As
President Obama enters his second term with a new Cabinet, the foreign
policy legacy of the past four years weighs heavily on their strategic
decisions and their empire-building efforts. Central to the analysis of
the next period is an evaluation of the past policies especially in
regions where Washington expended its greatest financial and military
resources, namely the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa .
We
will proceed by examining the accomplishments and failures of the
Obama-Clinton regime. We will then turn to the ongoing policy efforts
to sustain the empire-building project. We will take account of the
constraints and opportunities, which define the parameters resulting
from imperial military ambitions, Israeli-Zionist influence in shaping
policy and the ongoing anti-imperialist struggles. We will conclude by
examining likely polices and outcomes resulting from current strategies.
The Clinton-Obama Imperial Legacy: The Accomplishments
The
greatest success of the Obama-Clinton (OC) imperial legacy was the
virtual elimination of organized domestic anti-war dissent, the demise
of the peace movement and the co-optation of virtually the entire
‘progressive’ leadership in the US – while multiplying the number of
proxy wars, overt and covert military operations and ‘defense’
spending. As a result, the entire political spectrum moved further to
the right toward greater militarization abroad and increased
police-state measures at home.
Facing mass revolts and
the overthrow of long-standing client regimes in Egypt , Tunisia and
Yemen , the Obama-Clinton (OC) Administration moved rapidly to
reconfigure new client regimes while preserving the state apparatus –
the military, intelligence, police, judicial and civilian bureaucracy.
The empire dumped incumbent regimes in order to save the repressive
state, the key guarantor of US strategic interests. Washington reminded
its client rulers that ‘There are no permanent alliances, there are only
permanent imperial interests’. Washington successfully engineered a
political pact between conservative Islamist leaders and parties and the
old military elite.
The new political blocs in Egypt
upheld Israeli annexation of Palestine , the brutal blockade of Gaza and
the neo-liberal economic order. Washington repeated the ‘reshuffle of
clients’ in Yemen and Tunisia . The OC intervention temporarily aborted
the pro-democracy, anti-Zionist and anti-corruption popular revolt.
The OC policies secured a temporary respite, but the subsequent effort
by Egypt to secure an IMF loan has led to a stalemate amid deteriorating
economic conditions and rising political protest. The successful
imposition of new client regimes amenable to US hegemony in Egypt ,
Tunisia and Yemen , in the face of popular revolts, marked the beginning
of a series of favorable political-military outcomes in the region for
the OC regime.
Facing Israeli annexation of
ever-widening swaths of Palestinian land and the end of any pretense of
‘peace negotiations’, Washington continued to provide Israel with
massive military assistance, modern weapons systems and unconditional
political support in the UN. By submitting to Israel the OC regime
succeeded in retaining the political support of the domestic Zionist
power configuration (ZPC). The OC regime’s economic handouts supported
the puppet Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as it policed the
West Bank for Israel . Despite losing the vote to seat the Palestinians
as a non-voting member in the UN, Washington succeeded in blocking full
membership. The OC regime succeeded in fulfilling its role as Israel
’s handmaiden, despite opposition from the vast majority of UN members.
The
OC regime succeeded in tightening sanctions on Iran , by securing
Russian, Chinese and Arab League support, without provoking a
potentially destructive war. The US sanction policy toward Iran is
largely designed and implemented by key Zionist appointees in the
Treasury (formerly Stuart Levy, now David Cohen) and in Congress, by
legislators bought and directed by the powerful America-Israel Political
Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The US , under
Obama-Clinton, destroyed the independent nationalist Gadhafi government
via a joint air war with the EU and tried to set up a client regime. In
turn, Libya became a key recruiting ground for violent Islamist
mercenaries invading Syria and weapons depot supplying Islamist
terrorists. The OC regime’s military success in Libya was part of a
general strategy to accelerate the expansion of US and European military
operations in Africa . This includes setting up drone bases and
promoting African mercenary armies from Uganda , Kenya , and Ethiopia to
expand imperial control in Somalia , Mali and elsewhere.
In
the Gulf region the US succeeded in propping up the autocratic Bahrain
monarchy, as it killed and jailed opponents and outlawed the mass
pro-democracy social movement among its oppressed Shi’a majority
population. The OC regime successfully secured Gulf state financing for
the Libyan and Syrian wars.
In Iraq , the US has
succeeded in dividing the devastated nation into fragments of warring
fiefdoms, Shi’a, Sunni, Kurd and subsets of each. It succeeded in
destroying a once modern and secular society, an advanced economy and
independent nationalist regime. Initially the OC regime hoped to
establish a client outpost in Iraq from which to secure Washington ’s
wealthy petro-clients in the Gulf, especially among the patrimonial
dictatorships in Saudi Arabia , Qatar , Bahrain , Kuwait and United Arab
Emirates .
Washington, in alliance with other NATO
powers and its Gulf state clients, succeeded in converting a peaceful
civilian protest movement in Syria into a full scale civil war and
military invasion, increasingly dominated by armed Al Qaeda
‘internationalists’. The US-EU-Gulf State-Turkey-Israeli alliance has
armed, financed, trained and advised Islamist and mercenary terrorists
to effectively destroy the Syrian state, society and economy,
dispossessing and uprooting a million refugees across the border and
resulting in the death and injury of hundreds of thousands. The US
promoted invasion of Syria has seriously weakened one of the last
governments defending the Palestinians, opposing Israeli colonization of
the West Bank and providing a refuge for persecuted Palestinian
leaders.
By virtually destroying the Syrian state, the
OC regime has driven a wedge between Hezbollah, the leading nationalist
force in Lebanon and its ally Iran , while tightening the military
encirclement of Teheran and exerting cross-border pressure against Iraq
. A brutal Islamist regime in Syria will replace the secular state with
prospects of massive ethnic cleansing against minority populations,
especially Christians and Allevis.
Obama and Clinton
successfully expanded the drone assassination program throughout the
Middle East and South Asia, killing more civilian non-combatants than
suspected adversaries especially in Pakistan , Afghanistan and Yemen .
The
OC regime successfully imposed the presidential doctrine of killing of
US citizens via drones with the support or acquiescence of the US
Congress, judiciary and most of the mass media and without a shred of
judicial due process. Accompanying the license to assassinate civilians
via drones, Obama/Clinton successfully expanded the use of Special
Operations death squads, dispatching them to seventy countries to
assassinate political adversaries, destabilize independent governments
and bolster client regimes.
The OC regime has spent
tens of billions of dollars and succeeded in building a 350,000 man
mercenary army in Afghanistan to defend US strategic interests, sustain
its military bases and destroy the nationalist-Islamic opposition
(‘Taliban’). OC hoped to cover Washington ’s retreat from the combat
front. Despite the military build-up and in the face of a sharply
deteriorating military situation in Afghanistan, the OC regime has been
negotiating with political sectors of the ‘Taliban’, to dump the current
client ruler, Karzai, and ‘reshuffle the regime to save the state’,
hoping to pull-off a coalition-collaborator Islamist-military regime
such as has been shoe-horned in place in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. More
Monday 25 March 2013
The Obama Kerry Hagel Regime: Selling Death and Buying Assassins in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia
Posted @ 17:12
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