[A-List] US imperialism: global Monroe Doctrine

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

US troops take 'Monroe Doctrine' global
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, February 25 2003

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.