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March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
March
10, 2002
Thomas
Croft
Year
of Living Dangerously
March
9, 2002
Bill Cook
Sharon's
Bulldozer
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Nightmare in Israel
March
8, 2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
When
Business Men
Make Boo-Boos
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Enron's
Spooky
Image Consultant
Rep. Ron
Paul
Stop
the War on Colombia
Andre
Achong
The
Failed War on Drugs
John B.
Kelly
Michael
Moore and Me:
Disability Rights and
a Big Stupid White Guy
March
7, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Congressman
McInnis Equates Enviros to al-Qaeda
Mike Rogers
Will
the Battle of Shah-i-Kot Become the Taliban's Alamo
Walt Brasch
Patriot
Act and Free Speech
John Jonik
Insurance
Scams:
Who Are the Scofflaws?
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Bumper
Crop: The Politics
of Afghan Opium
March
6, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
A
Beautiful Mind:
Another Dangerous Lie?
Tom Turnipseed
War
Is Wrong
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
Delkhasteh and Wright
What
Should We be Fighting For? An Open Letter
to Pro-War Academics
Mariya
Tsvekova
Putin's
Georgian Gambit
March
4, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Dick
Cheney: A Dinosaur
in the Age of Mammals
Uri Avnery
How
Israel Will Torpedo
the Saudi Peace Plan
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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CounterPunch
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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by Cockburn
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March 14, 2002
Making Enemies
The Pentagon's Offensive
New Defense Doctrine
by Paul-Marie de La Gorce
Speaking on 31 January to students at the National
Defense University in Washington, The Defense Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld announced a major shift in United States military strategy.
The new objective was to be "deterrence in four critical
theatres, backed by the ability to swiftly defeat two aggressors
at the same time, while preserving the option for one massive
counter-offensive to occupy an aggressor's capital and replace
the regime".
Until then US Defense policy had gone
through three distinct phases. Until the early 1970s, when the
communist regimes were seen as forming a single bloc, it was
based on a "two-and-a-half conflicts" scenario. Preparations
were made for simultaneous wars with the Soviet Union and China,
plus a regional conflict involving an enemy with a much smaller
military capability than the two giants. The Korean war, the
Vietnam war and the US military interventions in Lebanon, Guatemala
and the Dominican Republic all fell into the "half-conflict"
category.
The second phase began after the rift
between the Soviet Union and China, when President Nixon adopted
a "one-and-half-conflict" strategy, retaining the means
to fight a major war with either the Soviet Union or China at
the same time as a limited regional conflict.
The third phase started immediately after
the end of the cold war. In the Base Force Review published in
1991, the Bush administration announced a new approach based
on "two major regional conflicts". This was confirmed
by the Clinton administration in the 1993 Bottom-Up Review, and
again in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, where such conflicts
were renamed "major theatre wars".
On 31 January Rumsfeld not only extended
the prospects of conflict from two to four major theatres. Attempting
a closer definition of the threats facing the US, he grouped
together in the enemy camp both terrorist organisations with
global ambitions and states supporting them that were allegedly
developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. "The
real concern at the present time," he said, "is the
nexus between terrorist networks and terrorist states that have
weapons of mass destruction." Threats were now defined both
by their source and by their nature. "We need to prepare
for new forms of terrorism, to be sure, but also attacks on US
space assets, cyber attacks on our information networks, cruise
missiles, ballistic missiles, nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons."
Paving the way for a considerable increase
in US Defense expenditure, Rumsfeld listed six "transformational
goals" of the new Defense strategy: to protect the American
homeland and US bases overseas; to protect and sustain power
in distant theatres; to deny the US' enemies sanctuary; to protect
US information networks from attack; to use information technology
to link up different kinds of US forces for effective combined
operations; and to maintain unhindered access to space and protect
US space capabilities from enemy attack.
These far-reaching changes do not affect
current doctrine on the deployment of forces, which continues
to be based on the "revolution in military affairs"
(RMA) (3) and focuses on the use of high-precision long-range
weapons and on permanent information concerning potential targets
and the deployment of enemy forces. RMA technology has led to
the adoption of "strategic control" as the central
concept of American Defense policy. Strategic control means the
ability to monitor the enemy's situation permanently, sap his
strength by surgical strikes on military, industrial and political
targets, and if necessary destroy his military, industrial and
political potential completely in order to force him to retreat
or capitulate.
Room for pragmatism
US strategists have consistently maintained
that the strategic control doctrine was conceived as a means
of responding to all types of conflict. How it is applied depends
on the nature of the enemy (population, industrial potential,
infrastructure, size of cities, etc). Above all, it depends on
the nature of the political regime and the means required to
overthrow or neutralise it. There is thus considerable room for
pragmatism. No wonder that US experts and their think-tank consultants
have being looking very closely at the way the doctrine was applied
during the Gulf war and the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The US air offensive against Iraq in
1991 lasted 43 days. It was followed by only four days of ground
operations. In 1994, when ground operations in Bosnia were delegated
to Washington's allies, US bombers hit 300 targets at the cost
of two planes lost and two American casualties. In the Kosovo
war, the US air offensive lasted 78 days. It proved effective
only against civilian targets in Serbia, Montenegro and on the
territory of Kosovo itself, without any loss of life on the American
side. The Pentagon admitted only the loss of one F117 stealth
fighter and a dozen drones. The experts investigating the application
of the strategic control concept agree that the air strikes against
the Yugoslav armed forces were almost a total failure, destroying
no more than 12 or 13 enemy tanks. These figures tally precisely
with those of the Yugoslav high command. They are a far cry from
the triumphant claims of Nato's information and propaganda services
during the war itself. Yet the same experts argue that US air
strikes have become more effective from one war to the next.
The strategic control doctrine was also
applied in Afghanistan, where it was adapted to the special nature
of the terrain and the deployment of enemy forces. As long as
priority was given to building up a political force capable of
replacing the Taliban, US air strikes were directed against the
enemy's military potential - airfields, tanks, hardware concentrations
and munitions dumps. They were backed up by high-precision cruise
missiles fired from planes or warships.
When the objective shifted to the occupation
of territory by the Northern Alliance, and subsequently by locally
recruited Pashtun militias, the US switched to blanket bombing.
This enabled its proxy ground forces to advance with the aid
of a few US special units and without the need for large-scale
engagements. Both Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul fell without major
battles, although this did not prevent massacres from taking
place. In Kandahar, where the Taliban had dispersed their forces,
the strategy was to obliterate the city from the air. The death
toll has not been published.
In Afghanistan as in Iraq, Bosnia and
Kosovo, the US authorities believe their strategic control concept
is being applied - with inevitable variations - effectively enough
for them to achieve most of their political objectives with negligible
losses for themselves.
The US military strategists and their
supporters frankly admit the link between strategic control and
the current plans for anti-missile Defense. Predictably, they
invoke the supposed threat from states that have a limited military
potential but possess medium- and long-range missiles capable
of reaching US territory (4). They argue that American aerospace
power rests on the invulnerability of US territory, since anti-missile
Defense systems deployed abroad or at sea can at best serve as
a back-up. The correlation between strategic control and anti-missile
Defense turns out to be more decisive than official explanations
would lead you to believe. The anti-missile Defense project,
now renamed the Missile Defense System (MDS), originally came
in for a great deal of criticism. But US determination to push
ahead overcame all opposition - even when the Bush administration
publicly announced its intention to withdraw from the 1972 ABM
treaty. And even when it successfully carried out an anti-missile
missile test launch from a surface vessel in defiance of the
requirement for six months' notice.
The MDS was the outcome of a strategic
analysis based on absolute US superiority in all areas of Defense.
The strategists involved - the members of the Rumsfeld commission
and the Secretary of State, Colin Powell - concluded that the
US need no longer be bound by the concepts of mutual deterrence
and nuclear parity that had prevailed during the cold war. The
present objective should be to reduce nuclear arsenals as far
as possible while Russia and the US kept their own nuclear deterrents,
since they no longer had any interest in attacking each other
or any intention to do so. It followed that the American homeland,
together with areas on the territory of US allies considered
to be of vital interest, and US air and naval bases abroad had
to be protected by an anti-missile system.
Protected against whom?
But protected against whom? Some of the
strategists argued that the potential enemy whose offensive capability
would be neutralised by an anti-missile barrier could be one
of the "rogue states" stigmatised by US diplomacy.
Others had no doubt the enemy was China. That debate has now
run its course. Both the rogue states and China are accepted
as potential threats in current US thinking, although the former
are now simply referred to as "states involved in developing
weapons of mass destruction". China is unambiguously designated
as a "peer competitor" and possible adversary in the
"Joint Vision 2020" military analysis of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff, a low-key version of which was published in
June 2000.
Clearly the first zone beyond US borders
to be protected by the MDS would be Taiwan, to prevent China
seizing control of it. The US air and air-ground bases in Kyrgyzstan
and Uzbekistan, which Rumsfeld says are there to stay, would
also be protected. To retain credibility, China would have to
respond by increasing the number and performance of its missiles
well beyond their current level. According to reliable US sources,
it could within 12 years have more than 100 mobile ground-to-ground
missiles fitted with nuclear warheads capable of reaching the
US. Being mobile, they would be invulnerable to pre-emptive strikes.
The potential enemy could also be one
the states forming the "axis of evil" which President
Bush referred to in a speech on 29 January - Korea, Iran and
Iraq. Yet none of these countries appears to have relations with
the terrorist organisation responsible for the attacks on 11
September. Nor do they possess weapons of mass destruction, since
those that Iraq was developing have now been dismantled.
The new strategy envisages the use of
conventional forces against these three states. For each of them,
various scenarios are being studied. In the case of Iraq, it
is already clear that a pinpoint air offensive would not be launched
unless the US was certain of locally recruited ground support.
The aim would be a full-scale combined operation designed to
end only with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The geographical, demographic, economic
and military dimensions of Iran make conventional war against
that country unlikely. The various scenarios envisaged range
from a partial blockade to surgical strikes against industrial
and military installations supposedly manufacturing weapons of
mass destruction. But a blockade would require the creation of
a disciplined coalition, which is no easy matter. And none of
these scenarios would prevent reactions and counter-reactions
escalating out of control.
The fact that North Korea has China as
its neighbour restricts the possibilities for air or air-ground
operations against it, although US strategists do not rule them
out. They are also considering negotiating agreements with the
North Korean government to restrict the production, development
and export of missiles, similar to past agreements concerning
the production of nuclear weapons.
The new US Defense budget is sufficient
proof that the Bush administration is determined to prepare for
the full range of possible conflicts with these three countries.
Military expenditure was already on the increase towards the
end of the Clinton administration. It rose from $259bn in 1998
to $279bn in 1999, $290bn in 2000 and $301bn for the financial
year 2000-2001. While the new budget does not signal a general
upsurge, the pace has clearly accelerated: from $328bn for 2001-2002
to $379bn for the following year. By 2007 we could be looking
at a figure of $450bn. Under the impact of the September attacks,
some budget heads have gone through the roof. Funding for measures
to combat biological terrorism, for example, has almost doubled,
from $1.4bn to $3.7.
The lesson is clear. The American administration
has announced that the use of force is a necessary and legitimate
means of achieving its aims. It is now gathering all the necessary
resources.
Paul-Marie De La Gorce is a French journalist. His latest book is Le
dernier empire : le XXIe siecle sera-t-il americain?, Grasset,
Paris, 1996. This article originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique.
Translated by Barry Smerin.
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