http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1072/op31.htm
17 - 23 November 2011
Issue No. 1072
A virtue of necessity?
Is there an "Obama Doctrine" governing the conduct of US foreign policy in
the Middle East or has it all been increasingly desperate improvisation,
asks *James Petras** <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1072/op31.htm#1>
After nearly three years in deep pursuit of the colonial wars initiated by ex-president Bush, the Obama regime has finally recognised the catastrophic domestic and foreign consequences. As a result, the "reality principle" has taken hold: the maintenance of the US empire requires a modification of tactics and strategies in order to cut political, military and diplomatic losses.
In response to major military and political losses, as well as to new opportunities, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators. These include the arming and financial backing of retrograde regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries, academic exiles, gangsters and others willing to serve the US empire for a price.
Whether these "changes" add up to a new post-colonial "Obama Doctrine", or whether they simply reflect a series of improvisations resulting from past losses ("making a virtue of necessity") remains to be seen.
We will proceed by outlining the strategic failures that set the context for the "rethinking" of the Bush-Obama policies in mid- 2011, before pointing to the "reality principle" -- the deep crises and rising pressures -- which forced the Obama regime to modify its methods of imperial warfare.
Obama's changes are designed to retain levers of power under conditions of limited resources and with dubious allies. The third section of this article will describe these changes as they have occurred, emphasising their reactive and improvised nature as unfavourable circumstances evolved and favourable opportunities arose.
The final section critically evaluates Obama's new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples as well as the consequences for the US.
THE BUSH-OBAMA CONTINUUM: Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and ran with it. He expanded US war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditure on base building and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; and multiplied US air and ground incursions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Libya. As a result, the US budget deficit reached $1.6 trillion, the trade deficit reached unsustainable levels, and the recession deepened. Public support for Obama and the Democrats plummeted.
Parallel to Obama's skyrocketing external imperial expenditures, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars on dozens of internal security agencies, further depleting the treasury. Greater debts abroad and deficits at home were accompanied by the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, while 10 million homes were foreclosed and unemployment in the US reached double digits.
Obama retained and expanded the Bush era wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts in social security, federally funded medical programmes and education. Yet, despite massive military commitments, Obama could not secure a single major military victory. By the beginning of the third year of his regime, it was abundantly clear that amidst the wreckage of the domestic US economy and the demise of key overseas collaborator regimes, the US empire was under siege.
The reality of massive expenditures on losing wars and faltering support at home and abroad finally penetrated even the most dogmatic and intransigent militarist ideologues in the Obama regime. Nationalist Islamists had become a "shadow" government throughout Afghanistan, inflicting increasing casualties on US-NATO forces even in the capital, Kabul. In Iraq, even the puppet regime installed by the US rejected a minimum US military presence, as warring factions sharpened their knives, preparing for a post-colonial showdown between willing colonial collaborators, resistance fighters, sects, tribes, death squads, ethnic separatists and mercenaries.
Despite US military threats and Zionist-designed economic sanctions, Iran gained influence throughout the region, eroding US influence in Iraq, Syria, western Afghanistan, the Gulf, Lebanon and Palestine (especially Gaza).
The fall of major US client regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (Hosni Mubarak and Zein Al-Abidine bin Ali), and mass uprisings threatening other puppets in Yemen, Somalia and Bahrain, finally forced the Obama regime to acknowledge that the Israeli model of war, occupation and colonial rule via puppet regimes was not viable. The reality principle finally penetrated even the densest fog surrounding imperial advisers and strategists: the US empire was in retreat, and Obama-Clinton were not custodians of an expanding empire, but the masters of imperial defeats.
The US empire-building project of the post-Cold War period, premised on unilateral action and military supremacy launched by Bush senior, continued by former president Bill Clinton, expanded by Bush junior and multiplied by Obama, was a total and unmitigated failure by any standards: prolonged, loss-making wars were accompanied by a vast wave of pro-democracy uprisings, dumping prized imperial clients.
As colonial wars depleted the US treasury, impoverished the country's citizens and undermined the "will to sacrifice" for the chimera of global greatness, the national mood in the US was also deeply disturbed by the cost of empire as well as the loss of global markets to new Asian competitors in China, India and elsewhere. Nowhere was the decline of the US more evident than in Latin America, where new nationalist, reformist and developmentalist regimes secured divergent policies on key foreign policy issues, generated high growth, collaborated with new trading partners, decisively rejected several US-backed coups and repudiated US treasury secretary Tim Geithner's recycled free-market dogma.
There was nowhere in the world where the Obama regime could claim military victory, economic success or great political influence. As the reality of the deficits, losses and discontent entered the consciousness of key policymakers, a new imperial policy agenda took shape, not fully elaborated but improvised as circumstances dictated.
THE MAKING OF THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: The first and foremost recognition of reality among the Obama-ites was that in a world of sovereign states, colonial land wars based on territorial armies of occupation are not viable. They lead to prolonged resistance, extended budget over-runs, continuing casualties and are definitely not "self-financing" as the Zionist geniuses in the Pentagon have claimed. New forms of imperial warfare were needed to sustain the empire and destroy adversaries.
The hard choice facing the Obama regime with regard to Iraq was whether to admit defeat and retreat (in the sense that the US could not retain a colonial presence and would leave behind an unreliable military and political configuration expanding ties with Iran and hostile to Israel), or to claim "victory" in the sense of overthrowing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and weakening Iraq's role in the Middle East.
The retreat-and-defeat reality has now been rationalised as a
"repositioning" of 20,000 US troops in the tiny city-states run by Gulf
monarchies and the posting of war vessels in the Gulf. Obama-Clinton claim
that US troops, warships and aircraft carriers will re-enter Iraq if the
current regime falls and a new nationalist movement comes to power. This is
a doubtful proposition -- as any re-entry would return the US to a
prolonged, costly war. Instead, the main purpose of the repositioning is to
protect the Gulf client states from their own pro-democracy movements and
to launch a joint US-Israeli air-and-sea attack on Iran.
In other words, US troop retrenchment (as an occupying colonial power) is being replaced by a build-up and concentration of air-and-sea power for the attack and destruction of the military and economic bases of the Iranian state.
The US retreat from Iraq is a product of defeat and is a departure under duress. The relocation of US troops to petrol mini-states is a downsizing of the US presence and a move to prop-up highly vulnerable countries. The shift from Iraq to the Gulf states is a move to small, safe sanctuaries from a highly volatile and conflictual major state, with a history of resistance and independence. Since the US can no longer afford an unending and large troop presence and cannot secure a residual force either, its retreat to the Gulf states makes a virtue of necessity, being a fall-back position in order to retain a launch pad for the next aerial war.
The Libyan war marks a key imperial formula for retaining Obama's imperial pretensions. The pretext for the war was just as phony as the cause for war in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and attacks on civilians were fabricated. A UN Resolution claiming the right to military intervention to "protect civilians" was cooked up, and NATO launched an eight-month war, employing nearly 30,000 air attacks, to overthrow the established government and destroy the economy.
Obama's Libyan policy was based on air and naval bombardment and Special Forces advisers, the use of a mercenary army and client expatriates as the new leaders of the country, and a multilateral coalition of European empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state oligarchs. In contrast to what had happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, sustained and massive air attacks took the place of a large ground invasion. Already Obama's military strategists have embraced and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new "Obama Doctrine" for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes. Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary rebels, the fact is that Gaddafi loyalists were only defeated by the air power of the NATO military command.
However, Obama-Clinton's celebration of the Libyan victory is premature: the means to victory involved the destruction of the country's economy, from ports to irrigation systems to roads and hospitals, and the disarticulation of the labour force, with the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan African workers and North African professionals. In other words, it was a pyrrhic victory: Washington has defeated an adversary, but it has not won a viable state.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: Even more seriously, Washington's client ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist and clan and neo- liberal operators who have few interests in common. All are armed and ready to carve up competing fiefdoms. The parallel is with Afghanistan, where the US armed and financed drug traffickers, clan chiefs, war lords and fundamentalists to fight the secular pro-Soviet regime. Subsequent to destroying the regime, the same forces turned against the US and proceeded to spread a kind of pan-Islamic mobilisation against pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South and Central Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.
Obama's Libyan formula of using disparate mercenaries to achieve short-term military success has boomeranged. Islamic fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are now sending tons of ground-to-air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gaddafi's arms depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south and north.
In a word, the volatile social and military conflict among the collaborator
"rulers" in Libya has all the markings of a failed regime. Neither NATO
bases nor oil companies can pretend to establish firm bases of operation
and exploitation in the country.
The resort to missile warfare, especially the drone attacks on insurgents challenging US client regimes which figure so prominently in the Obama Doctrine, have succeeded in killing a few local commanders, but at the cost of alienating entire clans, villagers, townspeople and the general public in the targeted countries. The drones' missiles are killing hundreds of civilians, causing relatives and kinspeople to join resistance groups. Up to the present, after three years of intensified missile warfare, the Obama regime has not secured a single major triumph over any of the targeted insurgencies. The data available demonstrates the opposite.
In Pakistan, not only has the entire northwest tribal area embraced the Islamic resistance, but the vast majority of Pakistanis (80 per cent) resent US drone violations of national sovereignty, forcing even otherwise docile officials to call into question their military ties with Washington. In Somalia and Yemen, US drone and Special Forces operations have had no impact in weakening the mass opposition to incumbent client regimes. Obama's long- distance, high-tech warfare has been an ineffective substitute for failed large-scale land wars.
The third dimension of the Obama Doctrine, the heavy reliance on "third party" military intervention and/or multilateral armed interventions, has not been successful in Afghanistan and Iraq and has been of limited effectiveness in Libya. The European multilateral forces retired early on in Iraq, unwilling to continue to spend on a war with no end and with virtual no support on the home front. The same process of short-term low-level military multilateralism took place in Afghanistan: most NATO soldiers will be out before the US withdraws.
The Libyan experience with multilateral air force collaboration in defeating Libya's armed forces destroyed the country, undermining any post-war reconstruction for decades. Moreover, aerial multilateralism followed the formula of an "easy entry and fast exit" -- leaving the mercenary predators, in control on the ground, with a documented record of rape, pillage, torture and summary executions. Only a morally depraved Hillary Clinton could sing the praises and dance a jig celebrating the victory of a knife-wielding thug torturing a captured former leader as "a victory for democracy".
The fourth dimension of the Obama Doctrine, the use of foreign mercenary armies, has been tried and has failed in a number of cases where incumbent client rulers are under siege from resistance forces. The US financed the Ethiopian dictatorship's armed invasion of Somalia in order to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital. After a prolonged effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary forces performed no better. They were followed by the entry of US-backed Kenyan armed forces, which has only led to massacres and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in northern Kenya and southern Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistance movement. These third-party mercenary invasions have failed to secure the puppet regime; in fact, they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.
The US-backed third-party armed intervention in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put down a majority uprising, has temporarily propped up the monarchy, but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy movement.
The fifth dimension of the Obama Doctrine is to use highly- trained and heavily-armed Special Forces (SF) contingents of 500 men or more to assassinate insurgent leaders, terrorize their rural supporters and "give backbone" to local military officials. Obama's dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in point. Up to now, there has been no report of any decisive victories, even in this tiny country. The prospects for the future use of this imperial tactic are probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance with weak resistance movements. And only as a "complement" to local standing armies.
The final and probably the most important element in the Obama Doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings and the reshuffling of elite figures in order to co-opt popular pro-democracy movements, derailing them from ending their countries' client relationships to Washington. Washington and the EU have incited and armed sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian and nationalist Al-Assad regime in Syria. Playing off of legitimate democratic demands and harnessing fundamentalist hostility to a secular state, the US and EU, with the collaboration of Turkey and the Gulf states, have engaged in a triple policy of external sanctions, mass uprisings and armed resistance against the secular civilian majority and the nationalist armed forces backing the Syrian regime. Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual regime change.
Parallel to this "outsider" political strategy in Syria, the Obama Doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a nationalist, pro-democracy and pro-workers social upheaval in Egypt, Washington financed and backed a military takeover and the rule of an autocratic military junta that follows the foreign and domestic policies of the former Mubarak dictatorship. While cynically evoking the "spirit" of the Arab Spring, Obama and Clinton have backed the military tribunals in Egypt that are prosecuting thousands of pro-democracy activists. A similar process of "internal subversion" financed by the EU has put in place a coalition of "Islamic free-marketers" and pro-NATO politicos, who have more in common with the White House then they do with the original pro-democracy movements.
For the immediate period, the Obama Doctrine's use of external and internal civilian-military subversion has succeeded in derailing the promising anti-imperialist movements that erupted in the early months of 2011. However, the great gulf that has opened between the recycled new client rulers and the pro-democracy movements has already led to calls for a second round of uprisings to oust the opportunists who have stolen the revolutions and betrayed the democratic principles of those who sacrificed themselves to oust the client dictators. All the conditions which underlay the Arab Spring remain in place or have been exacerbated: unemployment, police repression, crony capitalism, inequalities and corruption. The experience of successful rebellion is still fresh and alive among the increasingly disenchanted youth. Like all the new Obama imperialist policies, the propping up of co-opted officials does not promise a reconsolidation of empire.
PROSPECTS FOR THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: Reactive, improvised, with no overarching strategic framework, the so-called Obama Doctrine shows few signs of reversing the decline of the US empire. The deterioration of US forward positions in the Arab heartland has not been linear and nor has it been without tactical advances, especially in the light of the Obama regime's co-option of several Islamist leaders in Libya, Syria and Tunisia and the recycling of Mubarak-era generals in Egypt.
Under cover of political euphemisms the Obama regime has understated the scale and significance of its political and diplomatic losses: the forced withdrawal from Iraq is presented as a "successful mission in regime change," notwithstanding the burgeoning civil and regime violence between rival sectarian and secular factions, for example. The US "withdrawal" from Afghanistan is in reality a military retreat as the Taliban and related forces form a shadow government throughout the country, and the huge mercenary army funded by billions of Pentagon dollars is infiltrated by Islamist-nationalist militants.
The drone attacks, presented as a successful counter-terror weapon crossing frontiers, have been hyped as an effective and cost-effective alternative to large-scale ground invasions, which are subject to prolonged armed resistance. In fact the drones and killings mainly provide sensational propaganda and public- relations successes, and they have little impact on revising the larger political reality.
On the diplomatic front, US imperial decline has been even more dramatic. The UN General Assembly has voted against the US on Cuba, and the UNESCO vote on the admission of Palestine to membership of the organisation was overwhelmingly hostile to the Obama regime. Totally isolated, Washington's retaliatory posture of cutting off financial resources to UNESCO has further reduced US institutional leverage.
As Obama submits to ever-greater subservience to Israel's political arm in the US, in the shape of the 52 presidents of the major American Jewish organisations, and prepares a joint military attack on Iran, even NATO refuses to follow suite. The great danger of the Obama Doctrine here is that it is looking at short-term local consequences alone. Air and sea power can successfully bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities, please the head of the Israeli government and guarantee American Zionist financial backing for Obama's re-election campaign. But what is overlooked is the military capacity of Iran to close the world's most important waterway (the Strait of Hormuz), shipping oil to Europe, Asia and the US.
Obama's air-war successes in Iran would be overwhelmed by Iranian ground and missile attacks on US forces throughout the Gulf. All US allies in the region would be vulnerable to attack. Long-range Iranian missiles would send millions of Israelis scurrying for shelter, even before Obama's Zionist advisers uncorked the champagne to celebrate their air victory over Tehran.
The Obama Doctrine of extra-territorial air wars, turned with impunity against Iran, would provoke a catastrophic conflagration that would far surpass the disastrous outcome of the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama Doctrine is in reality a set of improvised policies designed to deal with specific sets of circumstances based on a common overall problem: how to retain imperial domination in the face of failed colonialist-occupation policies. The tactical success in the air war against Libya and the opportunities opened up by the locally led uprising in Syria have given rise to the need to formulate a new overall strategy. Local collaborators are central, especially those with an institutional power base (the Egyptian military) or with levers of regional influence in civil society (Islamist movements in Syria).
Yet, attempts to generalise these tactical gains into a general offensive strategy founder on the fallacy of "misplaced concreteness." Iran is not Libya: it has the military power, geographic proximity and economic resources to demolish the weak and vulnerable peripheral US client states. Israel can start a US war against the Islamic world -- but it cannot win it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's losses in the UN cannot be explained away as the whim of 193 "anti-semitic" countries.
The Zionist-US-Israeli troika can rant and rave and even precipitate an apocalyptic war, but Obama and Netanyahu are increasingly on the margins of worldwide changes. Their policies are impotent reactions to popular movements envisioning historical transformations that have even began to enter into the centre of empires: Wall Street and Tel Aviv. Ultimately the Obama Doctrine is doomed to failure, as it is incapable of recognising that the problem of decline is not simply a problem of tactics but is part of a systemic breakdown of empire-building: the cracks and fissures abroad have ignited revolts at home.
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