2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World
By Rick Rozoff
January 1 will usher in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United
States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.
Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not
ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.
The Afghan war, the U.S.'s first air and ground conflict in Asia since the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in
the 1960s and early 1970s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's first land war and Asian campaign, began during
the end of the 2001 war in Macedonia launched from NATO-occupied Kosovo, one in which the role of U.S. military
personnel is still to be properly exposed [1] and addressed and which led to the displacement of almost 10 percent of
the nation's population.
In the first case Washington invaded a nation in the name of combating terrorism; in the second it abetted cross-border
terrorism. Similarly, in 1991 the U.S. and its Western allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait and launched devastating
and deadly cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties inside Iraq in the name of preserving the national sovereignty and
territorial integrity of Kuwait, and in 1999 waged a 78-day bombing assault against Yugoslavia to override and fatally
undermine the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the name of the casus belli of the day,
so-called humanitarian intervention.
Two years later humanitarian war, as abhorrent an oxymoron as the world has ever witnessed, gave way to the global war
on terror(ism), with the U.S. and its NATO allies again reversing course but continuing to wage wars of aggression and
"wars of opportunity" as they saw fit, contradictions and logic, precedents and international law notwithstanding.
Several never fully acknowledged counterinsurgency campaigns, some ongoing - Colombia - and some new - Yemen - later,
the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003 with a "coalition of the willing" comprised mainly of Eastern European NATO
candidate nations (now almost all full members of the world's only military bloc as a result of their service).
The Pentagon has also deployed special forces and other troops to the Philippines and launched naval, helicopter and
missile attacks inside Somalia as well as assisting the Ethiopian invasion of that nation in 2006. Washington also arms,
trains and supports the armed forces of Djibouti in their border war with Eritrea. In fact Djibouti hosts the U.S.'s
only permanent military installation in Africa to date [2], Camp Lemonier, a United States Naval Expeditionary Base and
home to the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), placed under the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)
when it was launched on October 1, 2008. The area of responsibility of the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa
takes in the nations of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen and
as "areas of interest" the Comoros, Mauritius and Madagascar.
That is, much of the western shores of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, among the most geostrategically important
parts of the world. [3]
U.S. troops, aerial drones, warships, planes and helicopters are active throughout that vast tract of land and water.
With senator and once almost vice president Joseph Lieberman's threat on December 27 that "Yemen will be tomorrow's war"
[4] and former Southern Command chief and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark's two days later that "Maybe
we need to put some boots on the ground there," [5] it is evident that America's new war for the new year has already
been identified In fact in mid-December U.S. warplanes participated in the bombing of a village in northern Yemen that
cost the lives of 120 civilians as well as wounding 44 more [6] and a week later "A US fighter jet...carried out
multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen's northern rugged province of Sa'ada...." [7]
The pretext for undertaking a war in Yemen in earnest is currently the serio-comic "attempted terrorist attack” by a
young Nigerian national on a passenger airliner outside of Detroit on Christmas Day. The deadly U.S. bombing of the
Yemeni village mentioned above occurred ten days earlier and moreover was in the north of the nation, although
Washington claims al-Qaeda cells are operating in the other end of the country. [8]
Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not the only battlegrounds where the Pentagon is active. On October 30 of 2009 the
U.S. signed an agreement with the government of Colombia to acquire the essentially unlimited and unrestricted use of
seven new military bases in the South American nation, including sites within immediate striking distance of both
Venezuela and Ecuador. [9] American intelligence, special forces and other personnel will be complicit in ongoing
counterinsurgency operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the nation's south as well as
in rendering assistance to Washington's Colombian proxy for attacks inside Ecuador and Venezuela that will be portrayed
as aimed at FARC forces in the two states.
Targeting two linchpins of and ultimately the entire Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA),
Washington is laying the groundwork for a potential military conflagration in South and Central America and the
Caribbean. After the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras on June 28, that nation has announced it will be the first ALBA
member state to ever withdraw from the Alliance and the Pentagon will retain, perhaps expand, its military presence at
the Soto Cano Air Base there.
A few days ago "The Colombian government...announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and
has activated six new airborne battalions" [10] and shortly afterward Dutch member of parliament Harry van Bommel
"claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao" [11] off the Venezuelan
coast.
In October a U.S. armed forces publication revealed that the Pentagon will spend $110 million to modernize and expand
seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, across the Black Sea from Russia, where it will station initial
contingents of over 4,000 troops. [12]
In early December the U.S. signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, which borders the Russian Kaliningrad
territory, that "allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish
territory." [13] The U.S. military forces will operate Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Standard Missile 3
(SM-3) batteries as part of the Pentagon's global interceptor missile system.
At approximately the same time President Obama pressured Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to base missile
shield components in his country. "We discussed the continuing role that we can play as NATO allies in strengthening
Turkey's profile within NATO and coordinating more effectively on critical issues like missile defense," [14] in the
American leader's words.
"Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hinted his government does not view Tehran [Iran] as a potential missile threat
for Turkey at this point. But analysts say if a joint NATO missile shield is developed, such a move could force Ankara
to join the mechanism." [15]
2010 will see the first foreign troops deployed to Poland since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and the
installation of the U.S's "stronger, swifter and smarter" (also Obama's words) interceptor missiles and radar facilities
in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South Caucasus. [16]
U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan, site of the longest and most wide-scale war in the world, will top 100,000 early in
2010 and with another 50,000 plus troops from other NATO nations and assorted "vassals and tributaries" (Zbigniew
Brzezinski) will represent the largest military deployment in any war zone in the world.
American and NATO drone missile and helicopter gunship attacks in Pakistan will also increase, as will U.S.
counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines and Somalia along with those in Yemen where CIA and Army special forces
are already involved.
U.S. military websites recently announced that there have been 3.3 million deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq since
2001 with 2 million U.S. service members sent to the two war zones. [17]
In this still young millennium American soldiers have also deployed in the hundreds of thousands to new bases and
conflict and post-conflict zones in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Djibouti, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo,
Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mali, the Philippines, Romania, Uganda and Uzbekistan. In 2010 they will be sent abroad
in even larger numbers to man airbases and missile sites, supervise and participate in counterinsurgency operations
throughout the world against disparate rebel groups, many of them secular, and wage combat operations in South Asia and
elsewhere. They will be stationed on warships and submarines equipped with cruise and long-range nuclear missiles and
with aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the world's seas and oceans.
They will construct and expand bases from Europe to Central and South Asia, Africa to South America, the Middle East to
Oceania. With the exception of Guam and Vicenza in Italy, where the Pentagon is massively expanding existing
installations, all the facilities in question are in nations and even regions of the world where the U.S. military has
never before ensconced itself. Practically all the new encampments will be forward bases used for operations "down
range," generally to the east and south of NATO-dominated Europe.
U.S. military personnel will be assigned to the new Global Strike Command and for expanded patrols and war games in the
Arctic Circle. They will serve under the Missile Defense Agency to consolidate a worldwide interceptor missile network
that will facilitate a nuclear first strike capability and will extend that system into space, the final frontier in the
drive to achieve military full spectrum dominance.
American troops will continue to fan out to most all parts of the world. Everywhere, that is, except to their own
nation's borders.
1) Scott Taylor, Macedonia's Civil War: 'Made in the USA' Antiwar.com, August 20, 2001 http://www.antiwar.com/orig/taylor1.html 2) AFRICOM Year Two: Seizing The Helm Of The Entire World Stop NATO, October 22, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/africom-year-two-taking-the-helm-of-the-entire-world 3) Cold War Origins Of The Somalia Crisis And Control Of The Indian Ocean Stop NATO, May 3, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/cold-war-origins-of-the-somalia-crisis-and-control-of-the-indian-ocean 4) Fox News, December 27, 2009 5) Fox News, December 29, 2009 6) Press TV, December 16, 2009 7) Press TV, December 27,
2009 8) Yemen: Pentagon’s War On The Arabian Peninsula Stop NATO, December 15, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/yemen-pentagons-war-on-the-arabian-peninsula 9) Rumors Of Coups And War: U.S., NATO Target Latin America Stop NATO, November 18, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/rumors-of-coups-and-war-u-s-nato-target-latin-america 10) BBC News, December 20, 2009 11) Radio Netherlands, December 22, 2009 12) Bulgaria, Romania: U.S., NATO Bases For
War In The East Stop NATO, October 24, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/bulgaria-romania-u-s-nato-bases-for-war-in-the-east 13) Polish Radio, December 11, 2009 14) Hurriyet Daily News, December 30, 2009 15) Ibid 16) Black Sea, Caucasus: U.S.
Moves Missile Shield South And East Stop NATO, September 19, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/19/283 U.S. Expands Global Missile Shield Into Middle East, Balkans Stop NATO, September 11, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/u-s-expands-global-missile-shield-into-middle-east-balkans 17) World’s Sole Military Superpower’s 2 Million-Troop, $1 Trillion Wars Stop NATO, December 21, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/worlds-sole-military-superpowers-2-million-troop-1-trillion-wa
*************
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Global Research
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the
text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research
articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
Global Research contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the
copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to
advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If
you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright
owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
ENDS