ShareThisMEXICO CITY - A couple of opinion pieces appeared in two of this city's dailies that would not normally reach U.S. audiences and are worthy of mention.
The one by Luís Gutierrez Esparza, appearing Dec. 28 in Excelsior, recaps disclosures that have been trickling out about U.S. military policy since last year. Gutierrez Esparza reminds readers that The Washington Post had disclosed during mid-2011 that the Obama government intensified a secret war on hostile countries and organizations.
With a considerable budget, the U.S. is today active in more than 75 countries, 15 more than in 2009. Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill disclosed that the Obama administration has sent special-forces units to Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan, the Philippines and, since 2006, to Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico.
We have, of course, already been primed to understand that our military policy is gearing for new kinds of engagements, should they become necessary. The new policy is asynchronous, which means confronting the adversary on the same basis it operates. Who or what comprises the opposition, and the method of engagement, is situational. In this world, the military can do police actions and police do military work. Aid workers (like those from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House) serve as leverage.
Last May, Gutierrez Esparza, who heads the think tank Latin American Circle for International Studies, said a German authority had revealed that NATO had 29 military bases in Latin America, stretching from El Paso, Texas, to Tierra del Fuego, just above Antarctica. The number of U.S. soldiers deployed to these bases is kept secret.
The United Kingdom maintains three bases: in the Falkland Islands off the tip of South America, and in South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands in the south Atlantic Ocean. The U.S. air base in Palanqueto, Colombia, is a point of departure to Africa. Honduras, Panama and El Salvador also have bases.
But all this preparation for war is like saddling a horse backward. You can't get to where you're going that way. Which brings up Farid Kahhat's thought piece in Reforma's Dec. 31 edition, mostly looking at interventions by great powers.
In fact, wars are actually diminishing, he says, because of U.N. peace missions. In a cost-benefit calculation, the average intervention costing $8.5 billion saves $18 billion to $75 billion when the mission is only nation building.
Kahhat notes a Rand Corp. study showing that eight U.N. peacekeeping missions attained a sustainable peace in seven. Meanwhile, of eight U.S.-led interventions, only four led to a sustainable peace.
The sources of conflict include poverty, economic and social inequality, or regime changes that give rise to "anocracies": countries in which a central authority or its absence create a power vacuum to be filled by competing elites, warlords, pirates and criminals.
The changes in military policy strategy and budget that President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced are driven by the need to save $450 billion over 10 years and to end the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, even with a new "asynchronous" strategy and new sights set on the Pacific and Asia, there are limits to what violence accomplishes. Sometimes it takes a U.N. posse, economics and, most of all, strategic intelligence to attain what it was believed only a John Wayne could do.
The opinion pieces seem to urge comprehending the limits of power. One-time Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright wrote about that in 1967, in a book he called "The Arrogance of Power."
(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. Email him at joseisla3(at)yahoo.com.)
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