Pax Americana

[Dom Pedro II]

Attitudes don't have anything to do with governmental models... and if we're talking about Aztecs and Incas then we're NOT talking about Latin America.

[gunkulator]

Originally posted by Dom Pedro II
Attitudes don't have anything to do with governmental models...

Facism? Communism? Fundamentalist Theocracies? "God Save the King"?

and if we're talking about Aztecs and Incas then we're NOT talking about Latin America.

I was refering to the geographic region, Central and South America.

Must sign off for the night gents. regards.

[Dom Pedro II]

Good night.


But that STILL doesn't have anything to do with the governmental model. The STRUCTURE upon which the Latin American systems are based are based on those of Europe.

[Panag]

Washington's Pax Americana smacks of Roman power game

The Australian August 04, 2003

Washington's Pax Americana smacks of Roman power game

In-Depth Coverage

By Paul Kennedy

The US emphatically denies it has worldwide imperial ambitions, but the global spread of its military commitments suggests otherwise, writes Paul Kennedy

THERE is a cunning after-dinner board game called SPQR which involves the defence of the Roman Empire at its height. The board is a map of Europe and the Mediterranean, showing Roman cities and ports and the military roads and the sea lanes between them. The game involves the "senators and populace" moving selected Roman legions (there were 27 of them in, say, 80AD) along those internal lines in response to new threats, whether they come from Syria, Scotland or the Danube.

There were few places along the borders of the empire where one legion could not reinforce another within 10 days' march -- which was just as well, since Rome's expansion had given it many enemies, and a legion that was based in Sicily one year might find itself in the north of England the next, guarding Hadrian's Wall.

I thought of SPQR while reading Where Are the Legions? Global Deployments of US Forces, published by Global Security, the nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research group based outside Washington (https://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...eployments.htm). The message is clear, and very disturbing: there may not be many US troops coming home soon, perhaps not for a long time.

Washington now has military forces in about 130 countries, fighting in some of them, peacekeeping and training foreign military units in others. You can hear George Washington turning in his grave.

To be sure, the US has had standing military commitments abroad since the end of the World War II -- the occupations of Germany and Japan, the Korean War and the global rivalry with the Soviet Union made sure of that.

But when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it was generally assumed things would be different. Alas, that simply is not so. The fight against al-Qa'ida, the war and guerrilla resistance in Iraq, the implosion of Liberia, the continued unrest in Afghanistan, instability on the Korean peninsula and the need to reassure Japan of a strong US presence in the western Pacific have all conspired against a draw-down of US forces in the far corners of the globe. On the contrary, they have very much been drawn up.

Using official statistics, the editors at Global Security report there are 155 combat battalions in the US army. Before October 2001, only 17 of those were deployed on active combat service, in Kosovo and a few other hotspots (garrison deployment in Germany and Japan is not regarded as "active combat" service). Today, that figure stands at 98 combat battalions deployed in active areas.

Even a non-military expert can see this is an impossibly high number to sustain over the longer term, which is why, in addition to the 255,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guard forces deployed in combat and peacekeeping missions abroad, the US has sent another 136,000 troops from the National Guard and Reserves.

Most of the US carrier fleet are now back in their bases, being refitted after the defeat of Saddam Hussein, but Washington still has 40,000 sailors afloat and on mission. Meanwhile, the US generals are asking for more troop deployments in Iraq, and the Pentagon has just diverted three warships to the coast of Liberia. The US Defence Department now has to play a real-life game of SPQR.

These are not comfortable facts, and they should surely be giving US congressional representatives cause for thought. It is true the Pentagon is putting immense pressure on any country that counts itself a friend of Washington to send forces to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia, but the results so far are unspectacular.

Really, the only ground troops with heft and logistical capacity are the British, and, given all their other peacekeeping commitments -- from the Balkans to Sierra Leone -- they are probably more overstretched than the US is. Poland has assumed responsibility for running a relatively quiet (so far) zone in Iraq. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, Washington had to go to 22 countries to drum up the 9000 troops for that zone, and they will rely heavily on US technical support to function at all.

You wonder what utility Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz really accord a battalion of Latvian grenadiers in central Iraq. And what happens when they become the targets of grenade attacks?

Militarily -- and let's forget for a moment the debate about whether the US should have gone into these countries in the first place -- these awkward facts point to two equally awkward conclusions:

First, given the military overstretch, the US needs a few more heavy hitters, along with the British. It needs armies with substantial punch that could send 25,000 troops to southwest Asia. But of the 190 national armies of the world, you can count substantial ones on the fingers of one hand. Israel can't play, China and Taiwan won't play. South Korea is pinned down at home and remains a drain on US troop deployments. Japan is too psychologically and constitutionally restricted. A Pakistani presence alongside the US in Iraq might cause massive internal convulsions. A large Turkish contingent would cause a retaliatory Kurdish uprising.

This leaves India, Russia, France and Germany, and perhaps Italy, but four of those five opposed the war on Iraq in the first place, and if the US needs them now, there will be a price to pay. This is as obvious today as it should have been last September. Of course, the US can always "go it alone", but it does so at some cost.

Second, the US miliary services, and the army in particular, must come up with some long-term rotation scheme. They may have to move to a sort of Cardwell System, which was devised in the late 19th century by the then British secretary for war, Edward Cardwell, to deal with the constant calls on troops to serve abroad. One battalion of the British regiment was rotated out, perhaps to Afghanistan or Mesopotamia, for two or three years, the second battalion stayed home in the regimental barracks, recruiting fresh volunteers until its turn came to go abroad.

The system worked, just as the SPQR system worked, because both combined regular rotation (helping troop morale) and strategic flexibility. Occasionally, there were horrible reverses: for the Romans in the German forests or the British in the Khyber Pass. But the structure was strong enough to allow for recovery, often for further advances. These were empires that were in it for the long haul.

Is this the US future -- to have its troops stationed for an undefined time on the Northwest Frontier or in a disease-ridden port in West Africa or some other outpost?

Washington frantically denies it has imperial ambitions, and I believe those denials to be sincere. But if the US increasingly looks like an empire, walks like an empire and quacks like an empire, perhaps it is becoming one just the same.

Paul Kennedy is a professor of history at Yale University and author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

[Dom Pedro II]

Cool! Such a valuable researcher you are!

[Kramerman]

interesting article... first one i've read on thi forum with little bias for any side in quite sometime

[Ted Striker]

Forces in 130 countries?!?!

GOOD LAWD

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by panag



hi ,






btw , the earth is flat , .....


have a nice day

[DanS]

Well, to be fair, most of the 130 countries are probably special ops training of foreign militaries. Discounting that, we are still in a ton of places, though.

[problem_child]

Originally posted by Kramerman


wow, i sure hope you missed my point on purpose.

Fact: bastard regimes existed and exist and will continue to exist whether or not the US exists.

during the cold war, if the US didnt support them, the Soviet Union would have. Now would they not only be our enemies, but we would have lost valuable markets. The USA was not a god, it could not make all countries freedom loving bastions of liberty, despite that being a dream. instead we had to choose the lessor of two evils. support the bastards.
if you want to jump on your moral high horse, go ahead, but you are just making yourself look like a moron

Okay look, what's important here is that you are still under the assumption that US policy is interested in freedom and liberty. This is clearly untrue, that's just the noises US politicians make to the US public to get them to do what they want, and clearly their propaganda over the years has been succesful.

The US supports capitalism, not democracy, the US is against any government that blocks the freedom of US corporate concerns to maximise profit. That's why they were against Nicaragua, Cuba and Chile, because those governments nationalised US corporate assests.

You're a typical US citizen, you won't abide your country being involved in imperialism, so you've been conditioned to believe that it spends it time fighting evil threats to all that is good, and having to compromise it's 'morals' even though it doesn't want to.

I can't really blame your outlook, you are in the power of the most powerful nation in history, you stand little chance of thinking anything that the leadership of that nation doesn't want you to think. How could the glorious leader[s] have anything but noble intentions, one day there will be paradise, but in the mean time sacrifices must be made, etc etc etc.

[problem_child]

Originally posted by panag



hi ,

do you really believe that america wanted a war , ......


allas , imagine they did , did they twist saddam's arm to invade Q8 , .....


have a nice day

Look, first off, anybody can get Saddam Hussein into a fight, I could do it easily if I met him in the street

But don't take my word for it, it's still true. Ask anyone who knows about Middle Eastern diplomacy at the time what was going on between Kuwait and Iraq regarding the oil-fields near the Kuwaiti border, and the involvement of the US military with Kuwait leading up to the war. You really think the US is not a master manipulator, and doesn't know how to play the game of Devide & Conquor, and gained nothing from GW1 (bases in Saudi, Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, arms sales, strategic oil control etc)

At one point the US military even blatantly lied that Iraq was about to launch a massive offensive against Saudi itself, they of course never produced the 'satallite images' they claimed they had to support this, however they got the international support they wanted so... in the end it didn't matter.

You won't believe any of this because you just beleive everything they tell you. Read up on the situation of the time and you won't be so naive. Look for non-aligned political analysis of the diplomatic issues circa 1988-90 between Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi and the US.

[problem_child]

By the way Saddams Ba'athist were a National Socialist movement. Like most national socialists they were/are bastards, but they did also beleive in developing their country (while oppressing those considered external to the national identity). What this means is that Iraq was actually a fairly developed nation before GW1, by the standards of the region.

By the end of the IranIraq war though, Saddam was increasingly making Arab nationalist noises, anti American-influence-in-the-Middle-East noises, Nassarist noises... he used to be a US buddy, but the US was not about to let an Arab Nationalist threaten their interests in the ME, he had to go. Of course before Pre-emptive Doctrine was developed for GW2, how else would they destroy Saddam and smash Iraq back into place (the lesson being that nobody becomes a developed nation without US approval) other then to create a war?

To achieve this they instructed their Kuwaiti client to get thuroughly rude and economicaly aggressive with Iraq (if a country acted the same way against the US economy, Carrier-fleets would be on the scene in weeks, well, days) The US orchastrated the other clients to push all Iraqs buttons to get Iraq to react militarily. Saddam was played by the US and it's cronies like a violin. I don't think even the Kuwaitis realised the US would actually let them be taken over though... even though the 'royal family' got out in time.

[Kramerman]

Okay look, what's important here is that you are still under the assumption that US policy is interested in freedom and liberty.

this is a concern of the US, it may be secondary, but none-the-less a concern.

This is clearly untrue

oh clearly

The US supports capitalism, not democracy

we support both. it only appears we support the latter more because it is MUCH easier to support. to enforce capitalism is a piece of cake. to enforce democracy requires us to deploy large amounts of troops, in force, overseas. The US only has so much manpower and so much willingness to see our blood spilt for others. when you ask why we helped in some places and not in others, quite simply it has to do with the fact that some places are more in our interest, and since we only have so many resources to deploy, we will deal with the problems that will give us the most benefit. is this not sensible to you? or is the USA just inherently evil for not totally giving of itself in the name of its ideals until she collapses from over-exertion?

That's why they were against Nicaragua, Cuba and Chile, because those governments nationalised US corporate assests.

they stole our property. gee, we are such bastards for opposing them....how could we?

You're a typical US citizen, you won't abide your country being involved in imperialism, so you've been conditioned to believe that it spends it time fighting evil threats to all that is good, and having to compromise it's 'morals' even though it doesn't want to.

no, im a realist who understands that a country can only fight so hard in its beliefs to its own detriment if it wants to be successful. you on the other hand are a typical conspiracy theorist whos irrational anti-americanism is illogical and self-perpetuating, like a bad religion. i mean no insult by that, just my observation.

I can't really blame your outlook, you are in the power of the most powerful nation in history, you stand little chance of thinking anything that the leadership of that nation doesn't want you to think.

our leadership is trying to maintain america's power and keep us from decline. to do so they sometimes have to do things that compromise our ideals, such as supporting bastard regimes to fight our enemies and stuff like that. i think thats understandable. i guess i can understand why you dont, you find it hypocritical. all i have to say is GET OVER IT.

How could the glorious leader[s] have anything but noble intentions, one day there will be paradise, but in the mean time sacrifices must be made, etc etc etc.

i dont know exactly what you are talking about, but yes, our leaders are trying to make the US a better place. that is why they are voted into office, if they didnt, they would never be elected or reelected for sure. When they can make the world a better place too, they try. America first. you seem very upset about this very reasonable and understandable fact

[gunkulator]

Originally posted by problem_child
By the way Saddams Ba'athist were a National Socialist movement. Like most national socialists they were/are bastards, but they did also beleive in developing their country (while oppressing those considered external to the national identity). What this means is that Iraq was actually a fairly developed nation before GW1, by the standards of the region.

Yeah, well the Nazis built the Autobahn and made the trains run on time. So I guess except for the Jew thing I should admire them too?

how else would they destroy Saddam and smash Iraq back into place (the lesson being that nobody becomes a developed nation without US approval) other then to create a war?

To achieve this they instructed their Kuwaiti client to get thuroughly rude and economicaly aggressive with Iraq (if a country acted the same way against the US economy, Carrier-fleets would be on the scene in weeks, well, days) The US orchastrated the other clients to push all Iraqs buttons to get Iraq to react militarily. Saddam was played by the US and it's cronies like a violin. I don't think even the Kuwaitis realised the US would actually let them be taken over though... even though the 'royal family' got out in time.

Oh, this one is just rich. Sure, the US has all these "other clients" in the ME who love us so much that they'd risk their own lives starting a war for us. And those Kuwaitis! What a bunch of troopers they were for picking a fight with a bordering country possessing a vastly superior military - and all to help out their ol' buddy Uncle Sam for some vague political reasons. Bully for them I say!

[GePap]

Originally posted by gunkulator
Originally, yes. The European model was imposed on Latin America, however that model was dependent on centrallized control, which was hard to impose outside of the population centers and without a decent infrastructure. I'm also not convinced that the nationalistic "for god, king and country" attitude existed for Latin American states in the same way it existed in Europe.

BY this definition, the US did not fit the model either, now does it?

The new states were republics, with constitution, governments, so forth and so on. That is the definition of a western model state. Your opinion about possible attitudes notwithstanding, and without standing.