Your foreign policy program at work
After 9/11, U.S. policy built on world bases
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
Government officials have been searching for suitable memorials to the thousands killed in the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, but the most telling monument, which best illustrates the historic turn America's approach to global problems has taken since the attacks, may turn out to be an obscure American air base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.
The Bush administration honored the memory of Chief Peter J. Ganci Jr., the most senior New York City Fire Department official killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center, by naming the new military base there for him.
It was a fitting choice because the facility is just one in a string of new overseas military deployments, beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, that have become a defining characteristic of President Bush's tough style of foreign engagement.
One year after U.S. tanks rolled through Iraq and more than two years after the United States bombed the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, the administration has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.
The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls "lily pads." They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries -- the traditional Cold War role of such installations -- but as jumping-off points for future "preventive wars" and military missions.
In a major policy statement issued in September 2002 and titled the National Security Strategy, the president declared, "It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength," and he detailed two significant new uses of that might: pre-emptively attacking would-be enemies, as in Iraq, and preventing rivals from even considering matching U.S. strength. It was a new assertion of U.S. primacy, not through diplomacy or economics but through unquestioned military domination.
This sharp turn in U.S. policy has ignited a passionate debate -- well beyond the dispute over the wisdom of the war in Iraq -- over the proper role of U.S. power and whether the focus on the projection of military force has taken attention away from such other critical issues as economics and trade, the stunning rise of China as an economic power and the need to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
