Obama's Expanded Militarism

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/21-7

Last month’s release of the National Strategy for Counterterrorism has brought much joy to many foreign policy liberals. Finally, the ghosts of the Bush administration have been exorcised. Finally, the president speaks of law and allies instead of war and an “axis of evil.” Coupled with the recent announcement of a timetable to end combat operations in Afghanistan, liberals have taken heart at the apparent shift in national security strategy. Such sentiments are understandable given the foreign policy quagmire of the past decade.

And yet, those who laud the new announcement as a fundamental realignment fail to realize that the self-limitations on the part of the United States are, in many cases, vast expansions in authorization for the use of force against “ungoverned spaces.” The symbol of this expansion of power is the predator drone, which will police these ungoverned spaces by surgical strikes of unlimited scope.

Drones are the perfect weapons for the post-Cold War world of globalization that has radically compressed our notions of time and space and made a formerly predictable international environment chaotic. Drones, which can move with speed across vast geographic spaces, are the ultimate tool for a global policeman who aspires to maintain order over vast distances. As such, the new American strategy is both a dramatic departure from and a culmination of the Pentagon’s post-Cold War strategic paradigm.

:snip:

President Obama’s letter that prefaces the document is a message of limits. Whereas the previous regime took an overly belligerent policy of invasion and world transformation, the United States will shift to an approach organized around “concrete, realistic goals.” The most important of these goals is insisting that al-Qaeda is the enemy- a shift long requested by policy advocates. It begs the question, however, of defining al-Qaeda. If al-Qaeda operates not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan but also in Yemen and in Iraq, and has even spawned, as one French diplomat said, al-Qaeda franchises, targeting al-Qaeda does not serve to limit U.S. missions. The document indeed adds organizations linked ideologically to al-Qaeda but points out that they will nonetheless not be conflated with the latter.

More at the link --

[bemildred]

1. As long as our "Gulag Archipelago" is intact and our bases litter the world

nothing has really changed.