American reliance on military power is beginning to backfire

William Pfaff
International Herald Tribune
Saturday, January 26, 2002

NEW YORK -- Denials aside, real disagreement exists between Saudi Arabia and the United States over use of the big American Air Force installation in that country and over continuing the U.S. military presence there.

Some in Congress and the Pentagon are indignant that the Saudi government should have barred the United States from raiding Afghanistan from the expensive air operations center recently built at the Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh.

The head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, has said that the Saudi Arabians "act as though somehow or other they're doing us a favor." He and others talk as if U.S. withdrawal would punish Saudi Arabia.

He doesn't understand that the Saudi leadership doesn't consider itself doing a favor, but as having been forced to accept the U.S. presence, against important political interests of its own.

The Washington view is that the United States fought the Gulf War to defend Saudi Arabia; is defending it again in the war against terrorism and deserves thanks and cooperation.

The widely held Saudi view is that the United States fought the Gulf War to defend its own oil interests, put Saudi Arabia in an uncomfortable position by the way it did it and refused to go home when the war was over.

The Saudis' awkward guests insisted on enlarging their presence from a rotating detachment just after the Gulf War to a force of some 6,000 last year, before Sept. 11. They are seen as interfering in Saudi affairs, and their presence offends Muslim religious sensibilities.

The tale is a cautionary one of self-inflicted damage, the result of Pentagon expansionism, military ambition and the steadily increased power of neo-conservative hawks in a Washington now convinced that global extension of American power and control is the new Manifest Destiny. U.S. security and leadership is held to depend on worldwide military deployment.

There is no value in a military deployment, meant to stabilize a region, that actually destabilizes or subverts them, or which strengthens Islamic fundamentalism and wins it recruits.

This will be a recurring issue as the war against terrorism goes on. There already is trouble in the Philippines, caused by the arrival of U.S. Special Forces to advise the Philippine army's campaign against a Muslim separatist movement. This group until now has mostly been in the kidnapping and ransom business, but is believed to have links to Al Qaeda.

It now numbers in the hundreds, but separatist sentiment has considerable strength in the southern Philippines. Throughout the country, there has long been popular hostility to American military presence, although President Gloria Macapagal welcomes it.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says that the Philippine separatists are part of "a global problem (that) we are addressing globally, not just in Afghanistan."

The United States displayed efficiency and dispatch in overturning the Taliban government in Afghanistan and breaking up the Qaeda organization there. The efficiency resulted in part from the same unilateralism and the same indifference to the opinion of others that the Bush administration practiced pre-Sept. 11, with respect to global warming, the United Nations, war crimes tribunals, land-mine bans and trade conflicts.

The evident assumption of Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld is that while it is agreeable to be admired and respected abroad, it is better to be feared and obeyed. There is something to be said for that opinion, but practice of such advice can end in maximized negatives rather than positives. The latest example is the treatment of the Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo.

The United States has the power to get almost anything it wants from other governments, but it paid a price for pressing Saudi Arabia to accept a permanent U.S. deployment. The deployment may now be forced out, or be pulled out because of Saudi restrictions on its use.

The defeat of Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan, and the popular rejoicing that followed, dealt a real blow to the notion that fundamentalism is a powerful movement with a great destiny. It would be a mistake for Washington to underestimate that victory, or permit overconfidence or arrogance to undermine it.

Copyright (c) 2001 The International Herald Tribune

Original link

 
_____
Nieuwe Oorlog 2002 | Ander Nieuws week 06