- After nearly 3 years in deep pursuit of the colonial
wars initiated by ex-President Bush, the Obama regime has finally recognized
the catastrophic domestic and foreign consequences. As a result the "reality
principle" has taken hold; the maintenance of the US Empire requires
modification of tactics and strategies, to cut political, military and
diplomatic losses [1].
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- In response to major military and political
losses as well as new opportunity, 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. This includes the arming and financial backing of
retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist
defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing
to serve the empire for a price.
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- Whether these 'changes' add up to a new post-colonial
"Obama doctrine" or simply reflects a series of improvisations
resulting from past losses ("making a virtue of necessity" remains
to be seen.
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- We will proceed by outlining the strategic
failures which set the context for the "rethinking" of the Bush-Obama
policies in mid- 2011. We will then point out 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 will describe these changes as they
have occurred; emphasizing their reactive nature improvised- as unfavorable
circumstances evolve and favorable opportunities arose.
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- The final section will critically evaluate
Obama's new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples
as well as the consequences for the US.
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- The Bush-Obama Continuum 2009-2011
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- Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and
ran with it. He expanded war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground
troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditures on base building
and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; multiplied US air and ground incursions
in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya. As a result the 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 in 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 reached double digits.
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- Obama retained and expanded the Bush era
wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts
in social security, federal funded medical programs and education. 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 economy and the demise of
key overseas collaborator regimes, the US Empire was under siege.
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- The Reality Principle
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- The reality of massive expenditures in 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 were a "shadow" government throughout
Afghanistan, inflicting increasing casualties on US-NATO forces even in
the capital, Kabul. In Iraq even the puppet regime 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).
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- The fall of major US client regimes in Egypt
and Tunisia (Mubarak and Ali), and mass uprisings threatening other puppets
in Yemen, Somalia, 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, Obama-Clinton were not custodians of an expanding
empire, but the masters of imperial defeats.The empire- building project
of the post-Cold War period, premised on unilateral action and military
supremacy launched by Bush senior, continued by Clinton, expanded by Bush
junior and multiplied by Obama was a total and unmitigated failure by any
imperial standards: prolonged losing wars, were accompanied by a vast
wave of pro-democracy uprisings dumping prized imperial clients.As
colonial wars depleted the imperial treasury, impoverished citizens
and undermined the "will to sacrifice" for the chimera of Global
Greatness. The national mood was deeply disturbed by the cost of empire
but also by 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 reform and developmental 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 Geithner's recycled free market dogma. There
was nowhere in the world where the Obama regime could claim military victory,
economic success or greater political influence.
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- 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.
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- The Making of the "Obama Doctrine"
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- The first and foremost "recognition
of reality" among the Obamites was that in a world of sovereign states,
colonial land wars based on territorial armies of occupation were not viable.
They led to prolonged resistance, extended budget over runs, continuing
casualties and were definitely not "self-financing" as the Zionist
geniuses in the Pentagon once claimed. New forms of imperial warfare were
needed to sustain the empire and destroy adversaries.
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- The hard choice facing the Obama regime with
regard to Iraq was whether to admit defeat and retreat (in the sense that
the US can not retain a colonial presence and will leave behind an unreliable
military and political configuration expanding ties with Iran and hostile
to Israel), or to claim "victoryZ in the sense of overthrowing Saddam
Hussein and weakening Iraq's role in the Middle East. The retreat and
defeat reality is now rationalized as a "repositioning" of 20,000
troops in the tiny city states run by despotic Gulf monarchies and the
posting of war vessels in the Persian Gulf. Obama-Clinton claim the troops,
war ships and aircraft carriers would 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. The main purpose of the repositioning is to protect
the Gulf client dictatorships from their internal pro-democracy movements
and to launch a joint US-Israeli air and sea attack on Iran. In other
words troop retrenchment (as an occupying colonial power) is replaced by
a build-up and concentration of air and sea power for attack and destruction
of military and economic bases of the Iranian state.
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- The US retreat is a product of defeat; a
departure under duress. The relocation of troops to petrol-despot mini-states
is a downsizing of the US presence and a move to prop-up highly vulnerable
corrupt clan based despots. The shift from Iraq to the Gulf states is
a move to small, safe, sanctuaries from a highly volatile conflictual major
state, with a history of resistance and independence. Since the US can
no longer afford an unending large troop presence and cannot secure a 'residual
force' its retreat to the Gulf states is making a virtue of necessity,
a fall-back position to retain a launch pad for the next aerial war.
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- The Libyan war marks the key imperial formula
for retaining Obama's imperial pretensions. The pretext for the war was
just as phony as the cause bellicose in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass
destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and rape were fabricated. A
UN resolution claiming the right to militarily intervene to "protect
civilians" was cooked up, and NATO launched an 8 month war based on
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 ex-pats as the 'new leaders'; a multi-lateral coalition of European
empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state petrol-oligarchs. In contrast to
Iraq and Afghanistan sustained massive air attacks took the place of a
large invasion army. Already Obama's military strategists have embraced
and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new "Obama doctrine"
for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes and movements.
Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary
'rebels', the fact is that Gadhafi loyalists were only defeated by the
combined air power of the NATO military command.
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- Obama-Clinton's celebration of the Libyan
victory is premature: the means to victory involved the thorough destruction
of the economy ,from ports to irrigation systems to roads and hospitals;
the disarticulation of the labor force, with the forced flight of hundreds
of thousands of sub-Sahara African workers and North African professionals.
In other words it was a "pyrrhic victory": Washington defeated
an adversary it has not won a viable state.
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- Even more serious, Washington's client mercenary
ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist
clan and neo-liberal operators who have few interests in common .And 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 mobilization against
pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South-Central
Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.
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- Obama's Libyan formula of using disparate
mercenaries to achieve short term military success has boomeranged. Islamic
fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are sending tons of ground to
air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gadhafi's arms
depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south
and north.
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- In a word, the volatile social and military
conflicts 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.
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- 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 a cost of alienating entire clans,
villagers, townspeople and the general public in targeted countries. Drones'
missiles are killing hundreds of civilians, causing relatives and ethnic
kinspeople to join resistance groups. Up to the present, after 3 years
of intensified "missile air 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 areas embraced the Islamic resistance
but the vast majority of Pakistanis (80%) 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, 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.
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- The third dimension of the Obama doctrine,
the heavy reliance on "third party" military intervention and/or
multi-lateral armed interventions, was not successful in Afghanistan and
Iraq and was of limited effectiveness in Libya. The European multi-lateral
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 multi-lateralism took place in Afghanistan:
most NATO soldiers will be out before the US withdraws. The Libyan experience
with "multi-lateral" air force collaboration in defeating Libya's
armed forces destroyed the country, undermining any post-war reconstruction
for decades. Moreover, "aerial multi-lateralism" followed the
formula of "easy entry and fast exit" leaving the mercenary
predators, in control on the ground, with a documented record of excelling
in rape, pillage, torture and summary executions. Only a brainless and
morally depraved Hilary Clinton could sing the praises and dance a jig
celebrating the victory of a knife wielding sodomist, torturing a captured
President as "a victory for democracy".
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- The fourth dimension of the "Obama doctrine"
the use of foreign mercenary armies has been tried and 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 to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital.
After a prolonged futile effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary
forces performed no better.They were followed by the entry of the
US backed Kenyan armed forces which has only led to massacres and starvation
of hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugees in Northern Kenya and Southern
Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistence. These third
party mercenary invasions have totally failed to secure the puppet regime;
in fact they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.
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- US backed "Third Party" mercenary
armed interventions in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put
down a majoritarian uprising, has temporarily propped up the despotic monarchy
but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy mass
movements.
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- The fifth dimension of the Obama doctrine
is to use highly trained heavily armed "Special Forces" (SF)
contingents of 500 more to assassinate insurgent leaders, to terrorize
their rural supporters and to "give backbone" to the local military
officials. Obama's dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in
point. Up to now there is no reports of any decisive victories, even in
this tiny country. The prospects for future use of this imperial tactic
is probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance
with weak resistance movements. And only as a "complement" to
local standing armies.
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- The final and probably most important element
in the Obama doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings
and the reshuffle of elite figures to 'co-opt' popular pro-democracy movements
in order to derail them from ending their countrys' client relationship
to Washington.
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- Washington and the EU have incited and armed
sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian
nationalist 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 nationalist armed forces backing
Basher Assad. Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and
the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual
"regime change".
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- Parallel to the "outsider" political
strategy in Syria, the Obama doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in
Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a nationalist-pro-democracy-pro-workers social
upheavals in Egypt, Washington financed and backed a military takeover
and rule by an autocratic military junta which follows the basic foreign
and domestic policies sustaining the economic structures under the Mubarak
dictatorship. While cynically evoking the "spirit" of the Arab
spring, Obama and Clinton, have backed the military tribunals which prosecute,
torture and jail-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 have with the original
pro-democracy mass movements.
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- In the immediate period the Obama doctrines'
use of 'external' and 'internal' civilian-military subversion has succeeded
in derailing the promising anti-imperial 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 revolt" and betrayed the democratic principles
of those who sacrificed to oust the client dictators. All the conditions
which underlay the "Arab spring" are 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 of the new Obama imperial
policies, the propping up of co-opted officials does not promise a reconsolidation
of empire.
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- Conclusion: The "Obama Doctrine"
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- Reactive, improvised policies, 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 is not linear nor
without tactical advances, especially in light of the Obama regimes' co-optation
of several Islamic leaders in Libya, Syria and Tunisia and the recycling
of Mubarak era generals in Egypt.
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- Under cover of political euphemisms the Obama
regime understates 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. 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 dollar is infiltrated by Islamic-Nationalist
militants.
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- The "drone attacks" presented as
a successful new counter-terror weapon crossing frontiers, is hyped
as an effective cost-effective alternative to large scale ground invasions
subject to prolonged armed resistance. In fact the "drones"
and killings mainly provide sensational propaganda and public relations
successes having little impact revising the larger defeatist political
reality.
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- On the diplomatic front US imperial decline
is even more dramatic.The UN General Assembly votes against the US on Cuba,and
the UNESCO vote on the admission of Palestine are overwhelmingly hostile
to the Obama regime. Totally isolated, Washington's "retaliatory"
posture of cutting off financial resources further reduces US institutional
leverage.
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- As Obama submits to greater subservience
to Israel's political arm in the US, the 52 "Presidents of the Major
American Jewish Organizations", and prepares a joint military attack
on Iran, even NATO, refuses to follow suite.
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- The great danger of the "Obama doctrine"is
that it looks at short term 'local' consequences.Air and sea power can
successfully bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities, please the head
of the Israeli ruling junta and guarantee American Zionist financial backing
for Obama's re-election campaign. 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.
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- Obama's air war successes in Iran would be
overwhelmed by Iranian ground and missile attacks of US forces throughout
the Gulf. All US petrol allies in the region would be vulnerable to attack.
Long range Iranian missiles would send millions of Israeli's scurrying
for bomb shelters, even before Obama's Zionist advisers uncork their champagne
to celebrate their "air victory" over Teheran.
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- The 'Obama doctrine' of extra territorial
air wars with impunity turned against Iran would provoke a catastrophic
conflagration, which 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 colonial-occupation policies. The tactical success
in the air war against Libya and the opportunities opened by Muslim led
uprising in Syria has given rise to the need to formulate a new overall
strategy. Local collaborators are central, especially those with an institutional
power base (Egyptian military) or with levers of regional influence in
civil society (Islamic movements in Syria).
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- The attempt to generalize these 'tactical'
gains into a general offensive strategy, however, 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.Netanyahu's
losses in the UN cannot be explained away as 193 "anti-semitic"
countries. The Zionist-US-Israeli troika are mutually masturbating in
a closet. They can rant and rave and even precipitate an apocalyptic war,
but Obama and Netanyahu are increasingly on the margin of world changes.Their
policies are impotent reactions to popular movements
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- envisioning historical transformations, which have
even, began to enter into the center of empires: Wall Street and Tel Aviv.
Ultimately the "Obama doctrine" is doomed to failure as it is
incapable of recognizing that the problem of decline is not simply a problem
of 'tactics' but a basic systemic breakdown of empire building: the cracks
and fissures abroad have ignited revolts at home.
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- [1] Thomas Shanker and Steven Lee Myers "US Planning
Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit from Iraq", New York Times, Oct.
29, 2011.
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