Nation-Building Exposes GOP’s House Divided by Jacob Heilbrunn in the LA Times today is not merely simplistic in a number of ways, but considering that George is travelling the country pounding his simian chest and promoting the Bush Doctrine, which NRO asserted on 2/23/04 should be renamed the Reagan-Bush Doctrine, I find it disturbingly misleading as well. George hasn’t adopted the new wrapper yet that I’m aware of, but did refer to it indirectly in Florida’s coming out speech as an extension of, not a departure from, regime change policy embarked upon during Clinton’s presidency. I don’t expect Bush supporters to care, but when will someone ask Kofi Annan to clarify who was privy to the real story behind the misinformation used to justify that policy decision? I digress.
One would think an editorial writer at the LA Times would at least be hesitant to describe the recent coup in Haiti and years of US economic and political maneuverings there as humanitarian intervention unless of course they were a revisionist. To claim our interventions in East Timor were humanitarian is an insult. Somalia was hardly something Clinton initiated but how can one overlook that he was charged with wrongly applying a military solution to a political problem, a decision that left a bloodbath in the wake of whatever humanitarian objective may have existed. I’m surprised he didn’t toss in Colombia as well.
Additionally, the article fails to mention that bases exist today in Kosovo and Bosnia, built under the auspices of international peacekeeping, and doesn’t bother to explore their effectiveness even while Kosovo is suffering a resurgence in ethnic violence.
According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire:
p.155: There are some major discrepancies between the BSR and the Manpower Report that are not easily explained. To give one important example, the BSR for September 2001 does not have any entries for Bosnia-Herzegovina or for Yugoslavia, Serbia, or Kosovo. The Manpower Report for the same month gives 3,100 for the number of army troops in Bosnia and 5,675 for the number of army troops in the Serbian province of Kosovo. It is possible that Camp Eagle in Bosnia (built in 1995-96) and Camps Bondsteel and Monteith in Kosovo (both of which went up in 1999) were omitted intentionally in order to disguise their purpose-of protecting oil pipelines rather than contributing to international peacekeeping operations.
In fact, if you read at least the chapter The Empire of Bases in Johnson’s book, whose C-Span Book TV interview is being rebroadcast tonight [3/20-3/22], you’ll easily recognise that humanitarian intervention is hardly an accurate description for what’s taken place over the years no matter which party’s been in control.
Heilbrunn characterises DeLay’s condemnations of Clinton’s foreign policy decisions as the grumblings of a man who opposed humanitarian intervention as if DeLay was then one of the realists Heilbrunn writes [he names one] are now unhappy with neoconservative nation-building influence on the current administration. Considering DeLay continues to wield one of the biggest sticks in defense of every one of George’s interventionist policies, especially if they buttress his own long-held, fervent support of Israel, I find this assessment to be, at best, in the realm of wishful thinking.
Excerpted from Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire:
pp.145-146: Kosovo’s Camp Bondsteel, a Brown & Root product, is a spooky place, surrounded by a 2.5-meter-high earthen berm and nine wooden guard towers. All trees in the area have been removed to provide open fields of fire. Dominated by a mass of communication antennae, satellite dishes, and hovering attack helicopters, it has a six-mile perimeter and seems too large and permanent an installation merely to meet the requirements of peacekeeping in southern Serbia, a mission that President Clinton asserted would last no longer than six months and that George Bush said in his election campaign he wished to eliminate. More likely, Camp Bondsteel is intended to play a role in a grand strategy to secure for us Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil supplies and to control oil going to other countries.Camp Bondsteel is actually located astride the route of the proposed AMBO (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria Oil) Trans-Balkan pipeline. This $1.3 billion project, if built, will pump Caspian Basin oil brought by tanker from a pipeline terminus in Georgia across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian oil port at Burgas, where it will be piped through Macedonia to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. From there, supertankers would take it to Europe and the United States, thus bypassing the congested Bosporous Strait-as of now the only route out of the Black Sea by ship-where tankers are restricted to 150,000 tons. The initial feasibility study for the AMBO pipeline was done in 1995 by Brown & Root, which updated it in 1999. Bondsteel appears to be a base camp for what the University of Texas political scientist James K. Galbraith has called the “military-petroleum complex,” of which Dick Cheney is assuredly a godfather.
The Republican party hasn’t been forced to adopt a new vision since 9/11, as Heilbrunn contends, it willingly signed on when in 2000 it supported George W. Bush and his cronies, who’ve been up to their necks in this business for years.
If they didn’t know it then, what’s their excuse now?