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U.S. Supremacy Mission Hits Snags
By Steve Smith, IOL Washington correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 (IslamOnline) – U.S. President George W. Bush's
administration seems bent more than ever to hammer out a new world order based on unopposed U.S. military supremacy and unquestioned U.S. actions, analysts here say.
However, resistance to this new one-sided approach is gathering momentum with many intellectuals, politicians and writers saying that the White House has failed to read the possible future by-products of its policies and that it could also be shooting itself in the foot.
U.S. diplomatic and intellectual circles say here that Bush is copying from a 1992 strategy paper drafted by the current Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s National-Security Advisor, I. Lewis Libby. The paper reportedly calls for U.S. domination, at least with respect to Eurasia.
There are reports that while the paper was considerably softened after it was leaked to the press nearly a decade ago, there is no sign that either the two hawks - Wolfowitz or Libby - or their seniors now in the administration, have budged.
''We all have to start using the 'H' word - hegemony - now to describe U.S. policy,'' says Michael Klare, a national-security expert at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
Since Sep. 11, the administration has signalled in different methods that foreign nations should begin to reorient themselves to a world in which Washington will simply not tolerate constriction on its power or freedom of action.
The first signal came when the US withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, widely seen as safety pin for the world nuclear arms race, albeit near-nirvana for the devoted unilateralists on the far right and neo-conservative wings of the US Republican Party.
The second change came with the Pentagon statements that it was ready to position or was already deploying, Special Operations Forces (SOF) units in different corners of the globe. The reports here had it that American men and women in uniform were ready for Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines to give local troops a hand with the hunt for suspected Al-Qaeda members.
The third and the fourth moves came two weeks ago with the draft for the 2003 U.S. budget. Then, the President gave his now notorious State of the Union address in which he stated that his country could be targeting a new so-called “axis of evil” –Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
All three states would come under attack for having links to international terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction and for building long-range missiles that posed a threat to the US and its allies.
The Bush team called for a virtual freeze on all federal spending in order to free up funds that would support a gigantic hike of 14 percent in military expenditure, already at 331 billion dollars this year. US press reports said this is already greater than the combined defence budgets of the next nine most militarily powerful nations.
What’s more, Bush has said this would be only the “first” increase.
To show Washington’s new military resolve, the new upsurge alone - at 48 billion dollars - is more than the total defence budget of any of the US’s NATO allies.
The interpretation of the news here in Washington was that the move was designed to deter even Washington partners in Europe from thinking of coming anywhere near the US military superiority, let alone contending with the US military might. This was on of the goals of the 1992 Wolfowitz-Libby paper.
''(W)e are increasingly headed for a military apartheid within NATO,'' noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: ''America will be the chef who decides the menu and cooks all the great meals, and the NATO allies will be the busboys who stay around and clean up the mess and keep the peace - indefinitely.''
But all this comes with mummers of dissension. The question which is beginning to penetrate up into policy sphere in Washington is whether this approach is even tenuously sustainable, powered, as it is now, primarily by the persistent pain of Sep 11, the practically easy removal of the Taliban government, and Bush's stratospheric footing in the public- opinion polls.
For most of the past two decades, those same polls have, without fail, indicated that the US public refuses by a sizeable margin the concept that Washington should operate as the ''world's policeman'' or even as the ''first among equals' ' in international affairs. In that respect, Bush's policy and the current atmosphere embody a serious deviation.
While questioning Secretary of State Colin Powell, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran, even referred to Bush's oratory and measures of late as ''very dangerous'' and the administration's mind-set toward European qualms as ''cavalier.''
''Once you get started down a track., you can't, in State Department parlance, walk it back,'' he told Powell in remarks that were immediately endorsed by Rhode Island Republican, Lincoln Chafee.
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