Analysis

After Afghanistan and Iraq: What Lies Ahead?
Current Regional and Global Implications of the U.S. War on Terror

The invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003 signaled the major step toward “restructuring” the Middle East in America’s terms. It was also the major chip of an ambitious template aimed at stretching the global arc of the American Empire.

By Bobby Tuazon*
Bulatlat.com

In the course of the U.S. war on terror that began with the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001 and the invasion-occupation of Iraq in March 2003, a quiet yet equally lethal war was also being waged against Iran, North Korea, Syria and other countries belonging to the so-called “axis of evil” and “rogue regimes” in other regions of the world. U.S. imperialism also built a new military basing strategy, new defense partnerships and access agreements as well as increased the training, forming and arming of more surrogate armies throughout the world.

The central objectives of this global strategy of U.S. imperialism today are: 1) to ensure imperialist control – and not just access – of oil resources in the Middle East as swell as in other potential sources of this energy resource such as Africa, Latin America, central Asia, central Europe, Southeast Asia and other parts of the world; 2) to put in place a new military basing strategy that involves the most extensive realignment of all U.S. military forces and facilities throughout the world; 3) to strengthen the military force that would boost the momentum of imperialist globalization particularly in areas that remain hostile to this global economic agenda; 4) to preserve and consolidate U.S. imperialist hegemony in the world by reducing or disabling the economic and military capabilities of its imperialist rivals and other emerging power competitors; and 5) to neutralize the surge of anti-imperialist movements – particularly the armed struggles – using the pretext of fighting terrorism most especially in third world countries.

These objectives are clearly underlined in the various economic and geo-political blueprints, doctrines and strategies that were hammered out by the neo-conservatives, corporate-funded think tanks and ideologues years before U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr. took power and who now are very much ensconced in his regime. Particularly the oil oligarchs and arms manufacturers, they represent or are themselves members of the finance oligarchy and are closely linked to the powerful military-industrial-think tank complex. The objectives are also borne out by decisions and acts pursued by the Bush regime and its immediate predecessors.

In the case of Iran and other members of the “axis of evil” as well as other “rogue regimes,” U.S. imperialism has stepped up yet another form of warfare: the application of political pressures and economic sanctions as well as subtle military harassment. Just as the use of preemptive and unilateral force against Afghanistan and Iraq is nothing new as far as U.S. imperialism is concerned the use of economic sanctions and military harassment is also nothing new. As soon as the Iranian people won in 1979 their independence from the neocolonial control of the U.S. through its puppet – Shah Reza Pahlavi – the U.S. government began to impose economic sanctions as well as mount covert operations to topple the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini leadership. Cuba has been under economic blockade and trade embargo since it was liberated from the hated U.S.-backed Batista regime in 1959; several times President Fidel Castro had also been the target of CIA assassination plots. And so is North Korea, Libya, Syria and other countries led, according to U.S. war hawks, by so-called “rogue regimes.” The aim of these sanctions and covert operations has always been to weaken the economic and political structures of these new independent states, agitate for “reforms” among its nationals including the mounting of coup plots thus leading to the states’ possible collapse and the installation of regimes subservient to the United States.

International blackmail

Today, these countries have become targets of U.S.-engineered international blackmail alleging their possession of “weapons of mass destruction” including nuclear and biological arms at the pain of suffering the same fate met by Afghanistan and Iraq. This international blackmail is calibrated under some kind of “compellence” strategy: to tighten the squeeze on these states that would result in either a justified war or the collapse of their states by other means.

In the case of Iran, the Bush regime succeeded in forcing the U.S. Congress in July 2001 to renew for five more years the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA of 1996) that prohibits U.S. companies and their foreign subsidiaries from investing in the two countries particularly in the oil and gas industries. The following year, the Bush regime blocked the entry of Iran into the World Trade Organization (WTO) despite efforts by its government to begin a privatization program in its economy. While the economic squeeze is being tightened on Iraq, CIA moles have begun to infiltrate Teheran for intelligence gathering and in preparation for possible air strikes in the future.¹ Right now, the Bush regime is also supporting a “popular uprising” a la Poland in its effort to overthrow Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.² A British intelligence official said that in their campaign against Iran the Americans may use different tactics and not necessarily a ground war.³

While the economic and political warfare continues – regardless of the current domestic situation in the United States today, the Bush regime’s growing international indictment for lying about the WMDs in Iraq and the global resistance to the “war on terror” - U.S. imperialism will continue to use military force against any state that opposes its hegemony and resists imperialist globalization. The use of armed force – including nuclear weapons – on top of the U.S. government’s global strategy has been reiterated, for instance, in a book published end of last year – a manifesto for all-out war. The book, written by two of Bush’s neoconservative ideologues – Richard Perle and former speechwriter David Frum, bats for a military blockade against North Korea, the economic quarantine of Syria and the overthrow of the Iranian government. It also advocates harsh actions against France whose government stood against the war on Iraq, and Saudi Arabia who, the authors said, is an unreliable U.S. ally.⁴

Overall, the first immediate objective of the U.S. war on terror is to secure imperialist control – and not just access of oil and other energy resources of the world. With only 4-5 percent of the total world population, the United States is the biggest consumer of oil, accounting for 25 percent of the total global consumption.

Oil is the most crucial resource for the industries as well as war efforts of the whole American Empire. The future of U.S. imperialism rests on its control of oil and other sources of energy. Under Bush, Jr. the control of the world’s oil resources became the paramount objective of America’s foreign policy and security agenda. “Middle East oil producers will remain central to world [Read: U.S.] oil security,” Bush said in a National Energy Policy report. ⁵

Future oil requirements

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 National Energy Plan gives a grim outlook about the future of U.S. oil requirements: in 20 years (or by 2025), U.S. oil imports will increase from 10 million barrels a day (mbd) to 17 mbd. ⁶ In 1998, the United States used roughly 19 mbd, half of which it produced while importing the other half. One-fifth of the oil imported by the United States comes from the Persian Gulf, with the bulk of its imports from four western hemispheric sources (in descending order: Canada, Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia).⁷

It is not only the U.S. economy and its ruling military-industrial conglomerate however that faces this dilemma but also most EU countries, Japan and China. China is slated to double its oil consumption by 2020, from 4 mbd to 10.5 mbd. China, Japan and the rest of Asia are predicted to surpass North America in oil consumption to 31 percent in 2020 or double their total current oil consumption, with North America gobbling up 26 percent. Half of Asia’s oil requirement is produced at home while the other half is imported; 90 percent of its oil imports comes from the Middle East. ⁸ Any disruption in the supply of oil could cripple the economies of the oil-dependent countries and it is for this reason that the EU, Japan and China are trying to increase their access to the oil deposits of the Persian Gulf through joint corporate ventures and investments while looking for other sources in other regions.

With the overconsumption of oil and the expected shortage in few decades to come, the access to oil will become more and more limited and is expected to become a major source of competition and frictions particularly among the major oil consumers or monopoly-capitalist countries. In this connection, the immediate thrust of U.S. imperialism pursues what appears to be a “control and denial” strategy. It seeks to control the remaining major sources of oil and other fuel resources in the world. But control can only be consummated if it also undertakes “denial” strategy – using its monopoly of oil to deprive or limit rival economies’ access to the fuel and hence reduce their capability of becoming regional or world hegemons in the future.

While indeed the Persian Gulf provides only a fifth of the U.S.’ total consumption of oil, its current concern to increase and diversify its energy sources given its projected requirement will eventually find itself increasing its dependence on the Middle East oil. Right now, the Middle East has 65 percent of global oil reserves and 35 percent of gas reserves. In terms of oil reserves, the Middle East is followed by Africa, 8 percent; Latin America, 8 percent; the former Soviet bloc of countries including Central Asia, 6 percent; North America, 6 percent; Asia, 5 percent; and Europe, 2 percent. In natural gas reserves, the former Soviet bloc including Central Asia tops, with 35 percent; followed closely by the Middle East. 35 percent; Africa, 8 percent; Asia, 7 percent; North American, 5 percent; South America, 4 percent; and Europe, 3 percent. The Middle East and the former Soviet bloc of countries account for almost three-fourths of the global gas reserves; Iran leads the Middle East with 16 percent of the world total.9  It is in this context that the Middle East remains paramount for the U.S. economic and geopolitical strategy and occupies a priority in its targets of armed intervention. But the preeminent economic priorities of U.S. imperialism in the region – to control oil and other energy resources - are inextricably linked to its geopolitical objective of world domination by using the Middle East oil (and, for that matter, the rest of the world) as economic and political leverage to undermine what it perceives as its “peer competitors’” own hegemonic ambitions.

After the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001, the invasion and occupation of Iraq 18 months later became the first major step toward redrawing the map of the Middle East in America’s terms that, in turn, is inextricably interwoven to U.S. imperialism’s post-Cold War global hegemonic objectives. To recall, Iraq became the prime target for regime change on the first day of the Bush regime in 2001 and was in fact up for immediate bombing after the 9/11 attacks before the neoconservative hawks decided on Afghanistan instead. The plan against Iraq however dates back in 1992 when then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, the current deputy secretary of defense, came up with their now infamous “Defense Policy Guidance” (DPG) that laid the blueprint for U.S. world domination and the 2000 policy paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses – Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” of the notorious Project for a New American Century (PNAC) that called for securing America’s oil requirements and arms exports in the Middle East and worldwide.¹⁰ The DPG, in addition, argued that U.S. military intervention should become a “constant fixture” of the new world order.

Other considerations come into play on why Iraq was a prime target of U.S. armed intervention: Iraq is not only awash with oil and is partly an agricultural economy. Historically, it was also a center of pan-Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism – a legacy that makes it a potential powder keg for a strong anti-imperialism. So it became important that Iraq under U.S. colonial occupation be “reconstructed” in an all-sided way along America’s terms. The reordering of the Middle East under imperialist globalization and U.S. imperialism’ geo-political needs could not be pushed without diminishing Iraq’s anti-colonial legacy.

New international order

America’s hegemonic interests in the Middle East actually began under the aegis of the new international order constructed by U.S. imperialism after the second world war. In the region, the overriding priorities of U.S. imperialism was to replace the domain of the British and French imperialism under a neocolonialist order that ensured its access to the Middle East oil and – under the pretext of deterring Soviet-inspired communist expansionism – containing the spread of Arab nationalism. U.S. domination in the Middle East called for sponsoring under the guise of “decolonization” the formation in 1948 of the Zionist state of Israel as its junior partner in the region and depriving the Palestinian people of their own land; conducting intervention, coup plots, armed aggression and policy of deception in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and other countries. It also sponsored the installation of autocratic puppet regimes that, with Israel as the linchpin of U.S. imperialism’s hegemony, helped suppress nationalist and socialist movements and guaranteed its access to oil. The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1955 sought to cripple indigenous nationalist and democratic processes in the Middle East and to pave the way for U.S. military invasion. ¹¹ In 1958 American marines were sent to Lebanon to support reactionary President Camille Chamoun while British paratroopers landed in Jordan to protect the U.S. puppet King Hussein who was on CIA payroll. Despite the resistance and the economic backwardness that it generated, U.S. imperialist intervention in the Middle East began to bear fruit. For instance, since 1946 when U.S. corporations took control of Saudi Arabian oil – which accounted for 35 percent of the region’s total oil reserves U.S. control of oil grew from 13 percent to 65 percent by the mid-1950s.

More trouble emerged in the 1970s-1980s however when the U.S. puppet Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran (a major source of U.S. oil corporations) was deposed in the 1979 revolution and the Arab-Palestinian armed struggle for independence and self-rule won regional and international support. In the Iran-Iraq war, U.S. imperialism intervened on behalf of each warring state by sending arms and, in the case of Iraq, by sending chemical and biological weapons. The American objective was to weaken both states by causing massive destruction and, in doing so, reduce their capability as potential regional powers. In 1990, Saddam Hussein took the U.S. bait of encouraging an invasion of Kuwait and thus paved the way for U.S. punitive strikes and economic sanctions against Baghdad.

Aside from the objectives previously enumerated, the U.S. war on Iraq in 2003 set in motion the process of installing a reliable albeit puppet Arab regime (outside Israel) in the region, serving as a model for the privatization of the oil industry and sending a warning that those states that did not embrace the “free market economy” are bound to suffer the punishment of U.S. intervention. This is part of what Pentagon hawks say the start of the massive plan for the reordering of the entire Middle East. As defense consultant John Pike says of Richard Perle and his cohorts: “What people are not grasping here is that after Iraq they have got a long list of countries to blow up. Iraq is not the final chapter.” Aside from Iran and Syria, another target is America’s long-term puppet state, Saudi Arabia, identified by the hawkish RAND think tank as the “kernel of evil” that should be dismembered. ¹²

New basing strategy

The acts of aggression against both Afghanistan and Iraq also boosted a new international basing strategy that involves the reordering and strengthening of America’s network of military bases and other types of facilities throughout the world. Definitely, this new basing strategy is not being laid without a clear purpose. The objectives of this new basing strategy are: a) securing U.S. imperialism’s control of oil reserves and other strategic resources and markets; b) widening U.S. armed presence in regions perceived as current and future hot spots that threaten America’s strategic interests; such regions include the vast swathe of land and mineral wealth where the former USSR used to exert its sphere of influence – the Eurasia landmass; and c) maintaining U.S. imperialism’s military hegemony in order to encircle, intimidate and undermine the capabilities of other would-be hegemons that may challenge U.S. supremacy. Indeed, there is much more that is hidden by the statement of Cheney last January that the new military structures spreading into new areas of the globe are geared for a “war on terrorism” that would last for generations. ¹³

Described as “the most sweeping changes in the U.S. military posture abroad in half a century,” ¹⁴ the new basing strategy is being prioritized in the so-called “arc of instability” – vast swathes of land and seas covering Central Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, North Africa and Southeast Asia. This is identical with what used to be described as the Third World and covers the world’s strategic oil reserves. The new basing strategy answers security doctrine involving the preemptive and rapid projection of U.S. military power against its perceived enemies, hostile states and potential rivals.

Some permanent overseas bases will be replaced with smaller facilities while new but small “forward operating bases” will rise in many new locations. The new “forward operating bases,” which will be maintained by small support units, will be built in southern Europe, the former Soviet republics, the Middle East and Asia, Pentagon officials said middle of 2003. ¹⁵

Outside the hubs (or permanent bases) and forward operating bases would lie a ring of “forward operating locations,” or prearranged but unmaintained staging areas that U.S. forces build in host nations and which can be occupied quickly in a conflict situation. In the Persian Gulf, some of the forward operating bases have been put up in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Similar smaller bases have been built or are being built in Eastern Europe that could be used as staging areas for moving troops quickly to the Middle East and Africa. ¹⁶

Imperialist globalization

Aside from the fact that it responds to America’s immediate objective to diversify and control sources of oil and other mineral wealth, the new realignment of U.S. forces corresponds to an emerging Pentagon doctrine that seeks to increase the military force needed for the enforcement of the new economic order under the regime of globalization. The “arc of instability” includes the same countries and regions that Pentagon describes as being “disconnected” from the prevailing trends of economic globalization. These areas where “globalization is thinning or just plain absent are supposedly “plagued by politically-repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and – most important – the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of terrorists.” In particular, Thomas Barnett, a leading defense consultant from the U.S. Naval War College¹⁷  those excluded from globalization’s core are the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia.

The invasion of Iraq, Barnett further says, marks “a historic tipping point – the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.” Note that Barnett’s arc of instability also corresponds to regions of great oil, gas and mineral wealth, reflective again of Wolfowitz’s 1992 plan which asserts that the key objective of U.S. strategy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”¹⁸  In the same DPG cited, Wolfowitz also argued that U.S. military intervention should become a “constant fixture” of the new world order. Barnett and Wolfowitz echo what British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in 1999 in defense of globalization: “We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper…The principles of international community must apply to international security.” ¹⁹ It is enough to conclude at this point that economic and military policy are interconnected.

In the contemporary sense, what is being laid out reflects U.S. imperialism’s post-World War II objective of ensuring America’s vital interests and monopoly-capitalist expansionism throughout the world at a time when the hegemonic and colonial interests of British and French imperialism could no longer be sustained while socialist and independence movements were on the upsurge. Through the Bretton Woods system, U.S. imperialism envisioned a new international economic order that, among other goals, made sure that the world’s oil, mineral and other natural resources remained accessible to American capitalism along with its free trade and free market requirements. The “new international economic order” was strongly linked with the expansion of a network of military facilities and force deployments in Europe, Asia-Pacific particularly in the Far East including Southeast Asia, as well as in South America and parts of the Middle East and Africa under the guise of deterring communist expansion.

Homegrown liberation movements were suppressed brutally under the pretext of fighting communism. Meanwhile, military dictatorships were installed and supported as vast amounts of military aid were poured into other puppet regimes like the Philippines. Strong economic and military alliances were established with some key nations that served as U.S. imperialism’s linchpins in the regions: Britain and West Germany for Europe; Japan for the Asia-Pacific; and Israel for the Middle East. These key defense relationships complemented the formation of regional military alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the Atlantic and Europe, and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization for Southeast Asia. These also helped suppress socialist-inspired liberation struggles and served as U.S. imperialism’s large outposts for military hegemony throughout the world.

Latin America

Today, the link between imperialist globalization, U.S. imperialism’s “war on terror” and new military basing strategy is clearly laid out in Latin America and Africa. Despite the abundance of natural wealth and other resources, Latin America (or the Central and South America) remains largely poor and underdeveloped mainly as a result of its having suffered as U.S. imperialism’s exclusive economic domain for the past two centuries. It is from this region – which contains some 8 percent of the world’s oil deposits – that the United States acquires much of its oil requirements particularly from Venezuela and Colombia. The imperialist globalization blueprint for the region focuses on the expansion of free trade agreements to encompass other countries in the area particularly the plan for a Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA) interconnecting 34 countries in the western hemisphere. Through the International Monetary Fund-World Bank, the United States is dangling financial loans particularly to crisis-ridden countries to further rein in their economies along the WTO system and new free trade mechanisms.

Because Latin America however hosts countries that are either hostile to U.S. imperialism’s economic hegemony (such as socialist Cuba and Venezuela) or are facing armed revolutionary struggles (such as Colombia), the United States has of late increased its military presence in the region. Some warmongering U.S. politicians and think tanks have called for harsher measures in dealing with the region’s own “axis of evil” – Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Colombia’s rebel forces led by the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) and even Brazil’s new president, Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.²⁰  U.S. policy makers have also long considered the tri-boundary area of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay a “hotbed of Arab radicalism.”

Aside from Venezuela where the CIA in a coup plot in April 2002 tried to oust Chavez and hence scuttle plans to nationalize the oil industry, the Bush regime has used Colombia as the centerpiece of its war on terror in the region. Since 9/11, the $1.7 billion-funded “Plan Colombia” purportedly for the anti-drugs campaign has been expanded to provision direct counter-insurgency assistance and intelligence. In 2003, half a billion dollars in aid was earmarked by the Bush regime for Colombia; 70 percent of this was allocated for the country’s military and police forces. A priority of the expanded military program is to finance the Colombia army with an additional $98 million to protect the Cano Limon-Covenas oil pipeline operated by the California-based Occidental Petroleum. ²¹

Haiti

The recent armed intervention of U.S. forces and their abduction of the democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti underscored U.S. imperialism’s greed to maintain Central America along with the rest of the western hemisphere under its hegemony. Aristide pursued an independent economy that ran counter to U.S. imperialism’s free trade and free market policies and which particularly hurt its agricultural exporters. U.S. intervention engineered “regime change” in that small country by, first, financing an armed rebellion by remnants of the rightist military and then, along with French forces, invading Haiti to complete the process. In the past two centuries, Haiti had suffered French colonialism and U.S. interventionism.

Meanwhile, Gen. James Hill, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom), is virtually acting as the American Empire’s proconsul in Latin America with powers to meddle in the region’s purely internal affairs. Hill has earned notoriety for calling on militaries in Latin America – U.S. imperialism’s traditional surrogate armies – to take a greater role in the internal affairs of their countries. In support, he also called for constitutional changes to remove restrictions on military participation in law enforcement.²²

The U.S. Southcom’s command has also been enlarged in the region. Out of nine U.S. military bases five were added in 2001-2002 in the following locations: Vieques, Puerto Rico; Manta, Ecuador; Curacao, Aruba; Comalapsa, El Salvador; Colombia; and the Bahamas.

Africa

On the other hand, U.S. imperialism’s interests began to expand in Africa during the Cold War on account of the continent’s oil deposits as well as uranium, gold, copper, diamonds and other minerals. Africa accounts for 8 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Africa’s 76.5 billion barrels of oil reserves are found in Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Congo and Angola. Fifteen percent of U.S.’s oil imports come from West Africa; oil imports from this source are expected to increase to 25 percent by 2015.

But the U.S. began to move more aggressively after the Cold War when in 1992, for instance, the outgoing President George Bush, Sr. sent 30,000 Marines and Army Rangers to Somalia to intervene in the civil war that killed 10,000 people. U.S. military intervention was precipitated by the need to protect four major U.S. oil companies that were occupying two-thirds of Somalia’s land surface – Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Philips Petroleum. The presence of these oil companies – all of which were connected to Bush, Sr. – was in connection with the discovery by the Texas-based Hunt Oil Corporation of 1 billion barrels of oil reserves in Yemen south of Saudi Arabia. The oil reserves were part of a “great underground rift” that stretched to northern Somalia. Aside from its proximity to the oil, Somalia is a key strategic asset to oil tanker routes through both the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. oil corporations led by the lobbyist African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG) urged a push for oil expansion in Africa.²³  In early 2002, the oil lobbyists urged Congress to declare the Gulf of Guinea located off Western Africa as “an area of vital interests to the United States.” Walter Kansteiner, Bush’s assistant secretary of state of Africa, had earlier declared that “African oil is of national strategic interest to us, and it will increase and become more important as we go forward.”

Since 9/11 in the guise of fighting terrorism, the United States stepped up its force deployments including special operations forces (SOFs) in Djibouti in Western Africa and other locations with the aim of mounting military missions in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and other countries alleged to be harboring terrorist groups. In mid-January 2003, a new front in the war on terror was also opened in the Sahara desert of West Africa which is inhabited by Muslim populations. A vanguard U.S. force arrived in Mauritania to pave the war for a $100 million plan to bolster military forces and border patrols of Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger. ²⁴

Part of the growing U.S. military in the region has been the training of armies from at least 22 countries and the increase of military aid with Egypt as the major recipient. Under the new basing strategy, a naval base has been planned in Djibouti; other new military bases are also being considered for Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone and Kenya. Bulatlat.com

*This article is based on a paper that the author wrote for the coming second monograph of the Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies (CAIS) in connection with the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003.

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NOTES:

1. Robert Fox, “Special Forces ‘Prepare for Iran Attack,’” Evening Standard, June 17, 2003.

2. Jason Leopold, “U.S. Plans to Overthrow Iranian Regime,” ZNet May 28, 2003.

3. Fox, “Special Forces…”

4. Doug Ireland, “The Next War,” Jan. 5, 2004.

5. Cited in Bobby Tuazon, “The American Empire’s Bases without Borders: New U.S. Global Basing Strategy Gears for a War to Last for Generations,” a paper for Mumbai Resistance 2004, Jan. 16-19, 2004.

6. Alex Callinicos, “The Grand Strategy of the American Empire,” Mike Tait Socialist Review, autumn 2003.

7. Thomas Barnett, “Asian Energy Futures Event Report,” U.S. Naval War College, April 17, 2001.

8. Barnett, “Asian Energy…”

9. Barnett, “Asian Energy…”

10. Cited in Bobby Tuazon, “The New American Empire and the Rise of State Terrorism,” CAIS Monograph, Oct. 2003.

11. Haluk Gergerm, “U.S. Imperialism and the Middle East,” Mumbai Resistance Forum, Mumbai, India, Jan. 16-19, 2004.

12. Callinicos, “The Grand Strategy…”.

13. Cited in Tuazon, “The American Empire’s Bases without Borders…”

14. Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003.

15. Vernon Loeb, “New Bases Reflect Shift in Military,” Washington Post, June 9, 2003.

16. Lawrence Morahan, “U.S. Plans for Military Bases Reflect New Political Reality,” CSSNews.com, April 30, 2003.

17. Thomas Barnett, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” Esquire, March 2003.

18. Jim Lobe, “Pentagon Moving Swiftly to Become ‘GloboCop,’” Inter Press Service, June 10, 2003.

19. Cited in Tuazon, “Bush’s War on Terrorism and the U.S. Drive for World Hegemony,” in Unmasking the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialist Hegemony and Crisis, p. 15, published by CAIS, Nov. 2002, Philippines.

20. Coletta Youngers, “The U.S. and Latin America after 9-11,” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 2003.

21. Youngers, “The U.S. and Latin America…”

22. Youngers.

23. Mike Crawley, “With Mideast Uncertainty, U.S. Turns to Africa for Oil,” Christian Science Monitor, 2002; cited in Tuazon, “Bush’s War on Terrorism and the U.S. Drive for World Hegemony,” Unmasking the War on Terror, CAIS, Nov. 2002)

24. Cited in Tuazon, “The American Empire’s Bases…”

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