without this union, neither holds much chance of office in the future central government.