From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Fri Jan 01 2010 - 14:12:53 EST
Excerpt: "Washington also arms, trains and supports the armed forces of
Djibouti in their border war with Eritrea."
2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World
by Rick Rozoff
January 1 will usher 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.
At approximately the same time President Obama pressured Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to base missile shield components in his
country. "We discussed the continuing role that we can play as NATO
allies in strengthening Turkey's profile within NATO and coordinating
more effectively on critical issues like missile defense," [14] in the
American leader's words.
"Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hinted his government does not
view Tehran [Iran] as a potential missile threat for Turkey at this
point. But analysts say if a joint NATO missile shield is developed,
such a move could force Ankara to join the mechanism." [15]
2010 will see the first foreign troops deployed to Poland since the
breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and the installation of the U.S's
"stronger, swifter and smarter" (also Obama's words) interceptor
missiles and radar facilities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the
South Caucasus. [16]
U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan, site of the longest and most
wide-scale war in the world, will top 100,000 early in 2010 and with
another 50,000 plus troops from other NATO nations and assorted "vassals
and tributaries" (Zbigniew Brzezinski) will represent the largest
military deployment in any war zone in the world.
American and NATO drone missile and helicopter gunship attacks in
Pakistan will also increase, as will U.S. counterinsurgency operations
in the Philippines and Somalia along with those in Yemen where CIA and
Army special forces are already involved.
U.S. military websites recently announced that there have been 3.3
million deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 with 2 million
U.S. service members sent to the two war zones. [17]
In this still young millennium American soldiers have also deployed in
the hundreds of thousands to new bases and conflict and post-conflict
zones in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Djibouti, Georgia, Israel,
Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mali, the Philippines,
Romania, Uganda and Uzbekistan.
In 2010 they will be sent abroad in even larger numbers to man airbases
and missile sites, supervise and participate in counterinsurgency
operations throughout the world against disparate rebel groups, many of
them secular, and wage combat operations in South Asia and elsewhere.
They will be stationed on warships and submarines equipped with cruise
and long-range nuclear missiles and with aircraft carrier strike groups
prowling the world's seas and oceans.
They will construct and expand bases from Europe to Central and South
Asia, Africa to South America, the Middle East to Oceania. With the
exception of Guam and Vicenza in Italy, where the Pentagon is massively
expanding existing installations, all the facilities in question are in
nations and even regions of the world where the U.S. military has never
before ensconced itself. Practically all the new encampments will be
forward bases used for operations "down range," generally to the east
and south of NATO-dominated Europe.
U.S. military personnel will be assigned to the new Global Strike
Command and for expanded patrols and war games in the Arctic Circle.
They will serve under the Missile Defense Agency to consolidate a
worldwide interceptor missile network that will facilitate a nuclear
first strike capability and will extend that system into space, the
final frontier in the drive to achieve military full spectrum dominance.
American troops will continue to fan out to most all parts of the world.
Everywhere, that is, except to their own nation's borders.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16720> &aid=16720
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