Obama projects Pacific power

What's the real story behind Washington sending a bunch of marines to Australia? Pepe Escobar Last Modified: 22 Nov 2011 10:30

US Marines being dispatched to station in northern Australia are meant to symbolise a new focus on the Pacific  [Getty] "The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay." That was US President Barack Obama, in his current Asia-Pacific swing, addressing the Australian Parliament. One would expect a Pacific/peaceful power to promote, well, diplomacy and peace. Not really. Not when the key scriptwriters of the President's offensive - "turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific" - come from the Pentagon. Washington may not be on the verge of an Occupy Australia gambit - but one's got to start somewhere. The start is 250 US Marines deployed as part of an Air-Ground Task Force to bases in Australia's Northern Territory, including Darwin - which is a stone's throw from Indonesia, and thus, Southeast Asia. US Air Force fighter jets will also be in the house, with the Marines on six-month tours starting in the summer of 2012 up to an eventual rotation of 2,500 troops. Then comes the whopper. The marines will be conducting war games on Australian soil "out of the reach of Chinese ballistic missiles". And no one told an unsuspecting world that Beijing was about to establish a unilateral no-fly zone to conduct "humanitarian" bombing Down Under. Here's the scene The hardly subtle Obama spin is that China must "play by the rules of the road", and stop its "military advances". This Washington narrative implies a benign superpower - the US - intervening to protect an Asia under siege. Reality tells a completely different story; the "rules" - imposed by the US - assume that Washington has the right to (aggressively) police the whole planet. Beijing, for its part, is planning, long-term, how to defend its multiple national security interests in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. No less than 85 per cent of China's imported oil and gas travels across the Indian Ocean, through the extremely sensitive Malacca Strait, towards China's ports in the Pacific. Sure, China is investing heavily in Pipelineistan from Central Asia and from Siberia and is increasing energy imports from Africa. Still, two of China's three top energy sources are Saudi Arabia and Iran (the other one is Angola). This means China needs to build its own defence/protection mechanisms for an immense merchant fleet plying the Indian Ocean - and the Western Pacific. It's an utmost matter of national security. To rely on the US Navy to defend Chinese national interests would be suicidal. The junction of the Indian Ocean with the Western Pacific - where the South China Sea meets the Java Sea - is, for Beijing, the holy of the holies. That's the bottleneck its energy imports coming from the Middle East and Africa must imperatively negotiate. And that converges with a wealth of untapped oil in the South China Sea that Beijing plans to exploit. Here's the agenda Now imagine if Beijing decided to set up a base, say, in Catalina Island off the coast of California, or even in Hawaii, to patrol the Eastern Pacific. None of this warmongering, though, is new. Not only the map, but the figures tell the story. Almost 90 per cent of world trade and almost 70 per cent of oil travel by sea. Half of all the world's shipping container traffic crosses the Indian Ocean. And from the Middle East to the Pacific, 70 per cent of all global oil trade flows through the Indian Ocean. The US Navy 2007 maritime strategy calls for a "sustained presence" in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. The US Marine Corps 2008 "Vision and Strategy" programme - which goes all the way to 2025 - stresses the Indian Ocean and environs will be a major area of conflict. So when Obama said the US is a Pacific power, he also meant that the Pentagon wants to be not only that, but also the top South Asian power. Forever. For all practical purposes the Pentagon has extended its self-described "arc of instability" to the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. To top it off, it's gaming a new strategy, called AirSea Battle - which assumes that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) will "deny access" to US naval power in all the seas surrounding China. "Imagine if Beijing decided to set up a base, say, in Catalina Island off the coast of California, or even in Hawaii, to patrol the Eastern Pacific." This suggests the Pentagon will try to prevent - or at least intimidate - China in its quest for the untapped wealth of oil and minerals in the South China Sea. Reposition me, babe So it starts with 250 US Marines. Just like in Uganda it starts with a few Special Forces. That's how it started in Vietnam in the early 1960s. And still the US keeps over 40,000 troops in Japan and over 28,000 in South Korea - decades after the (war) facts. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin, in a masterpiece of understatement, said the new US move "deserves to be debated". Now this is how Beijing really sees it - as well as dozens of countries part of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The Pentagon calls it "repositioning". It's the warlike equivalent of the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. We take you from Iraq or AfPak and we ship to you Africa or Australia. The cover story - sold by a compliant corporate media - is that the US is repositioning itself as "a leader on both economics and security in the fast-developing Asia-Pacific". Pentagonism, as applied to Asia-Pacific, is an extension of the Pentagon's Long War - which has been the "soft" denomination of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) since 2001. See it as Global War Inc. And the new locations of choice are Africa (from Libya to Central Africa) and Asia-Pacific. Washington's wars in Iraq and Libya offered mixed results. Iraq was a defeat of historical proportions - and China in the end was not locked out of the oil (on the contrary). Libya - for the moment - is a "victory", with China virtually locked out of any new oil and gas contracts. Now not only the Pentagon has launched a Cold War against Chinese commercial interests in Africa, it's encroaching on China's own maritime backyard. And by inverting all the rules of logic - posing as the usual, non-threatening benign outside power. Obama said explicitly that if Beijing does not respect "international rules", the US "will send a clear message to them that we think that they need to be on track in terms of accepting the rules and responsibilities that come with being a world power." Translation of this "clear message": "Occupy Australia" is just the beginning. There's no business like (expanding) Pentagon business. Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111121134858987329.html

The West's tragedy of capital

While Rome burns citizens should not fiddle, but believe another world may be possible and work together for that world. Pepe Escobar

 The one per cent's counter-revolution against protests has begun, and 'it will be beyond ruthless' [GALLO/GETTY] Here's a crash course on global finance 2.0. The debt is in the Atlanticist, wealthy North. The resources are in the global South. And the (reluctant) supreme banker of the last resort is the Middle Kingdom, as personified by the Almighty Hu (Jintao).

The name of the game - Marx revisited by Occupy the World - is class struggle. It's casino capitalism, aka finance turbo-neoliberalism, as practiced by a liquid modernity elite of one per cent, versus the have-a-little-something, have-nots and have-nothing, aka the 99 per cent. There could not be a more graphic demonstration than last week's Greek tragedy takeover of the Cannes debt festival of Slavoj Zizek's thesis that the marriage of capitalism and democracy is over.

If there is something capable of terminally terrorising the European Union (EU) oligarchy it is the concept of a popular referendum. How dare you consult the "rabble" about our Austerity Forever policy, the only one capable of satisfying the financial markets! This is enough to make unelected zombies such as European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi (formerly vice-president of Goldman Sachs International), European Council President Herman van Rompuy (member of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg club) and European Commission (EC) head Joao Manuel Barroso to dream of a drone-heavy, Special Forces-filled, NATO no-fly zone to enforce their will.

 Surrender or else The made in Frankfurt ECB screenplay is brought to you by the TINA ("there is no alternative") school. The dull, monochromatic action predictably mixes savage privatisations with social devastation. "Democratic" Europe functions just like in good old Brezhnev times; a troika - IMF, ECB, UE - exercising totalitarian rule, even if in a shambolic way. "'Merkozy' - that mongrel/robotic cross-pollination... can only emit a baleful cry: 'Coon ... traaaact'." "Merkozy" - that mongrel/robotic cross-pollination of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel and neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy - can emit only a baleful cry: "Coon .... traaact". "Coon ... traaaact" - as in EU-prescribed endless monetary and fiscal contraction.
 It doesn't matter that Italy has a primary surplus. It doesn't matter that Italy's combined private and public debt is 250 per cent of its GDP - much lower than France, the UK, the US and Japan. Italy is now under the volcano because the EU "Cooon ... traaact" monster has thrown it into recession. And regime change won't make it any less different. No wonder the top candidate for succeeding Prime Minister Silvio "bunga bunga" Berlusconi is Mario Monti; a former top director at the EC, European president of the Trilateral Commission and a member of the Bilderberg group. Yet another quintessential one per cent luminary. "Europe" - as in a sub-sect of Franco-German oligarchies - thought the eurozone could be saved by the Orwellian-named European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). But now even that blob - which is nothing but a bunch of "guarantees" lavished on a shell company in Luxembourg - is about to be devoured by the Supreme Zombie, the God of the Market. So a monster bailout fund set up as a Goldman Sachs-style racket now risks being in dire need of a bailout itself. You can't make this stuff up - even in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, the IMF's bag lady, the sartorially irreprehensible Christine Lagarde, is currently hitting BRICS members Russia and China for some pocket money. But Madame Lagarde, mired in soliloquy with her Dior buttons, knows very well this won't fly, and it won't be enough to "save" the model the IMF, the ECB and "Merkozy" insist on applying. Look South, young man The global indignados - from Greece and Spain to the US and beyond - at least are very much aware of the one per cent's machinations. As in learning about the astonishing performance of Goldman Sachs' commodities index - the top traded across the world. This quintessential one per cent index doubles and even triples the cost of wheat, rice and corn, thus plunging hundreds of millions among the 99 per cent across the globe into terminal hunger. How not to think that another world must be possible? The only solution to the recession the one per cent can come up with is austerity for the 99 per cent [GALLO/GETTY] The Occupy the World 99 per cent are dreamers in a very May 1968 sense - "be realist, demand the impossible". Dreamers in a refreshingly horizontal - not vertical or pyramidal - way. They want to rescue politics - when politicians have lost all legitimacy - as a debate of ideas, not egos or ideology. The pathetic G20 farce last week showed once again they're right. They want a Republic of common sense. They want a popular assembly in every neighbourhood and every village. Against money as a moral value and casino finance as an irate God, they want to rescue the power of collective intelligence. What they need now is to reach critical mass all across the world.

In a sense, it's as if there's been a collective reading of Albert Camus's The Rebel, published six decades ago. The one per cent of the time very much despised what they saw as a little Algerian, son of a domestic worker and without a diploma, posing as a philosopher. But way before the Google and Twitter generation Camus showed how revolt inevitably migrates from the individual to a collective response, enshrined in his beautiful formulation "I revolt, therefore we are". Yet make no mistake. Turbo-capital's one per cent counter-revolution is already on - and it will be beyond ruthless. History shows that every crisis of capitalism is "solved" by outright repression. What's pressing is the search for effective strategies. This includes everything from calls for a general strike to the debate preceding the creation of new political groups. We are all responsible South America, which has outlived torrents of IMF's dreadful "structural adjustments" and is now slowly forging its integration and independence, always denied by the neocolonial one per cent and their local satraps, can be quite helpful.

In a very enlightening discussion with leaders of the Brazilian MST - the Landless Peasant Movement, one of the most important social movements in the world - they explained to me how they have adjusted from fighting for an agrarian reform to fighting a much more nuanced battle against the current, powerful transnational agro-business interests who have forged an intricate alliance with the Lula government. "[For the] irresponsible citizenship... the exercise of political rights is just a ceremony of renouncing political will." - Alvaro Garcia Linera This shows how even a broad social movement with an enormous popular base has to be constantly calibrating its strategic struggle. On a parallel front, there must be an urgent English translation of La Potencia Plebeya ("The Plebeian Power"), a collection of essays by Bolivian vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera, one of the most crucial intellectuals at work in Latin America. Linera essentially charges how the one per cent and its minions have "sold" the concept of public interest as a separate sphere of civil society. And how civil society can only exist as political if subordinated to mediators or political priests. This, Linera argues, is an archaism that goes back to Hobbes and Montesquieu. And the 99 per cent should be aware of it - and fight it. Linera coins the concept of "irresponsible citizenship" to describe the discombobulated voting masses under the spell of a neoliberal farce. For the "irresponsible citizenship", the "exercise of political rights is just a ceremony of renouncing political will, and will to govern, to place it in the hands of a new caste of private proprietors of politics, which attribute to themselves the knowledge of sophisticated and impenetrable techniques of ruling and governing". So the crucial fight is against these "private proprietors of politics" - and their one per cent masters, be it in Cairo or Manhattan, Madrid or Lahore. G20? Forget it; it's more like G7 billion. If we are truly indignados towards a system that must be toppled, we are all responsible.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

source//// al jazeera