Amerika – dat komt vaker voor – is een
grootmacht die zich moet consolideren. Die had een hele sterke plek in de
wereld en dat wordt minder. Het is helemaal niet verval, maar het komt op zijn
eigen plek terecht. Een beetje zoals het rond 1940 was, nog steeds een
grootmacht. Onder Obama kunnen Amerikanen daar meer aan gaan wennen dan onder
Romney.
Geert Mak, op de EO-Radio,
6 november 2012
Internationally, the world is going through
huge changes, but we are perfectly poised to make the 21st century
again the American Century.
Barack Obama, March 11, 2011
Deze voorspellingen klinkten categorisch, hoopvol en geruststellend.
Haaks hierop staan de analyses van kritische Amerikaanse intellectuelen zoals
bijvoorbeeld de Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘professor of international relations at Boston
University and a retired career officer
in the United States
Army.’ Als samensteller van de bundel
The Short American Century. A Postmortem
stelt hij het volgende:
To doubt the feasibility of
America’s remdemptive mission – to allow that the American Century has never
quite lived up to expectations (or worse still, that it never existed in the
first place) – would be, in effect, to concede that American Exceptionalism is
an illusion or an outright fraud. To declare the American Century defunct would
be tantamount to lumping the United States among all of the other powers that
have paraded across history’s pages purporting to erect a new order for the
ages before falling short of that goal.
Daarom getuigt Mak’s advies dat de VS ‘van
een dominante wereldmacht weer het ‘gewone’ land moeten worden dat het tot 1940
was’ van een gebrek aan inzicht. De
mainstream beseft niet wat achter de façade schuilgaat, wat de VS altijd
gemotiveerd heeft, wat de functie van het exceptionalisme al die eeuwen is
geweest. Laat ik het concreet maken. Als het geloof in het
‘exceptionalisme,’ de woorden zijn van Mak, ‘de diepe
overtuiging dat Amerika een speciaal door God uitverkoren en gezegend land is’ wegvalt,
dan bestaat er geen rechtvaardiging meer voor de genocide van de indianen,
het vermoorden van miljoenen Zuidoost-Aziaten, het ten val brengen van
democratische regeringen in bijvoorbeeld Guatemala, Congo en Iran, het
grootscheepse geweld tegen bijvoorbeeld Irak en Aghanistan en de Amerikaanse
steun aan doodseskaders overal ter wereld. Als de Amerikaanse elite zou toegeven dat ‘de Amerikaanse normen en
waarden' geenszins 'universeel zijn, en dat ieder mens volgens die waarden hoort te denken,’ maar al die tijd verzinsels waren om de hegemonie in de wereld te rechtvaardigen,
dan zouden de beleidsbepalers in Washington onderstrepen dat ze met geen haar verschillen van de nazi’s. Dat
begrijpt de mainstream niet, deze realiteit past niet in zijn simplistische
voorstelling van zaken. Wanneer de
legitimering van het Amerikaans geweld, de grootscheepse terreur tegen
burgerbevolkingen, wegvalt, hoe rechtvaardigt het imperium zich dan nog in de
toekomst om andere landen te dwingen de belangen van de Amerikaanse elite te
gehoorzamen? Dan zou ook niet meer te ontkennen zijn dat de NAVO als een
terroristische organisatie opereert, zoals een ‘career officer’ als Bacevich maar al te goed beseft. Zonder
het bloedvergieten van ook burgers had de VS veel meer moeite gehad de Tweede Wereldoorlog te winnen. Bacevich:
in its aerial bombing campaign
directed against German and Japanese cities, the United States engaged in the
conscious, intentional, wholesale slaughter of noncombatants. In the aftermath
of the European war, the victorious allies collaborated in enforcing a massive
involuntary transfer of populations, that is, a policy of ethnic cleansing.
When they found it expedient to do so, U.S. officials allowed Nazi war
criminals – rocket scientists, for example, and intelligence officials – to
escape justice and to enter the service of the United States. Then there is
this: at no time prior to or during the war did the United States any
substantive effort to prevent or even disrupt the Nazi persecution of Jews that
culminated in the ‘final solution.’ In Washington the fate of European Jewry
never figured as more than an afterthought. As much or more than the promotion
of American ideals – that ‘sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our
Declaration of Independence, [and] our Constitution’ that Luce (uitgever van Time
en Life. svh) dearly hoped to see – these choices and decisions, along with the
priorities they reflect, laid the basis for the interval of American primacy
that followed.
Het
is dus een farce te spreken van ‘de diepe overtuiging’ onder de
politieke elite in Washington ‘dat de Amerikaanse normen en waarden
universeel zijn.’ In de praktijk handelt de VS als elk ander imperium
in de geschiedenis: meedogenloos, in dit geval door samen te werken met nazi’s
en door het plegen van oorlogsmisdaden als het massaal bombarderen van wat
officieel heet ‘non-combattanten.’ Intussen wordt de ‘Disneyfication’
van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, gevolgd door
the Disneyfication of the Cold
War, reduced in popular imagination and the halls of Congress to Ronald Reagan
demanding ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ […] Facts that complicate this
story – assassination plots, dirty tricks gone awry, cozy relations with
corrupt dictators – provide endless fodder for scholarly articles and books but
ultimately get filed under the heading of things that don’t really matter.
Professor
Bacevich wijst er tevens op dat de mainstream versie niet alleen contraproductief is, maar
ook levensgevaarlijk.
The problem for the United States
today is that sanitizing history no longer serves U.S. interests. Instead, it blinds Americans to the
challenges that they confront. Self-serving mendacities – that the attacks of
Sptember 11, 2001, rising those of December 7, 1941 ‘came out of nowhere’ to
strike an innocent nation -- don’t
enhance the safety and well-being of the Amedrican people. If anything, the
reverse is true. […] Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the revival of waterboarding and
other forms of torture, and the policy of so-called extraordinary rendition
have left the ‘incandescent moral clarity'; that some observers attributed to
U.S. policy after 9/11 more than a little worse for wear.
To further indulge old illusions of the United
States of the United States presiding over and directing the course of history
will not impede the ability of Americans to understand the world and themselves
but may well pose a positive danger to both. Faced with a reality that includes,
within the last decade alone,
. an inability to anticipate, whether the
events of 9/11, the consequences of invading Iraq, or revolutionary upheaval in
Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world;
. an inability to control, with wars begun in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, along with various and sundry financial
scandals, economic crises, and natural disasters, exposing the limits of
American influence, power, and perspicacity;
. an inability to afford, as manifested by a
badly overstretched military, trillion dollar annual deficits, increasingly
unaffordable entitlement programs, and rapidly escalating foreign debt;
. an inability to respond, demonstrated by the
disfunction pervading the American political system, especially at the national
level, whether in Congress, at senior levels of the executive branch, or in the
bureaucracy; and
. an inability to comprehend what God intends
or the human heart desires, with litlle to indicate that the wonders of the
information age, however dazzling, the impact of globalization, however
far reaching, or the forces of corporate capitalism, however relentless, will
provide answers to such elusive questions…
We hebben dus wel degelijk te maken met een imperium in verval. Zowel
het buitenlandse als binnenlandse beleid is failliet. Bernie Sanders, de onafhankelijke
senator van Vermont verklaarde op 9 januari 2013 dat wat betreft de situatie in
de VS zelf ‘the rich are becoming much richer while the middle class
collapses’ en ‘the
number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high…’ Sanders:
In America today, we have the
most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth,
and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns
42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom
60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart,
owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income
distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent
earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the
remaining 7 percent. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/the-soul-of-america_b_2439576.html
Vanuit
dit perspectief gezien is de vraag gerechtvaardigd wat
we nu precies ‘in Europa van ze kunnen leren,’ vooral ook als we
weten dat
many researchers have reached a
conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less
economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The
mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season
of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center
stage.
Met het oog op de fundamentele problemen waarmee het imperium kampt
getuigen de opmerkingen van Obama en onze opiniemakers geenszins van enige inzicht:
Internationally, the world is going through
huge changes, but we are perfectly poised to make the 21st century
again the American Century.
Barack Obama, March 11, 2011
Het is beter
voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.
Geert Mak. EO Radio, 6 november 2012.
In tegenstelling tot
wat de Nederlandse mainstream denkt, is ook Obama uit op de bestendiging van
de Amerikaanse hegemonie, dat wil zeggen, zo nodig met geweld, vandaar dat de
militaire uitgaven ook onder de huidige Amerikaanse president bleven stijgen.
Daarom laat ik opnieuw kritische Amerikaanse onderzoekers aan het woord.
Allereerst de gezaghebbende hoogleraar, Michael Klare.
Is
Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney?
Four
Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy.
As details of his administration’s global war against
terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a
war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected
assassinations -- President Obama has been compared to President George
W. Bush in his appetite for military action. “As shown through his
stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries
of state,wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has
become George W. Bush on steroids.”
When it comes to
international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president,
Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As
recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie
likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics
of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the
major powers.
Michael T. Klare is a
professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author most
recently ofThe Race for What’s
Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (Metropolitan
Books). To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Klare discusses imperial geopolitics as the default mode for Washington since
1945, click here or download it to
your iPod here.
Een andere, goed
geinformeerde bron is de Amerikaanse journalist Nick Turse. Hij schreef het
volgende:
Under President Obama,
the U.S. has expanded or launched numerous military campaigns -- most of them
utilizing a mix of the six elements of twenty-first-century American war.
Take the American war in Pakistan -- a poster-child for what might now be
called the Obama formula, if not doctrine. Beginning as a highly-circumscribed drone assassination
campaign backed by limited cross-border commando raids under the
Bush administration, U.S. operations in Pakistan have expanded into something
close to a full-scale robotic air war, complemented by cross-border helicopter attacks, CIA-funded “kill teams” of Afghan proxy forces,
as well as boots-on-the-ground missions by elite special
operations forces, including the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin
Laden.
The CIA has conducted
clandestine intelligence and surveillance missions in Pakistan, too, though
its role may, in the future, be less important, thanks to Pentagon mission
creep. In April, in fact, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the creation of a new
CIA-like espionage agency within the Pentagon called the Defense Clandestine
Service. According to the Washington
Post, its aim is to expand “the military’s espionage efforts beyond war
zones.”
Over the last decade, the
very notion of war zones has become remarkably muddled, mirroring the blurring
of the missions and activities of the CIA and Pentagon. Analyzing the new
agency and the “broader convergence trend” between Department of Defense and
CIA missions, the Post noted that the “blurring
is also evident in the organizations’ upper ranks. Panetta previously served as
CIA director, and that post is currently held by retired four-star Army Gen.
David H. Petraeus.”
Not to be outdone, last
year the State Department, once the seat of diplomacy, continued on its long march to
militarization (and marginalization) when it agreed to pool some of its
resources with the Pentagon to create the Global Security
Contingency Fund. That program will allow the Defense Department even
greater say in how aid from Washington will flow to proxy forces in places like
Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
One thing is certain:
American war-making (along with its spies and its diplomats) is heading ever
deeper into “the shadows.” Expect yet more clandestine operations in ever
more places with, of course, ever more potential for blowback in the years
ahead.
Shedding Light on 'the Dark Continent'
One locale likely to see
an influx of Pentagon spies in the coming years is Africa. Under President
Obama, operations on the continent have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years. Last year’s war
in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean
archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting
regional operations; a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against
militants in Somalia, including intelligence operations, training for Somali
agents, secret prisons, helicopter attacks, and U.S. commando raids; a massive influx of
cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly
in the region using manned aircraft; tens of millions of dollars in arms for
allied mercenaries and African troops; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department
experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army
leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders, operating in Uganda, South Sudan,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African
Republic (where U.S. Special Forces now have a new base) only begins to scratch
the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.
Even less well known are
other U.S. military efforts designed to train African forces for operations now
considered integral to American interests on the continent. These
include, for example, a mission by elite Force Recon Marines from the Special
Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12) to train soldiers from the
Uganda People's Defense Force, which supplies the majority of troops to the
African Union Mission in Somalia.
Earlier this year,
Marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense
Force, the second-largest contingent in Somalia; sent trainers into Djibouti
(where the U.S. already maintains a major Horn of Africa base at Camp Lemonier);
and traveled to Liberia where they focused on teaching riot-control techniques
to Liberia’s military as part of an otherwise State Department spearheaded
effort to rebuild that force.
The U.S. is also conducting counterterrorism
training and equipping militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania,
Niger, and Tunisia. In addition, U.S. Africa Command (Africom) has 14
major joint-training exercises planned for 2012, including operations in
Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and what
may become the Pakistan of Africa, Nigeria.
Even this, however,
doesn’t encompass the full breadth of U.S. training and advising missions in
Africa. To take an example not on Africom’s list, this spring the U.S.
brought together 11 nations, including Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Liberia,
Mauritania, and Sierra Leone to take part in a maritime training exercise
code-named Saharan Express 2012.
Nick Turse is the
associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his
work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author/editor
of several books, including the just published Terminator Planet: The
First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt). This piece is
the latest article in his new series on the changing face of
American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can follow
him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook.
Het is beter
voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.
Geert Mak. EO Radio, 6 november 2012.
Morgen meer daarover.
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