#72: World Politics/USA:------------
EU? 'The Problem With Europe' Jun17,08 http://tinyurl.com/3g9o8g
USA: 'Ron Paul to End Campaign, Launches New Effort: Supporters Plot Shadow Convention, More Revolution' Z. BYRON WOLF: Jun12,08 http://tinyurl.com/6aoua4
: "" Rep. Ron Paul's presidential campaign, a pugnacious, ideological crusade against big government and interventionist leanings in the Republican party, will officially end Thursday at a rally outside the Texas GOP's convention, ABC News has learned. "
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'Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment' Gore Vidal: Jun12,08 http://tinyurl.com/4kzxaw
: "" On June 9,2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.
I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment — he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials — we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it. "
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'House Waves Off Impeachment Measure Against Bush' Laurie Kellman: jun12,08 http://tinyurl.com/3lg7ra
: "" The House has voted to send articles of impeachment against President Bush to a committee that is not likely to hold hearings before the end of his term.
By 251-166, House members dispatched the measure to a committee on Wednesday - a procedure often used to kill legislation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi long ago declared the prospects for impeachment proceedings “off the table.” "
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'It’s Conyers’s Time to Act on Impeachment' Pub. Jun15,08 by The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild editor: http://tinyurl.com/4flwpj
: " Dennis Kucinich is saying exactly what you were saying before you became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "
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-1) Japan, Israel, UK: -------------
(1) Japan & S. Korea, even S. Sakhalin:
Sakhalin Online, posted Jun17,08 http://online.sakh.com/en/
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' 「白樺」の主権強調 ガス田合意で中国' The Sankei Shimbun & Sankei Digital Jun17,08
http://tinyurl.com/62fvuo
2008.6.17 23:24 
東シナ海の天然ガス田「白樺」（中国名・春暁）＝０５年９月、海上自衛隊のＰ３Ｃ哨戒機から 中国外務省の姜瑜副報道局長は１７日の定例記者会見で、日中両政府が近く正式合意、発表する見通しの東シナ海ガス田 共同開発について「中国の立場と主張は一貫している。春暁（日本名・白樺）ガス田は中国主権の範囲内にある」と述べ、日中両国が共同開発対象とした「白 樺」ガス田の主権はあくまで中国側にあるとの立場を強調した。
姜副局長は、同ガス田の主権問題と「共同開発問題とは無関係」と主張。中国側が単独開発してきた「白樺」の共同開発に応じても、原則論をめぐっては日本に譲歩していないことをアピールした。
日本が中国との排他的経済水域（ＥＥＺ）の境界線と位置付けている日中中間線についても「認めない立場に変わりはない」と述べた。
一方で副局長は「（日中ガス田協議の）結果は双方にとって利益があるものになるだろう」とも強調。共同開発の早期実施に期待感を示した。（共同）
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'
尖閣問題で日本の対応批判 中国' The Sankei Shimbun & Sankei Digital Jun17,08
http://tinyurl.com/5mn8a8
【北京＝野口東秀】中国外務省の姜瑜報道官は１７日、定例記者会見で、「日本政府に釣魚島付近の海域での違法活動を停止し、類似事件の再発防止を要求する」と日本の対応を改めて批判、台湾擁護の姿勢を示した。
１７日付の中国共産党機関紙「人民日報」（海外版）は、この問題で「台湾民衆が強く日本を責めている」とする記事を掲載。「悪意ある衝突」「厳正な抗議」「共同で同島を守る」などといった見出しをつけている。
インターネットでは、中台が連携して対処すべきだとの声が多く、「先祖の遺志を継いで日本鬼子（日本人への蔑称（べつしよう））を追い出せ」「中国海軍を派遣せよ」「国共合作。台湾を孤立させるな」などといった書き込みが目立つ。
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'釣魚台群島：駐日美軍演習場' Jun16,08 http://tinyurl.com/5r9kpm
: " 我們是在爭「釣魚島」，還是「釣魚台群島」？參考：http://blog.yam.com/dili/article/5442557
: " 政治鬥爭，也要注重研發時時更新，不要把民眾當傻瓜，白白詐取財物（稅金）。
釣魚台群島（的赤尾嶼與黃尾嶼），是駐日美軍（海空軍）的演習場。
這是源自戰後美軍對於沖繩的佔領，並於1951年9月8日每日簽署的第一版〈美日安保條約〉之授權，以及1972年「沖繩返還」之再確認所獲得之權力。 "
'管内 在日アメリカ合衆国軍 海上訓練区域一覧表' Aug,07=平成１９年８月現在 http://tinyurl.com/5q6k7c
〈聯合國國際海洋公約〉「第三節 領海的無害通過」（II）' Jun16,08 http://tinyurl.com/5qf92j
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0) Middle East:
'“HUMAN CARGO”: BINYAM MOHAMED AND THE RENDITION FREQUENT FLIER PROGRAMME' Jun10,08 http://tinyurl.com/6dvnzp
: " From Goldhawk Road to Guantánamo Bay: Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Odyssey "
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' Ghost ships: America's 'floating prisons' are not only illegal, but evidence of the limitless scale of US detention policy ' Shayana Kadidal, guardian.co.uk: Jun5,08 http://tinyurl.com/6nd8r7
: "" This week the Guardian broke the news that an upcoming report from Reprieve – our counterparts across the pond in the Guantánamo litigation – documents the use of as many as 17 American warships as floating prisons to hold detainees in the "war on terror". The report apparently documents not only descriptions of detentions at sea from released Guantánamo detainees, most of whom presumably were held in the early days of the "war on terror", but also more recent detentions on US warships, particularly in the Horn of Africa, a current hot spot for disappearances carried out by the US military and intelligence agencies. The report also claims that in the last two years there have been several hundred renditions – another practice thought to have ceased after President Bush declared an end to it in 2006. "
'
War Crimes Committed and Justice Denied' Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.)
Pub. Jun18,08 by Physicians for Human Rights http://tinyurl.com/43ghoc
The fllowing is the preface written for the report, Broken Laws, Broken Lives
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'Bush Pledges on Iraq Bases Pact Were a Ruse' Jun13,08 http://tinyurl.com/5jkd4n
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'‘Hotline to Iran’ Aims to Head Off War' Jun11,08 http://tinyurl.com/42885p
: "" WASHINGTON - Members of Congress joined religious and civil society leaders today in an urgent call to stop the “drumbeat of war” with Iran and open up diplomatic talks to resolve growing tensions between Washington and Tehran. "
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'Incident Foreshadows Future Attacks in Pakistan' Jun12,08 http://tinyurl.com/4fow45
'A Line Not To Be Crossed: American-led War on Terror Cannot be Allowed to Spread Into Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Area' Eric Margolis, The Toronto Sun: Jun15,08 http://tinyurl.com/6c6l7w
"" The killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers by U.S. air and artillery strikes last week shows just how quickly the American-led war in Afghanistan is spreading into neighbouring Pakistan.
Pakistan’s military branded the air attack “unprovoked and cowardly.” There was outrage across Pakistan. However, the unstable government in Islamabad, which depends on large infusions of U.S. aid, later softened its protests.
The U.S., which used a B-1 heavy bomber and F-15 strike aircraft in the attacks, called its action, “self-defence.”
This latest U.S. attack on Pakistan could not come at a worse time. Supreme Court justices ousted by the Pervez Musharraf dictatorship staged national protests this week, underscoring the illegality of Musharraf’s continuing presidency and its unseemly support by the U.S., Britain, Canada and France. Asif Zardari, head of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, shamefully joined Musharraf in opposing restoration of the justice system out of fear the reinstated judges would reopen long-festering corruption charges against him
Attacks by U.S. aircraft, Predator hunter-killer drones, U.S. Special Forces and CIA teams have been rising steadily inside Pakistan’s autonomous Pashtun tribal area known by the acronym, FATA. The Pashtun, who make up half Afghanistan’s population and 15% of Pakistan’s, straddle the border, which they reject as a leftover of Imperial Britain’s divide and rule policies.
Instead of intimidating the pro-Taliban Pakistani Pashtun, U.S. air and artillery strikes have ignited a firestorm of anti-western fury among FATA’s warlike tribesmen and increased their support for the Taliban.
The U.S. is emulating Britain’s colonial divide and rule tactics by offering up to $500,000 to local Pashtun tribal leaders to get them to fight pro-Taliban elements, causing more chaos in the already turbulent region, and stoking tribal rivalries. The U.S. is using this same tactic in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This week’s deadly U.S. attacks again illustrate the fact that the 60,000 U.S. and NATO ground troops in Afghanistan are incapable of holding off the Taliban and its allies, even though the Afghan resistance has nothing but small arms to battle the West’s hi-tech arsenal. U.S. air power is almost always called in when there are clashes.
In fact, the main function for U.S. and NATO infantries is to draw the Taliban into battle so the Afghan “mujahidin” can be bombed from the air. Without 24/7 U.S. airpower, which can respond in minutes, western forces in Afghanistan would be quickly isolated, cut off from supplies, and defeated.
But these air strikes, as we saw this week, are blunt instruments in spite of all the remarkable skill of the U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots. They kill more civilians than Taliban fighters. Mighty U.S. B-1 bombers are not going to win the hearts and minds of Afghans. Each bombed village and massacred caravan wins new recruits to the Taliban and its allies.
OPEN WARFARE
The U.S. and its allies are edging into open warfare against Pakistan. The western occupation army in Afghanistan is unable to defeat Taliban fighters due to its lack of combat troops. The outgoing supreme commander, U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, recently admitted he would need 400,000 soldiers to pacify Afghanistan.
Unable to win in Afghanistan, the frustrated western powers are turning on Pakistan, a nation of 165 million. Pakistanis are bitterly opposed to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and their nation’s subjugation to U.S. policy under dictator Musharraf.
“We just need to occupy Pakistan’s tribal territory,” insists the Pentagon, “to stop its Pashtun tribes from supporting and sheltering Taliban.” But a U.S.-led invasion of FATA simply will push pro-Taliban Pashtun militants deeper into Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, drawing western troops ever deeper into Pakistan. Already overextended, western forces will be stretched even thinner and clashes with Pakistan’s tough regular army may be inevitable.
Widening the Afghan War into Pakistan is military stupidity on a grand scale, and political madness. But Washington and its obedient allies seem hell-bent on charging into a wider regional war that no number of heavy bombers will win.
Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. ""
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1) Latin America:
'Losing Latin America: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?' Greg Grandin Jun9,08 http://tinyurl.com/5p7p2k
: ...
" Latin America, in fact, has been indispensable in the evolution of U.S. diplomacy. The region is often referred to as America’s “backyard,” but a better metaphor might be Washington’s “strategic reserve,” the place where ascendant foreign-policy coalitions regroup and redraw the outlines of U.S. power, following moments of global crisis. "
" We are once again at a historic crossroads. An ebbing of U.S. power — this time caused, in part, by military overreach — faces a mobilized Latin America; and, on the eve of regime change at home, with George W. Bush’s neoconservative coalition in ruins after eight years of disastrous rule, would-be foreign policy makers are once again looking south.
Goodbye to All That
“The era of the United States as the dominant influence in Latin America is over,” says the Council on Foreign Relations, in a new report filled with sober policy suggestions for ways the U.S. can recoup its waning influence in a region it has long claimed as its own.
Latin America is now mostly governed by left or center-left governments that differ in policy and style — from the populism of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to the reformism of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Yet all share a common goal: asserting greater autonomy from the United States.
Latin Americans are now courting investment from China, opening markets in Europe, dissenting from Bush’s War on Terror, stalling the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and sidelining the International Monetary Fund which, over the last couple of decades, has served as a stalking horse for Wall Street and the Treasury Department.
And they are electing presidents like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, who recently announced that his government would not renew the soon-to-expire lease on Manta Air Field, the most prominent U.S. military base in South America. Correa had previously suggested that, if Ecuador could set up its own base in Florida, he would consider extending the lease. When Washington balked, he offered Manta to a Chinese concession, suggesting that the airfield be turned into “China’s gateway to Latin America.” "
" But things have changed. “Latin America is not Washington’s to lose,” the Council on Foreign Relations report says, “nor is it Washington’s to save.” The Monroe Doctrine, it declares, is “obsolete.”
Good news for Latin America, one would think. But the last time someone from the Council on Foreign Relations, which since its founding in 1921 has represented mainstream foreign-policy opinion, declared the Monroe Doctrine defunct, the result was genocide.
Enter the Liberal Establishment
That would be Sol Linowitz who, in 1975, as chair of the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations, said that the Monroe Doctrine was “inappropriate and irrelevant to the changed realities and trends of the future.”
The little-remembered Linowitz Commission was made up of respected scholars and businessmen from what was then called the “liberal establishment.” It was but one part of a broader attempt by America’s foreign-policy elite to respond to the cascading crises of the 1970s — defeat in Vietnam, rising third-world nationalism, Asian and European competition, skyrocketing energy prices, a falling dollar, the Watergate scandal, and domestic dissent. Confronted with a precipitous collapse of America’s global legitimacy, the Council on Foreign Relations, along with other mainline think tanks like the Brookings Institute and the newly formed Trilateral Commission, offered a series of proposals that might help the U.S. stabilize its authority, while allowing for “a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system.”
There was widespread consensus among the intellectuals and corporate leaders affiliated with these institutions that the kind of anticommunist zeal that had marched the U.S. into the disaster in Vietnam needed to be tamped down, and that “new forms of common management” between Washington, Europe, and Japan had to be worked out. Advocates for a calmer world order came from the same corporate bloc that underwrote the Democratic Party and the Rockefeller-wing of the Republican Party. "
" At that moment throughout Latin America, leftists and nationalists were — as they are now — demanding a more equitable distribution of global wealth. Lest radicalization spread, the Trilateral Commission’s executive director Zbignew Brzezinski, soon to be President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, argued that it would be “wise for the United States to make an explicit move to abandon the Monroe Doctrine.” The Linowitz Commission agreed and offered a series of recommendations to that effect — including the return of the Panama Canal to Panama and a decrease in U.S. military aid to the region — that would largely define Carter’s Latin American policy.
Exit the Liberal Establishment
Of course, it was not corporate liberalism but rather a resurgent and revanchist militarism from the Right that turned out to offer the most cohesive and, for a time, successful solution to the crises of the 1970s.
Uniting a gathering coalition of old-school law-and-order anticommunists, first generation neoconservatives, and newly empowered evangelicals, the New Right organized an ever metastasizing set of committees, foundations, institutes, and magazines that focused on specific issues — the SALT II nuclear disarmament negotiations, the Panama Canal Treaty, and the proposed MX missile system, as well as U.S. policy in Cuba, South Africa, Rhodesia, Israel, Taiwan, Afghanistan, and Central America. All of them were broadly committed to avenging defeat in Vietnam (and the “stab in the back” by the liberal media and the public at home). They were also intent on restoring righteous purpose to American diplomacy.
As had corporate liberals, so, now, neoconservative intellectuals looked to Latin America to hone their ideas. President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, focused mainly on Latin America in laying out the foundational principles of modern neoconservative thought. She was particularly hard on Linowitz, who, she said, represented the “disinterested internationalist spirit” of “appeasement” — a word back with us again. His report, she insisted, meant “abandoning the strategic perspective which has shaped U.S. policy from the Monroe Doctrine down to the eve of the Carter administration, at the center of which was a conception of the national interest and a belief in the moral legitimacy of its defense.”
At first, Brookings, the Council on Foreign Affairs, and the Trilateral Commission, as well as the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972 by the crème de la CEO crème, opposed the push to remilitarize American society; but, by the late 1970s, it was clear that “normalization” had failed to solve the global economic crisis. Europe and Japan were not cooperating in stabilizing the dollar, and the economies of Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China were too anemic to absorb sufficient amounts of U.S. capital or serve as profitable trading partners. Throughout the 1970s, financial houses like the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank had become engorged with petrodollars deposited by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other oil-exporting nations. They needed to do something with all that money, yet the U.S. economy remained sluggish, and much of the Third World off limits.
So, after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory, mainstream policymakers and intellectuals, many of them self-described liberals, increasingly came to back the Reagan Revolution’s domestic and foreign agenda: gutting the welfare state, ramping up defense spending, opening up the Third World to U.S. capital, and jumpstarting the Cold War.
A decade after the Linowitz Commission proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine no longer viable, Ronald Reagan invoked it to justify his administration’s patronage of murderous anti-communists in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. A few years after Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. had broken “free of that inordinate fear of communism,” Reagan quoted John F. Kennedy saying, “Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be negotiated.”
Reagan’s illegal patronage of the Contras — those murderers he hailed as the “moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” and deployed to destabilize Nicaragua’s Sandinista government — and his administration’s funding of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala brought together, for the first time, the New Right’s two main constituencies. Neoconservatives provided Reagan’s revival of the imperial presidency with legal and intellectual justification, while the religious Right backed up the new militarism with grassroots energy.
This partnership was first built — just as it has more recently been continued in Iraq — on a mountain of mutilated corpses: 40,000 Nicaraguans and 70,000 El Salvadorans killed by U.S. allies; 200,000 Guatemalans, many of them Mayan peasants, victimized in a scorched-earth campaign the UN would rule to be genocidal.
The End of the Neocon Holiday from History
The recent Council on Foreign Relations report on Latin America, arriving as it does in another moment of imperial decline, seems once again to signal a new emerging consensus, one similar in tone to that of the post-Vietnam 1970s. In every dimension other than military, Newsweek editor Fareed Zacharia argues in his new book, The Post-American World, “the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.” ..."
" ...The fiasco in Iraq, the fall in the value of the dollar, the rise of India and China as new industrial and commercial powerhouses, and of Russia as an energy superpower, the failure to secure the Middle East, soaring oil and gas prices (as well as skyrocketing prices for other key raw materials and basic foodstuffs), and the consolidation of a prosperous Europe have all brought their dreams of global supremacy crashing down.
Barack Obama is obviously the candidate best positioned to walk the U.S. back from the edge of irrelevance. ..."
" Parag Khanna, an Obama advisor, recently argued that, by maximizing its cultural and technological advantage, the U.S. can, with a little luck, perhaps secure a position as third partner in a new tripartite global order in which Europe and Asia would have equal shares, a distinct echo of the trilateralist position of the 1970s. ... Spain’s Fernando VII or Britain’s Clement Richard Attlee, each of whom presided over his country’s imperial decline.) "?
" Certainly, there are already plenty of feverish conservative think tanks, from the Hudson Institute to the Heritage Foundation, that would double down on Bush’s crusades as a way out of the current mess. ..."
" The Right’s decay as an intellectual force is nowhere more evident than in the fits it throws in the face of the Left’s — or China’s — advances in Latin America. The self-confidant vitality with which Jeane Kirkpatrick used Latin America to skewer the Carter administration has been replaced with the tinny, desperate shrill of despair. “Who lost Latin America?” asks the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney — of pretty much everyone he meets. The region, he says, is now a “magnet for Islamist terrorists and a breeding ground for hostile political movements… The key leader is Chávez, the billionaire dictator of Venezuela who has declared a Latino jihad against the United States.”
Scare-Quote Diplomacy
But just because the Right is unlikely to unfurl its banner over Latin America again soon doesn’t mean that U.S. hemispheric diplomacy will be demilitarized. After all, it was Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who, at the behest of Lockheed Martin in 1997, reversed a Carter administration ban (based on Linowitz report recommendations) on the sale of high-tech weaponry to Latin America. That, in turn, kicked off a reckless and wasteful Southern Cone arms race. And it was Clinton, not Bush, who dramatically increased military aid to the murderous Colombian government and to corporate mercenaries like Blackwater and Dyncorp, further escalating the misguided U.S. “war on drugs” in Latin America.
In fact, a quick comparison between the Linowitz report and the new Council on Foreign Relations study on Latin America provides a sobering way of measuring just how far right the “liberal establishment” has shifted over the last three decades. The Council does admirably advise Washington to normalize relations with Cuba and engage with Venezuela, while downplaying the possibility of “Islamic terrorists” using the area as a staging ground — a longstanding fantasy of the neocons. (Douglas Feith, former Pentagon undersecretary, suggested that, after 9/11, the U.S. hold off invading Afghanistan and instead bomb Paraguay, which has a large Shi’ite community, just to “surprise” the Sunni al-Qaeda.) "
" ...Seven decades ago, Franklin Roosevelt supported the right of Latin American countries to nationalize U.S. interests, including Standard Oil holdings in Bolivia and Mexico, saying it was time for others in the hemisphere to get their “fair share.” Three decades ago, the Linowitz Commission recommended the establishment of a “code of conduct” defining the responsibilities of foreign corporations in the region and recognizing the right of governments to nationalize industries and resources.
The Council, in contrast, sneers at Chávez’s far milder efforts to create joint ventures with oil multinationals, while offering nothing but pablum in its place. Its centerpiece recommendation — aimed at cultivating Brazil as a potential anchor of a post-Bush, post-Chávez hemispheric order — urges the abolition of subsidies and tariffs protecting U.S. agro-industry in order to advance a “Biofuel Partnership” with Brazil’s own behemoth agricultural sector. This would be an environmental disaster, pushing large, mechanized plantations ever deeper into the Amazon basin, while doing nothing to generate decent jobs or distribute wealth more fairly.
Dominated by representatives from the finance sector of the U.S. economy, the Council recommends little beyond continuing the failed corporate “free trade” policies of the last twenty years — and, in this case, those scare quotes are justified because what they’re advocating is about as free as corporate “social justice” is just.
An Obama Doctrine?
So far, Barack Obama promises little better. A few weeks ago, he traveled to Miami and gave a major address on Latin America to the Cuban American National Foundation. It was hardly an auspicious venue for a speech that promised to “engage the people of the region with the respect owed to a partner.”
Surely, the priorities for humane engagement would have been different had he been addressing not wealthy right-wing Cuban exiles but an audience, say, of the kinds of Latino migrants in Los Angeles who have revitalized the U.S. labor movement, or of Central American families in Postville, Iowa, where immigration and Justice Department authorities recently staged a massive raid on a meatpacking plant, arresting as many as 700 undocumented workers. Obama did call for comprehensive immigration reform and promised to fulfill Franklin Roosevelt’s 68 year-old Four Freedoms agenda, including the social-democratic “freedom from want.” Yet he spent much of his speech throwing red meat to his Cuban audience.
Ignoring the not-exactly-radical advice of the Council on Foreign Relations, the candidate pledged to maintain the embargo on Cuba. And then he went further. Sounding a bit like Frank Gaffney, he all but accused the Bush administration of “losing Latin America” and allowing China, Europe, and “demagogues like Hugo Chávez” to step “into the vacuum.” He even raised the specter of Iranian influence in the region, pointing out that “just the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits.”
Whatever one’s opinion on Hugo Chávez, any diplomacy that claims to take Latin American opinion seriously has to acknowledge one thing: Most of the region’s leaders not only don’t see him as a “problem,” but have joined him on major economic and political initiatives like the Bank of the South, an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the Union of South American Nations, modeled on the European Union, established just two weeks ago. And any U.S. president who is sincere in wanting to help Latin Americans liberate themselves from “want” will have to work with the Latin American left — in all its varieties.
But more ominous than Obama’s posturing on Venezuela is his position on Colombia. Critics have long pointed out that the billions of dollars in military aid provided to the Colombian security forces to defeat the FARC insurgency and curtail cocaine production would discourage a negotiated end to the civil war in that country and potentially provoke its escalation into neighboring Andean lands. That’s exactly what happened last March, when Colombia’s president Alvaro Uribe ordered the bombing of a rebel camp located in Ecuador (possibly with U.S. logistical support supplied from Manta Air Force Base, which gives you an idea of why Correa wants to give it to China). To justify the raid, Uribe explicitly invoked the Bush Doctrine’s right of preemptive, unilateral action. In response, Ecuador and Venezuela began to mobilize troops along their border with Colombia, bringing the region to the precipice of war.
Most interestingly, in that conflict, an overwhelming majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries sided with Venezuela and Ecuador, categorically condemning the Colombian raid and reaffirming the sovereignty of individual nations recognized by Franklin Roosevelt long ago. Not Obama, however. He essentially endorsed the Bush administration’s drive to transform Colombia’s relations with its Andean neighbors into the one Israel has with most of the Middle East. In his Miami speech, he swore that he would “support Colombia’s right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders.”
Equally troublesome has been Obama’s endorsement of the controversial Merida Initiative, which human rights groups like Amnesty International have condemned as an application of the “Colombian solution” to Mexico and Central America, providing their militaries and police with a massive infusion of money to combat drugs and gangs. Crime is indeed a serious problem in these countries, and deserves considered attention. It’s chilling, however, to have Colombia — where death-squads now have infiltrated every level of government, and where union and other political activists are executed on a regular basis — held up as a model for other parts of Latin America.
Obama, however, not only supports the initiative, but wants to expand it beyond Mexico and Central America. “We must press further south as well,” he said in Miami.
It seems that once again that, as in the 1970s, reports of the death of the Monroe Doctrine are greatly exaggerated.
Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. ""
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