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quote: US asks allies for respect
David Teather in New York
Wednesday February 13, 2002
The Guardian
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told European allies yesterday they should respect the "principled leadership" of the United States, even if they sometimes disagree with it.
Mr Powell, seeking to deflect criticism of the Bush administration's foreign policy, also denied claims of unilateralism and bellicosity within the government.
Concerns among European leaders have been high since President George Bush's state of the union speech last month where he referred to an "axis of evil", encompassing Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Mr Powell, viewed as one of the more moderate officials in the White House, said: "We have demonstrated that we are anxious to reach out to the world. We are not unilateralists pulling back.
"But where we believe strongly about something and we have to stick by our principles, we will do that, and lead and try to convince others to go with us. Our friends are increasingly coming to the understanding that this is principled leadership, the kind they should respect."
A number of European leaders have warned President Bush in recent weeks of a growing discomfort with US policy. The French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, accused the White House of a "simplistic" approach.
The German foreign minister, Joschka Fisher, said yesterday: "Alliance partners are not satellites."
The relationship between the US and its allies is being put further under strain by the suggestion that it may try to overthrow president Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Mr Powell said: "The president does not have before him right now plans for a conflict with anybody."
He said however that force was not ruled out against the so-called "axis of evil". http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,649409,00.html
Top gun - and the rest
The gap between US military capability and that of the rest of the world is now so big that it raises serious questions about the transatlantic alliance
Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday February 13, 2002
The Guardian
We are at a defining moment in transatlantic relations. President Bush's plans for huge increases in the US defence budget, boosting Washington's rhetoric about America's "war" on terrorism which is causing such deep concern among its traditional allies, invites just one conclusion. The growing gap between the US and Europe in terms of sheer military power is now unbridgeable. It was evident before. In the war against Afghanistan, it became glaringly obvious.
It was there, says Michael Clarke, director of the centre for defence studies at King's College, London, that the much-heralded revolution in military affairs was put into practice. The American bombing campaign showed the potential for synergistic military operations, with joint maritime-ground-air force assets using satellites and hi-tech communications technology and giving pilots real-time intelligence. US pilots were able to fire so-called "stand-off" weapons ie drop their bombs and missiles well away from their targets, thereby protecting them from enemy fire from the ground.
The Afghan war also demonstrated the potential offered by armed, unmanned, aircraft - killing the enemy with a robot. The Pentagon, which has been collecting DNA, has even raised the possibility that Osama bin Laden was killed by a missile from a pilotless Predator plane.
All this is way ahead of what any European air force, including the RAF, can do. The huge gap between the Americans and even the best of the Europeans is not confined to expensive air forces. SAS soldiers back from Afghanistan after fighting with US special forces say the Americans' equipment, including communications, was much more advanced than theirs.
Lord Robertson, Nato's secretary general, is increasingly concerned about the future cohesion of the alliance. He recently described Europe as a "military pygmy". Here are some figures. Bush plans to increase US defence expenditure next year by $48bn, a rise of more than 14%. It is the biggest hike for two decades. It is also far in excess of the total annual defence budgets of France and Britain - Europe's biggest military spenders - and larger than the combined annual budgets of 12 other Nato members. By the year 2007, US defence spending will be 11% higher than average cold war levels.
The US spends about $28,000 on research and development for each member of its armed forces. The European average is about $7,000. Even two years ago the US military budget amounted to more than that of all 17 Nato European allies, and Russia and China, combined, according to the latest figures from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The EU, meanwhile, in its attempt to set up a joint rapid reaction force, struggles to coordinate national arms procurement policies. Defence spending may now be bottoming out but other priorities will prevent anything more than minimal increases in European military spending .
Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to Nato, warned last week that "without dramatic action to close the capabilities gap, we face the real prospect of a future two-tiered alliance" - in other words, the US and the rest. He spoke of the "extraordinary technological leap in the quality of American weapons" from the Gulf war to Bosnia, and from Kosovo to Afghanistan.
"Unfortunately," he added, "our allies have not kept pace with us, and we risk an alliance that is so unbalanced that we may no longer have the ability to fight effectively together in the future".
Hi-tech weaponry, said Burns, was critical to fighting modern wars. The Europeans ask the US to share technology with them. Yet America does not want to give up its commercial dominance and does not trust most of the allies with its military secrets. It offers stealth technology to Britain, but not to other European allies. The technology gap is as much about power and politics as money. Europe relies on America's satellite-based global positioning sys tem to target "smart" weapons and locate enemy, and friendly, forces. In December, the Pentagon warned the Europeans against developing Galileo - an alternative, independent, navigation system, being pushed by France in particular.
The Pentagon argued that because Galileo did not incorporate the latest technology (ie American), an enemy could turn it against the west in the event of war. France's President Chirac warned that Europe risked "vassal status" if it abandoned the project. "Galileo is indispensable for European industry, for technological capacity, but also for other issues... such as autonomy and sovereignty," said the EU commissioner responsible for the project, Loyola de Palacio.
At a meeting in Brussels last week, Britain led opposition to Galileo on grounds of cost - which could amount to more than $3bn. The US, meanwhile, is embarking on a secret $25bn project for a new network of spy satellites.
Such is the mood in the US that it can spend all this and continue with an expensive and unproven missile defence project. This will need British bases, making this country, as ministers admit, a potential target with inadequate resources to combat the new threat to its security. Transatlantic solidarity is bound to break up, warned Robertson at an international conference in Munich this month, if "the Americans do the cutting edge while the Europeans are stuck at the bleeding edge, if the Americans fight from the sky and the Europeans fight in the mud".
Yet the alliance faces just such a prospect, with the US bombing away with increasingly sophisticated weaponry, leaving the Europeans to sort out the mess - for example, by placing peacekeepers on the ground. It is a task Blair welcomes as he promotes the cause of humanitarian intervention. Senior military officers are far from happy about the prospect. Yet since the Europeans do not have the resources to fight the US on its own ground - hi-tech military hardware - there seems to be no alternative.
Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor.
richard.norton-taylor@ guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,649280,00.html
Sean (GNN)
quote: Can the US be defeated?
America's global power has no historical precedent, but its room for manoeuvre is limited
Seumas Milne
Thursday February 14, 2002
The Guardian
Those who have argued that America's war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had "better get their house in order" or face what he called the "justice of this nation", it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all.
Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the "full spectrum dominance" the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for 10, 23 and 52 years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.
With his declaration of war against this absurdly named "axis of evil", Bush has abandoned whatever remaining moral high ground the US held onto in the wake of September 11. He has dispensed with the united front against terror, which had just about survived the onslaught on Afghanistan. And he has made fools of those, particularly in Europe, who had convinced themselves that America's need for international support would coax the US Republican right out of its unilateralist laager. Nothing of the kind has happened. When the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer plaintively insists that "alliance partners are not satellites" and the EU's international affairs commissioner Chris Patten fulminates at Bush's "absolutist and simplistic" stance, they are swatted away. Even Jack Straw, foreign minister of a government that prides itself on its clout in Washington, was slapped down for his hopeful suggestion that talk of an axis of evil was strictly for domestic consumption. Allied governments who question US policy towards Iraq, Israel or national missile defence are increasingly treated as the "vassal states" the French president Jacques Chirac has said they risk becoming. Now Colin Powell, regarded as the last voice of reason in the White House, has warned Europeans to respect the "principled leadership" of the US even if they disagree with it.
By openly arrogating to itself the prerogative of such leadership - and dispensing with any restraint on its actions through the United Nations or other multilateral bodies - the US is effectively challenging what has until now passed for at least formal equality between nations. But it is only reflecting reality. The extent of America's power is unprecedented in human history. The latest increases will take its military spending to 40% of the worldwide total, larger than the arms budgets of the next 19 states put together. No previous military empire - from the Roman to the British - had anything like this preponderance, let alone America's global reach. US officials are generally a good deal more frank about the situation than their supporters abroad. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon described US strategy as "benevolent domination" (though whether those who have recently been on the receiving end of US military power, from the Middle East to Latin America, would see it that way seems doubtful). A report for the US Space Command last year, overseen by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, rhapsodised about the "synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority" that would come with missile defence and other projects to militarise space. This would "protect US interests and investment" in an era when globalisation was likely to produce a further "widening between haves and have-nots". It would give the US an "extraordinary military advantage".
In fact, it would only increase further what became an overwhelming military advantage a decade ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the experience of Bush's war on Afghanistan has rammed home the lessons for the rest of the world. The first is that such a gigantic disproportion of international power is a threat to the principles of self- determination the US claims to stand for on a global scale. A state with less than one 20th of the earth's population is able to dictate to the other 95% and order their affairs in its own interests, both through military and economic pressure. The issue is not one of "anti-Americanism" or wounded national pride (curiously, those politicians around the world who prattle most about patriotism are also usually the most slavish towards US power), but of democracy. This is an international order which, as the September 11 attacks demonstrated, will not be tolerated and will generate conflict.
Many doubt that such conflict can amount to anything more than fleabites on an elephant, which has demonstrated its ability to crush any serious challenger, and have come to believe US global domination is here for good. That ignores the political and economic dimensions (including in the US itself), as well as the problems of fighting asymmetric wars on many fronts. In economic terms, the US has actually been in decline relative to the rest of the world since it accounted for half the world's output after the second world war. In the past few years its share has bounced back to nearly 30% on some measures, partly because of the Soviet implosion and Japanese stagnation, and partly because of America's own long boom. But in the medium term, the strain of military overstretch is likely to make itself felt. More immediately, the US could face regional challenges, perhaps from China or Russia, which it would surely balk at pushing to military conflict. Then there is the likelihood of social eruptions in client states like Saudi Arabia which no amount of military technology will be able to see off. America's greatest defeat was, it should not beforgotten, inflicted by a peasant army in Vietnam. US room for manoeuvre may well prove more limited than might appear.
When it comes to some of America's richer and more powerful allies, the opposite is often the case: they can go their own way and get away with it. The Foreign Office minister Peter Hain argued at the weekend that being a steadfast ally of the US didn't mean being a patsy, pointing as evidence to the fact that Britain was able to maintain diplomatic relations with two out of three of President Bush's axis of evil states.
The test of his claim will come when the US government turns its rhetoric into action and demands British support for a full-scale assault on Iraq (as yesterday's Washington drumbeat suggests could be only months away), or the use of the Fylingdales base in Yorkshire for its missile defence plans. Tony Blair has demonstrated none of the limited independence shown by earlier Labour prime ministers, such as Harold Wilson, and all the signs are that he will once again agree to whatever he is asked to do on Britain's behalf. If he is going to stand up to the global behemoth, he's going to need some serious encouragement - both inside and outside parliament. http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,649931,00.html
Speak for Britain
Blair should dare to criticise Bush
Leader
Thursday February 14, 2002
The Guardian
Across Europe, a chorus of alarmed but mostly constructive criticism of George Bush's "axis of evil" state of the union speech continues to grow. First, there was Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, warning against the global unilateralism of the American leader's conflation of Iran, North Korea and Iraq as his next targets. Then came Hubert Védrine, foreign minister of France, soon echoed by his prime minister Lionel Jospin, and then by the European foreign affairs commissioner Chris Patten. At the start of this week, Russia's President Vladimir Putin chipped in, followed on Tuesday by the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. When such witnesses, all friends or would-be friends of America, make such points, they cannot be simply dismissed as the usual anti-American suspects. But, lest anyone still think that such views are confined to Europe, note that there are some very significant American voices of doubt too. Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, said last week that Mr Bush's axis of evil notion made little sense. And the senate foreign relations committee chairman, Senator Joseph Biden, has cautioned that the three evil states are not allies, do not present equivalent threats and have rightly been handled with very distinct foreign policy strategies by Washington in the past.
There is a significant empty chair in this increasingly large and harmonious chorus of concern. Almost alone among serious international leaders (a category from which the strident Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi naturally excludes himself), Tony Blair continues to believe that any public criticism of United States policy is self-indulgent and counter-productive. When the foreign secretary Jack Straw allowed himself to speculate - more in optimism than on any basis in fact - that Mr Bush's rhetoric might be a piece of mid-term electioneering, he was not just slapped down by the Bush administration itself but also by Downing Street, which regards all such apostasy as uniformly unhelpful and disloyal.
Mr Blair is in fact a friendly critic of American policy. But he believes that criticism of Washington can only take place in private between consenting adults, if at all. Whether Mr Bush really listens to Mr Blair is open to some doubt, not just in the light of speeches like the state of the union, or of the continuing US neglect of the Middle East, but also of the Washington Post's recent reconstructions of administration policy-making in the aftermath of September 11, a process in which Mr Blair does not loom large and in which at one point Mr Bush reportedly said he did not want the allies making conditions. "At some point we may be the only ones left," Mr Bush says. "That's OK with me. We are America."
Well, we are not America. We are Britain. Our support for action against terrorism cannot be questioned. But our national interest is independent. It is not in our interest to reduce relations with Iran, North Korea or even Iraq to the fight against terrorism. Still less is it in our interest to pretend that that these regimes can be dealt with only by overwhelming military means of the kind envisaged in Mr Bush's shocking new Pentagon budget. These things need to be said from the position of credibility which this country possesses, and of which Rudolph Giuliani spoke in London yesterday. They need to be said for Britain's sake - and indeed for America's too. They need to be said by our government, and they need to be said, above all, by Mr Blair himself, who by his ill-judged silence risks more of his standing than he appears to recognise. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/attacks/comment/0,1320,649778,00.html
Sean (GNN) |
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