Articles
The Missile Shield Deadlock between the US and Russia
Spiegel Online
By Christian Nee
March 3, 2010
The US and Russia are currently negotiating a successor to the START nuclear disarmament treaty. But continued American plans for a missile shield in Europe have proven to be a major stumbling block. President
Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world is in danger.
There is good news on the disarmament front: US President Barack Obama is fine-tuning a new nuclear strategy. As White House officials said last week during a meeting between Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he plans to reach a decision by April. The new strategy could include the scrapping of “thousands of nuclear weapons,” and even a commitment by the United States not to develop any new nuclear weapons.
In addition, what may be the final round of Russian-American talks on the further reduction of strategic offensive weapons started on Tuesday in Geneva. The successor for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is “almost 100 percent complete,” says a Moscow negotiator. “We have agreed on the number of launch systems and the warheads, as well as the inspection and destruction of the nuclear payloads. All problems have been solved.”
So much optimism has rarely been seen in Moscow and Washington, particularly when it comes to the two countries’ arsenals of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, though, the elation is not genuine. The idea that the world can become a planet free of nuclear weapons one day — as in his visionary speech last year in Prague — remains a fallacy for the time being. …
Read the full article: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,682734,00.html
Okinawa and the new domino effect
By John Feffer
Asia Times
March 6, 2010
For a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for United States military power.
We couldn’t have fought wars in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1959-1975) without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally. Even today, Japan remains the anchor of what’s left of America’s Cold War containment policy when it comes to China and North Korea. From the Yokota and Kadena air bases, the United States can dispatch troops and bombers across Asia, while the Yokosuka base near Tokyo is the largest American naval installation outside the United States.
You’d think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn’t make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the US Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa – an island prefecture almost 1,600 kilometers south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen US bases and 75% of American forces in Japan – is just revving up. In fact, Washington seems ready to stake its reputation and its relationship with a new Japanese government on the fate of that base alone, which reveals much about US anxieties in the age of President Barack Obama.
What makes this so strange, on the surface, is that Futenma is an obsolete base. Under an agreement the George W Bush administration reached with the previous Japanese government, the US was already planning to move most of the Marines now at Futenma to the island of Guam. Nonetheless, the Obama administration is insisting, over the protests of Okinawans and the objections of Tokyo, on completing that agreement by building a new partial replacement base in a less heavily populated part of Okinawa.
The current row between Tokyo and Washington is no mere “Pacific squall”, as Newsweek dismissively described it. After six decades of saying yes to everything the United States has demanded, Japan finally seems on the verge of saying no to something that matters greatly to Washington, and the relationship that Dwight D Eisenhower once called an “indestructible alliance” is displaying ever more hairline fractures. Worse yet, from the Pentagon’s perspective, Japan’s resistance might prove infectious – one major reason why the United States is putting its alliance on the line over the closing of a single antiquated military base and the building of another of dubious strategic value. …
Over the last several decades, with US bases built cheek-by-jowl in the most heavily populated parts of the island, Okinawans have endured air, water, and noise pollution, accidents like a 2004 US helicopter crash at Okinawa International University, and crimes that range from trivial speeding violations all the way up to the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three Marines in 1995.
According to a June 2009 opinion poll, 68% of Okinawans opposed relocating Futenma within the prefecture, while only 18% favored the plan. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party, a junior member of the ruling coalition, has threatened to pull out if Hatoyama backs away from his campaign pledge not to build a new base in Okinawa. …
www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/LC06Dh01.html
A new approach to ballistic missile defence in Europe?
Demystifying the end of the ‘third site’
Andrew Futter
Oxford Research Group
February 2010
On 17th September last year President Barack Obama announced that the Pentagon would be cancelling the plan proposed by George W Bush to place long-range interceptor missiles and large X-band radar in Europe to counter the growing missile threat from Iran. The decision to end the ‘third site plan’ – so called because it would complement the existing missile defence assets in Alaska and California – has been widely perceived as marking something of a sea-change in US ballistic missile defence policy, with many viewing the announcement as a tangible manifestation of Obama’s pledge to renew US foreign policy by reining in a programme pursued so vigorously by his predecessor. But a closer examination of the decision reveals that the cancellation of the system may not in fact be as revolutionary as has been widely assumed, for whilst the third site plan has been terminated the ‘Phased Adaptive Approach’ to missile defence in Europe – the programme which replaces it – may in fact prove to a be larger, more comprehensive system, involving far more assets, and that is almost certain to become operational far quicker than the third site. Moreover there is strong reason to believe that many of the political and diplomatic – not to mention technological – problems that hampered the previous system will be prolonged if not exacerbated.
Whilst the third site plan had called for 10 long-range interceptor missiles to be placed in Poland and a large X-band radar in the Czech Republic sometime towards the end of the current decade, the ‘Phased Adaptive Approach’ announced by Obama envisages four stages of deployment beginning in 2011 …
The Return Of Missile Defense
By Daniel Larison
After the administration scrapped the central European missile defense plan, Obama’s domestic critics were horrified by the “betrayal” and “appeasement” that it represented.
We have heard this for the last year from Republicans (it may be the one thing on which almost all of them agree), and we recently heard it echoed in some of the CPAC speeches earlier this week. This complaint was always absurd. There were some administration supporters who unrealistically expected that the decision would yield greater Russian cooperation on pressuring Iran. For my part, I exaggerated the significance of the decision and neglected to notice how little the policy had actually changed. As we have been seeing in recent weeks with the announcement of an agreement with Romania to establish an installation there, there was always little reason to expect improved Russian cooperation when the re-configured missile defense plan was likely to irritate Moscow in much the same way that the earlier plan did. …
In the event that Iran ever develops a missile that could reach Berlin or Paris or even London, it is not going to launch strikes against any of them. It will not for the same reason that it is not going to launch missiles against any of our allies in the Near East and the Gulf that it can conceivably attack now. Quite simply, Iran will not do this because it does not want to suffer retaliation from U.S. and allied forces. …
From The American Conservative: Read the full article article
Wars sending U.S. into ruin
Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford.
In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug — debt.
More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.
Washington’s deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already
owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion.
To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today. …
Obama seeks record $708 billion
in 2011 defense budget
President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2011, but vowed to continue his drive to eliminate unnecessary, wasteful weapons programs.
The budget calls for a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon’s base budget to $549 billion, plus $159 billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Obama’s spending freeze on other parts of the budget, designed to rein in the deficit, did not apply to the military.
United States finishes
Ballistic Missile Defense Review
The U.S. Defense Department conducted its first ever Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Review, released on February 1st, along with a 48-page report.
download here (2.87 MB).
The review emphasized that regional missile threats were more urgent than the more slowly emerging long-range threats, noting that the United States would continue to develop its long-range defense capabilities, but not: “at the same accelerated rate or with the same level of risk as in recent years. Rather, the United States will refocus its homeland BMD program as it began to do with the fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget—maintaining the current level of capability with 30 ground-based interceptors (GBIs) and further developing proven capabilities that will enhance homeland defense should a new threat emerge.” (p. iv)
Particular emphasis was given to the development of mobile and regional defenses, such as the SM-3, for example, with the “phased adaptive approach” for the revamped missile defense system planned for NATO Europe. The report noted that this approach would allow for eventual Russian cooperation, if “political circumstances make that possible.” (p.34)
The review recommended that a comprehensive approach be taken toward ballistic missile threats, with prevention, international engagement, and continued use of deterrence, both conventional and nuclear, saying, “While missile defenses play an important role in regional deterrence, other components will also be significant. Against nuclear-armed states, regional deterrence will necessarily include a nuclear component (whether forward deployed or not).” (p.23)
Comment from British American Security Information Council (BASIC)
Space systems and missile defense in 2010
All of their other neighbors, especially Russia, North Korea. and India, have been building up their rocket forces at a rapid rate. …
For both Europe and China, any effective ballistic missile defense requires space-based early warning sensors similar to the US Defense Support Program satellites based in geosynchronous orbit …
Watch What They Spend, Not What They Say
The Obama administration says
missile defense isn’t as important as it used to be.
Its budget says otherwise.
Afghanistan: propaganda of the deed
By Paul Rogers
The deluge of publicity about a large-scale military operation against the Taliban must be set against Afghan realities that tell a different story.
The military campaign now being waged in the Afghan province of Helmand is being described in much of the world’s media as the biggest such operation since the one which secured “regime-change” in Kabul in October-November 2001. A coordinated military assault involving 15,000 troops – from the United States, Britain and Afghanistan itself – aims to seize the town of Marjah and surrounding areas, which are described as the Taliban’s last stronghold in Helmand.
Operation Moshtarak (the word means “together” in the Dari language), even before its launch, has been the subject of a series of high-profile news stories with an almost uniformly positive “spin”. Their consistent core is that the operation’s purpose is to curb Taliban influence over Helmand as a whole; that the province is, alongside neighbouring Kandahar, the pivot of Taliban power in Afghanistan; and, therefore, that victory would be likely to turn the whole course of the war in Afghanistan in favour of the Nato/Isaf project. …
STOP PRESS: the news is that ‘Operation Moshtarak’ is now underway (11 February 2010)- don’t the decision makers ever learn from the history of failed attempts to ‘tame’ Afghanistan?
VANDENBERG MISSILE TEST
“DANGEROUS, DESTABILIZING AND PROVOCATIVE”
Watch this slideshow!
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation today condemned Sunday’s scheduled missile defense test from Vandenberg Air Force Base as “dangerous, destabilizing and provocative.”
The test involves a missile being fired from the Marshall Islands to simulate an attack on the United States by Iran, a country that neither possesses nuclear weapons nor long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States. An interceptor missile will be fired from Vandenberg AFB in an attempt to collide with the incoming missile.
Latest: The Missile Defense Test Flops
Over the weekend, the Missile Defense Agency released news of another failed intercept test. And no, the interceptor didn’t fail to lift off or fly off course. This time, the tracking radar that wasn’t up to scratch.
According to an military news release, a Sea-Based X-Band (SBX) radar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was supposed track a target missile launched from Kwajalein Atoll, relaying the data to a ground-based interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. While both the target missile and interceptor launched successfully, the interceptor failed to hit the target. According to the agency, the SBX “did not perform as expected.”
European Parliament votes down SWIFT agreement with the USA
The Parliament refused on Thursday to give its consent to the EU’s interim agreement on banking data transfers to the USA via the SWIFT network, amid concerns for privacy, proportionality and reciprocity. This move renders the text signed between the US and the 27 EU Member states legally void. MEPs propose to negotiate a new agreement.
The resolution rejecting the agreement was approved by 378 votes to 196, with 31 abstentions.
A proposal by the EPP and ECR groups to postpone the vote was rejected by 290 votes to 305, with 14 abstentions.
Background: Hilary Clinton (US Secretary of State) and Timothy Geithner (US Secretary of Treasury) are putting pressure on the parliament urging the parliament to change its mind: Clinton-Geithner letter to EP (pdf).
Letter from the President of the European Parliament to the Council of the European Union: EP Letter (pdf).
And in the flurry of activity the Council (27 governments) has adopted a Declaration: Draft Council declaration (pdf) and under pressure from the parliament to provide more information have published: Declassified Council Decision (pdf)
See also:
- SWIFT: Civil Liberties Committee recommends rejecting the agreement (EP press release (pdf)
- Draft EP Resolution (pdf)
- Opinion of the EP Legal Service
- Opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor (pdf)
- Opinion of the Article 29 Working Party (pdf)
- Draft EU-USA SWIFT Agreement
Same Empire, Different Emperor
February 11, 2010
by Laurence M. Vance
Just as Hadrian succeeded Trajan, Domitian succeeded Titus, Nero succeeded Claudius, and Caligula succeeded Tiberius, so Kennedy replaced Eisenhower, Nixon replaced Johnson, Reagan replaced Carter, and Obama replaced Bush.
Same empire, different emperor.
The extent of the U.S. global empire is almost incalculable. We know enough, however, about foreign bases, physical assets, military spending, and foreign troop levels to know that we have an empire in everything but the name.
There are, according to the Department of Defense’s “Base Structure Report” for FY 2009, 716 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in thirty-eight countries. Yet, according to the expert on this subject, Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, that number is far too low: “The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude – e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan.” Johnson places the real number of foreign bases closer to 1,000.
This same Base Structure Report states that the DOD’s physical assets consist of “more than 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,570 sites, on approximately 29 million acres.” The 307,295 buildings occupied by the DOD comprise over 2.1 billion square feet. The DOD manages almost 30 million acres of land worldwide. …
Read on: http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=6726
Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan
February 11, 2010
Existing in the shadows, the US base-building program is staggering in size and scope and also extraordinarily expensive.
In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country. …
Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year. …
Read on: www.alternet.org
With Nuclear, Conventional Arms Pacts Stalled,
U.S. Moves Missiles And Troops To Russian Border
On January 13 the Associated Press reported that the White House will submit its Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress on February 1 and request a record-high $708 billion for the Pentagon. That figure is the highest in absolute and in inflation-adjusted, constant (for any year) dollars since 1946, the year after the Second World War ended. Adding non-Pentagon defense-related spending, the total may exceed $1 trillion.
The $708 billion includes for the first time monies for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which in prior years were in part funded by periodic supplemental requests, but excludes what the above-mentioned report adds is the first in the new administration’s emergency requests for the same purpose: A purported $33 billion.
Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire
And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
by Chalmers Johnson
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
‘A History of American Imperialism’
by Noam Chomsky
US cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars tops $1 trillion.
But Obama wants a lot more.
The cost to U.S. taxpayers of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 has topped $1 trillion, and President Barack Obama is expected to request another $33 billion to fund more troops this year.
Over two-thirds of the money has been spent on the conflict in Iraq since 2003. This year is the first in which more funds are being spent in Afghanistan than Iraq, as the pace of U.S. military operations slows in Iraq and quickens in Afghanistan. Reuters
Why the US owes Haiti billions and why finding the money is a no-brainer!
Follow the Stop the War Coalition debate on Twitter
‘Save the Earth, Close the Pentagon!’
(Bryan Farrell’s new book, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism).
How to Exit Afghanistan
The Nation
By Selig S. Harrison
This article appeared in the January 11, 2010 edition of The Nation.
With the Taliban growing steadily stronger, 30,000 more US troops will not lead to the early disengagement from the Afghan quagmire envisaged by President Obama, even in the improbable event that Hamid Karzai delivers on his promises of better governance. What is needed is a major United Nations diplomatic initiative designed to get Afghanistan’s regional neighbors to join in setting a disengagement timetable and to share responsibility for preventing a Taliban return to power in Kabul.
The timetable should provide not only for the early withdrawal of all US combat forces within, say, three years but also for the termination of US military access to air bases in Afghanistan within five years. It should set the stage, in short, for the military neutralization of Afghanistan.
A commitment to categorical disengagement has long been demanded by Taliban leaders as the condition for negotiations. It would test whether they are ready for the local peace deals that the Obama administration appears prepared to accept, or will insist on power-sharing in Kabul as the price of peace. …
www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/harrison
Bush to Obama – a toxic legacy
openDemocracy
January 8, 2010
By Paul Rogers
A cascade of bad news for the United States from a series of frontlines – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and even the American homeland itself – is provoking a series of emphatic statements of concern and resolve from President Barack Obama. It is becoming clear that the abortive attempt to explode a device on a plane close to landing at Detroit on 25 December 2009 and the bombing of a key CIA station in eastern Afghanistan on 30 December (to name but the most embarrassing incidents) are striking examples of intelligence failure that illustrate the depth of the US’s strategic predicament. The inherited “war on terror” refuses to die.
The Afghan winter
The CIA attack involved a trusted Jordanian official meeting the head of forward operating base (FOB) Chapman in Khost province, along with most of her senior staff and a senior Jordanian intelligence officer. The official was expected to provide new information on the location of al-Qaida leaders, possibly including Osama bin Laden’s deputy and the group’s ideological figurehead, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Instead he detonated a hidden explosive charge which killed the station head, six of her colleagues and the Jordanian agent, and wounded six more people …
The Yemeni shards
The CIA disaster in Afghanistan comes at a time when Yemen has suddenly entered the frame following the near-disaster over Detroit on 25 December 2009. Many commentators in western Europe have yet to appreciate the impact of the Detroit incident within the United States; a reading of the president’s remarks in his statement of 7 January 2010 leaves no doubt about the deep concern at the highest level. For the past eight years domestic opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has grown slowly but steadily. Always, though, has been the thought that at least the United States itself has not suffered another major assault on the model of 9/11. London, Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Amman, Casablanca, Mumbai, Islamabad and many others may have been hit, but the US had been spared.
The Detroit attack came very close to changing that. …
The Iraqi shards
A very rare piece of positive news in the past couple of months for the United States has been the report from Iraq that December 2009 marked the first month since the war began in which no US military personnel were killed in combat. This came at the end of a year in which the loss of civilian lives was also sharply reduced. Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimates that 4,497 civilians were killed by violence up to 16 December, compared with 9,226 in 2008.
This combination of indicators might seem to suggest that at last Iraq is becoming more secure. But a closer look at developments in Iraq leads to less positive conclusions …
The deep muddy
Much of the surge in activity across northern and central Iraq is aimed at breaking confidence in the elections scheduled for January 2010; its ferocity and persistence make clear that the insurgency is far from over. In particular, it looks as though the withdrawal of US troops from the majority of their urban combat-patrols since 30 June 2009 is allowing insurgent groups to act with much more boldness. This would be serious enough if their aim was primarily to foster intercommunal violence; but their systematic (and often successful) targeting of heavily protected state facilities indicates a more refined strategic objective, and causes even greater concern.
Barack Obama’s administration has many problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is now likely to become much more deeply involved in Yemen. There was at least the hope that the situation in Iraq was improving, but even that is looking markedly over-optimistic. …
Read the entire article: www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/bush-to-obama-toxic-legacy
Save the Earth, Close the Pentagon!
Climate and Capitalism
By Sara Flounders
January 9, 2010
How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count. …
Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from measurement or reductions.
After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords. …
More than emissions:
Besides emitting carbon dioxide, U.S. military operations release other highly toxic and radioactive materials into the air, water and soil.
U.S. weapons made with depleted uranium have spread tens of thousands of pounds of microparticles of radioactive and highly toxic waste throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans.
The U.S. sells land mines and cluster bombs that are a major cause of delayed explosives, maiming and disabling especially peasant farmers and rural peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. …
Environmental war at home:
Moreover, the Defense Department has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases. …
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of acres of land and water with radiation. …
Around the world, on past and still operating bases in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Japan, Nicaragua, Panama and the former Yugoslavia, rusting barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of rounds of ammunition are criminally abandoned by the Pentagon. …
Read the entire article: http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=1534
The Question No U.S. Official Dare Ask
By Willam Pfaff
January 7, 2010
It is time to ask a question that virtually no one in an official or political position in the United States is willing to contemplate asking. For a person in a responsible public position to pose this question would be to risk exclusion from the realm of “serious” policy discussion. It could be, as they say in the bureaucracies, “a career destroyer.”
It would be like declaring that after long analysis you had come to the conclusion that the world is indeed flat, and not round. A round earth is merely an illusion, which everyone has accepted, and adapted to—and fears challenging.
My question is the following. Has it been a terrible, and by now all but irreversible, error for the United States to have built a system of more than 700 military bases and stations girdling the world? Does it provoke war rather than provide security?
Each of six world regions now has a separate U.S. commander with his staff and intelligence, planning and potential operational capabilities. Central Command, based in Florida, currently is responsible for America’s Middle Eastern and Central Asian wars.
The other five commands—Atlantic, Pacific, Southern (for Latin America), Africa and Europe—oversee in detail what goes on in their assigned portions of the world, generating analyses, appreciations, and scenarios of possible reactions to a myriad of perceived or possible threats to the United States.
Each commander also makes contact with regional government military forces, so far as possible, cultivating good relations, professional exchanges and training. Each promotes training missions to the U.S. and military aid, and supports equipment purchases.
Each regional commander controls “main operating bases” abroad, which in turn support fully manned “forward operating sites,” usually including permanently stationed American forces and an air base.
Beyond them, “cooperative security locations” are established, shared with the forces of allies or clients. …
The unthinkable question with which I began this article was whether all of this has been a ghastly mistake. Many Americans question or oppose this system, but ordinarily with anti-militarist motives, or because they see it as imperialist, or part of an interventionist or aggressive foreign policy outlook that they oppose.
My reason for questioning it is that it generates apprehension, hostility and fear of the United States; frequently promotes insecurity; and has already provoked wars—unnecessary wars.
It is an obstacle to peaceful long-term relations between the United States and other countries, and with the international community as a whole.
Today the United States is involved in two and a half—or even more—wars provoked by this system of global American military engagement. …
Read on: www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_question_no_us_official_dare_ask_20100107/
Obama presses review of nuclear strategy
The Boston Globe
January 3, 2010
… The Pentagon is rethinking the unthinkable: Making major changes to Cold War arsenal. In a thorough review expected to be completed early this year, the size, structure, and even the very mission of America’s nuclear arsenal are being reconsidered as part of President Obama’s pledge to reduce the role of the world’s most deadly weapons. …
Obama has already reached a tentative agreement with Russia to reduce the number of warheads on both sides from about 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675 in the next several years, while also slashing the missiles and submarines designed to carry them to between 500 and 1,000. The so-called Nuclear Posture Review, led by the Pentagon, could recommend going even further, to 1,000 warheads or fewer …
www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/01/03/obama_presses_review_of_nuclear_strategy/
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