Obama's "deep cuts" in military spending largely illusory

A couple of months ago, President Obama announced 'deep cuts' in US military spending, sending signals to hopeful liberals and pessimistic conservatives alike. But, as is so frequently the case with Barack Obama's announcements, rhetorical flourishes need unpacking, and who better to open up this matter than someone who's job it is to read the fine print and tell us what the 'deep cuts' announcement actually means.

Not very much, as it turns out. Despite being the 'soft power' president, offering the hand of friendship rather than a clenched fist to the world, Brack Obama continues to pursue policies that fit right in with his Republican predecessor. 50 years and a few short months after President Eisenhower's warnings about the corrosive effects of a 'military-industrial complex', President Obama continues to fund, empower and encourage the most aggressive and militaristic elements of American society, economy and polity.

The author of the article reprinted below from a blog at Forbes magazine is:

Loren Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of the private consultancy Source Associates. The Lexington Institute receives money from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, and Source Associates provides technical services to companies in the industry.

http://blogs.forbes.com/beltway/2011/04/19/obamas-deep-defense-cuts-wont-amount-to-much/

ACCESSED 29 JUNE 2011

Obama’s “Deep” Defense Cuts Won’t Amount To Much

Apr. 19 2011 - 9:16 am | 4,059 views

Posted by Loren Thompson

On April 13, President Obama finally got around to saying what he would do about the federal government’s huge budget deficit. Not surprisingly, one of the items in his proposed deficit-reduction package was cuts in spending on national security — $400 billion over 12 years, to be precise. Well, maybe precise is the wrong term to use here.

The White House hasn’t clarified whether it’s counting inflation, where the cuts would fall, or when. In fact, it hasn’t really said much at all beyond the big top-line number. Nonetheless, the lead in the next day’s Washington Post story described “deep cuts in military and domestic spending,” and Politico warned of “far-reaching implications” that might entail “a dramatic reduction in the U.S. military’s global footprint, size and capabilities.”

These characterizations seem a bit exaggerated. Mr. Obama’s new and improved plan for slimming down America’s national-security posture likely will entail little sacrifice for the federal government’s biggest source of discretionary spending, the Department of Defense. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of wasteful spending to be found — the Army will spend over $2 billion during the period in question just on its music bands — but the way the President has couched his proposed savings minimizes their likely impact on security (and the deficit). Let’s take a look at some of the factors mitigating what seems like a very big cut in spending.

The first and most obvious point to note is that Mr. Obama won’t even be in office during most of the period when his reductions are supposed to be realized. The factsheet distributed by the White House press office predicts the president’s security cuts would “save $400 billion by 2023,” but even if he is re-elected to a second four-year term in 2012, that would still require his successor to follow through on implementing the savings for the last seven years of a twelve-year period. Nobody today can say whether that successor will be a Democrat or a Republican, what new security challenges might arise, or how the government’s fiscal circumstances could change. What can be said for sure is that new presidents seldom feel bound by the priorities of their predecessors, and thus the Obama efficiencies are likely to be forgotten long before 2023 rolls around.

A second factor that has gotten short shrift in initial coverage of the president’s proposals is the sheer scale of planned defense spending during the period in question. The government hasn’t yet released spending plans for the last two years of the period covered by the President’s pronouncements, but it has disclosed planned defense spending of over $6 trillion during the ten years ending in 2021. Robert Ewers of Height Analytics estimated in an April 14 note that the last two years of the covered period — assuming two percent inflation annually — would raise the 12-year total to $7.5 trillion in military outlays. So if the president is expressing his aggregate security savings in then-year rather than constant dollars, which is almost certainly the case, then the $400 billion only amounts to 5.3 percent of Pentagon spending during the period. Saving one out of every twenty dollars spent from a defense budget that has seen buying power balloon by 75 percent over the past ten years doesn’t sound like a herculean task.

But the task isn’t even that hard, because a third mitigating factor in the president’s proposed cuts is that they would be derived from the government’s entire security community, not just the Department of Defense. That broader security community currently includes an annual budget of $53 billion for the Department of State and international programs, $57 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, $43 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and $11 billion for Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs. Each of these departments expects annual budget increases during the period in question, and there are additional intelligence outlays not reported in public documents that are funded outside the Pentagon budget. Add those to the defense budget for the period 2012-2023, and total security outlays approach a staggering $10 trillion. Thus, the $400 billion in savings that President Obama is seeking represents only about four percent of the amount the government currently proposes to spend on all security functions during his target period.

Finding an average of $33 billion in annual savings in America’s current, overgrown security apparatus is not likely to entail heavy political lifting for this president or whoever follows him. In fact, Mr. Obama’s aides were able to identify two trillion dollars in prospective savings across the entire federal government over a ten-year period during his first month in office, half of which were supposed to come just from getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But those savings didn’t materialize the way the administration planned due to congressional resistance, and that brings us to one other point about the Obama defense cuts: none of them will happen unless Congress goes along, which it probably won’t. Despite all the speculation about Tea Party deficit hawks making common cause with liberals on the other side of the aisle to cut Pentagon spending, there just isn’t much evidence Republicans are ready to slash military outlays. Party leaders like Representatives John Boehner and Paul Ryan have explicitly said they will not countenance big cuts in the military budget, regardless of what other tradeoffs have to be made.

So the bottom line on President Obama’s “deep cuts” in security spending is that many of them probably won’t happen, but even if they did the damage to America’s military posture and global presence is likely to be modest. The White House has already directed that any new cuts to defense spending be preceded by a comprehensive review of capabilities and missions, meaning that whatever budget cuts occur will be allocated to avoid harming essential functions. What’s remarkable about the proposed reductions isn’t their size, but the stubbornness with which the Obama Administration continues to resist turning the Pentagon into a bill-payer for other priorities. This isn’t the way Democratic administrations are supposed to behave when wars are ending, and it suggests much of the rhetoric about a coming defense downturn has been overdone. Preserving a strong security posture may be one area where bipartisanship still has a future.

Loren Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of the private consultancy Source Associates. The Lexington Institute receives money from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, and Source Associates provides technical services to companies in the industry.

Despite Obama's anouncement, America in Afghanistan to Stay

There's an old saying about the art of political smoke and mirrors: 'signal left while turning right'. Obama's Afghanistan speech last night has been hailed by some as a turning point, and in the long run it may well turn out to be. In the short term, however, very little is likely to change: the US will still have ca 70,000 troops on the ground after the 'surge' troops Obama ordered in 2009 leave. 70,000 troops is still around twice the levels Obama inherited from the Bush administration.

There's another saying: 'follow the money'. The article below does just that.

Source: CNNMoney
Journalist: Charles Riley
Original Post: Troops Drawdown Won't Stop Spending Machine
Type: Blog Post

June 22, 2011 — When snow starts falling in Afghanistan later this year, fewer U.S. soldiers will be on the ground, and fewer taxpayer dollars will be required to continue to finance the war.

President Obama is expected to announce Wednesday evening that a portion of the 30,000 surge troops he ordered to Afghanistan will be brought home later this year.

But the savings in the first year -- probably less than $10 billion -- won't be much to write home about, especially considering the U.S. has already run up a $443 billion tab in Afghanistan.

It's not yet clear exactly how many troops will leave the country, or when. But according to an analysis conducted by Center for a New American Security researcher Travis Sharp, if 15,000 troops were removed in fiscal year 2012, taxpayers would save $7 billion over the previous year's spending levels.

That level of savings is hard to get excited about.

"Seven billion is really quite modest," said Sharp. "If people think taking out surge troops is the answer to the Pentagon's budget problems, they have another thing coming."

In recent years, spending in Afghanistan has skyrocketed, right along with troop levels.

The United States spent $43 billion on the war in 2008, seven years after hostilities began, according to a Congressional Research Service report. This year, spending will hit $118 billion. There were 33,000 troops on the ground in 2009. Now there are 102,000.

Generally speaking, more troops mean higher costs for the military.

The bin Laden spending spree

Some researchers have estimated that each soldier on the ground in Afghanistan costs the military as much as $1 million a year. That's the top-end range.But there are other factors to consider.For the military, one of the biggest cost drivers in simple geography. Afghanistan is home to some very, very rough terrain, no ports, and little in the way of infrastructure.

"It's a landlocked country and you have to truck everything in from somewhere," said Chris Hellman, senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project, who added that supply lines are often disrupted by Afghan militants.

Fuel, for example, is shipped from Pakistan in convoys of trucks that must endure challenging terrain, a lack of decent highways, and a tricky border crossing. All that increases cost.

Another driver of cost in recent years is a vast expansion in operations and maintenance costs, which have nearly doubled between 2004 and 2008, from $42 billion to $80 billion.

And spending on war-related investments like mine-resistant trucks and base construction necessary for the unique challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan still costs billions every year.

Pentagon budget: Time to cut

Just because troops start leaving Afghanistan, those costs won't go away. And if combat forces leave, other kinds of spending might have to increase.

"We may see a shift in funding rather than a reduction," Hellman said. "We might just be moving money from combat accounts to support accounts."

Afghan security forces, for example, might get a funding boost as their duties expand. Already the United States has increased the money spent on that force from $1.3 billion in 2005 to $11.6 billion in 2011.

Hellman said U.S. taxpayers will be footing that bill for a long time. After all, the GDP of Afghanistan was only $27 billion in 2010, according to the CIA factbook.

And even the act of pulling soldiers out of the fight will cost, Sharp said, citing additional transportation and security spending necessary to complete the drawdown.

Tony Blair: New Chapter, Same Old Imperial Story

Tony Blair, interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning, selling the paperback of his autobiography, A Journey. It has a new chapter further to justify Western military and other interventionism in the Middle East. He gave two reasons: first, what happens "over there" affects "us" over here; secondly, the changes in the Middle east need to be comprehensive - political, economic, social - and must be "evolutionary" NOT "revolutionary". This was loosely introduced under the broad banner of "humanitarian" intervention.

Blair provided no elaboration on precisely how "over there" affects "over here", nor was he pressed to, indicating an underlying assumption in the discussion: that everywhere is a "Western" interest, and the "West" (which presumably now also includes Saudi Arabia) had better be ready and willing permanently to intervene. The second assumption was just as instructive: that Middle eastern states are of interest to the West because the latter just want to 'do good' in the former, neatly eliding very recent history not to mention the longer record of colonial rule and interference. In that regard, Blair echoes, from his perch as Middle East peace envoy, the message pumped out of the White House by President Barack Obama, and by current premier, David Cameron.

Back in 2010, USBlog noted that Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal coalition government’s foreign and national security policy team may be inexperienced, but their ideological record is not unclear: the team is made up of a mixture that may prove quite lethal in terms of overseas interventions behind a ‘renewed’ and ‘re-balanced’ ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

David Cameron has denied being a ‘neo-conservative’ in foreign policy terms; he claims to be a ‘liberal-conservative’. On those grounds, Cameron had supported the Iraq War and, in 2010, restated his commitment to that course of action.

Cameron outlined his interventionist plans at a speech at Chatham House, in January 2010. There is nothing original in his national security ‘strategy’s’ goals: he wants Britain to intervene before potential threats become actual threats: “we need to do much better at stopping wars from ever starting and that means really focussing on the causes of conflicts and then joining all that together to make sure that DfiD and the Foreign Office deliver a really tight, tied-up, progressive approach.”

In 2006, Cameron told an audience at the British-American Project that 9-11 style attacks represented a kind of “terrorism [that] cannot be appeased – it has to be defeated”, and called for increasing the size of the security services. He wanted to take elements that were best in the British neo-conservative approach (i.e., what Cameron attributes to Tony Blair’s approach) – appreciation of the scale of the terrorist threat, the centrality of “the leadership of the United States, supported by Britain… to the struggle”, the correctness of “extending freedom…[as] an essential objective of Western foreign policy”, and commitment to the use of military force, including “pre-emptive force” and for “humanitarian purposes”.

As a liberal, Cameron supports “spreading freedom and democracy,” but as a conservative he remains sceptical of “grand schemes to remake the world”. Cameron’s is a call for ‘realism’ in light of what’s happened since 2003 in Iraq and Afghanistan: greater multilateralism, exploring military and non-military options, including winning “hearts and minds”, development aid, public diplomacy and strategic communications.

At the same time as calling for multilateralism, Cameron argued that the United Nations may not always be the best vehicle for decisive international intervention; “So we may need to fashion alliances which can act faster than the machinery of formal international institutions.” This sounds suspiciously like ‘coalitions of the willing’ assembled ahead of the Iraq war.

In the struggle to defend “civilisation”, Cameron told the British-American Project that Britain would be “moral”, that its foreign policy (quoting Victorian era prime minister, WE Gladstone), “should always be inspired by a love of freedom”, and that its methods match the morality of its goals.

This may not be full-blooded neo-conservatism, hubristic before the chastening experience of Iraq. It may not be full-blooded conservatism, eschewing grand schemes and ideas on a global scale. Cameron’s views, which are now central to his coalition government, merely serve to remind us that the post-9-11 Anglo-American story was not a neo-con hijacking: it was the fusion of several tendencies that had previously been in tactical disagreement – liberal interventionism combining Gladstonian and Wilsonian morality, with a wounded (American) conservative nationalism, in a language and terminology so skilfully developed by groups of neo-cons previously known as ‘the Crazies’.

That post-9-11 fusion was institutionalised in the US by the passing of power from Republican George W. Bush to the Democratic Obama; and in Britain by its passing from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour to the Conservative-Liberal Cameron. Blair may have written a new chapter; he remains fully committed to his imperial journey.

Militarised Memorials

The post below is by Richard Jackson and is characteristically excellent. It is from his blog, the address of which is below. It is timely, of course. Britain is at war in Libya and in Afghanistan, and its military casulaties are honoured and on display in practically all aspects of life: schools, nurseries, TV shows, charitable events, and sporting occasions, most recently when Manchester United were awarded the Premier League champions trophy.

USBlog has noted numerous times the militarisation of British national life, and the great discomfort it causes those who take the views that Richard so eloquently, and sensitively, espouses. This discomfort with "military sacrifice" and "heroism" exists at all levels including at the very pinnacles of British government and state.

I've been reading Sherard Cowper-Coles's book, Cables From Kabul, which is very enlightening about the mindsets of British and American elites as a seemingly endless war rages in Afghanistan. Cowper-Coles is a loyal servant of the Crown but refers to the mission in that tragic country as "a kind of military colonialism" foisted on a country and people who have little say in in their own affairs. He also indicates the lack of "balance" and levels of deference towards the military that exist today. This makes it "awkward and unpatriotic to criticise that [military] machine..."

Managing the war machine is not easy, Cowper-Coles argues: in the Ministry of Defence, he says, top civilian officials are "treated by their military colleagues rather as second-class citizens", making it difficult to argue with military planners. In addition, even Cabinet Ministers don't know, and appear unwilling to find out, the difference between a Tornado ground attack aircraft "and a torpedo" and, therefore could not "possibly question the Chief of the Defence Staff on this".

Memorial Day 2011

May 30, 2011 by richardjacksonterrorismblog

I would attend Memorial Day services if…

I would attend Memorial Day services if the churches were not festooned with military flags and the emblems of war and conquest. It would be more appropriate to have flags of peace and pictures of war’s pity and grief so the congregation might be better reminded of its brutality and the colossal destruction and waste of human life war has always caused.

I would attend Memorial Day services if they laid wreaths of the white poppies of peace rather than the red poppies of the Legion. It seems to me that the red poppies have lost their original meaning as remembrance for the unspeakable destruction of human life and the commitment to ensuring ‘never again’; instead, they valorize the heroic dead, plaster over the waste of human life, and make the call to sacrifice a noble gesture. The white poppies, in contrast, symbolize an explicit commitment to finding alternatives to ritual slaughter and the remembrance of all the victims of war, soldier and civilian alike.

I would attend Memorial Day services if they said prayers for all the victims of war, and not just the soldiers sent to kill. It seems obscene to me to pray solely for those who rained down death on their fellow human beings, and not for the countless, nameless, innocent people they killed in the name of patriotism, militarism, imperialism.

I would attend Memorial Day services if the clergy prayed for the forgiveness of the massacres, the unlawful killings, the torture, the brutality and the crimes committed by our own soldiers acting in our name. It is a willful deception to pretend that our soldiers have not committed grievous crimes against humanity, that they have not fought in wars of aggression and imperialism to enslave others and pursue our own material gain. Some prayers for forgiveness for this long history of brutality would seem to be in order when we remember war.

I would attend Memorial Day services if prayers were prayed against the venal, cowardly, vainglorious politicians who are so willing to spill the blood of fellow humans so freely, who hunger for the glory of military victory, who believe that national identity requires an enemy to defeat and humiliate, and who lack the intelligence, imagination and moral courage to find a non-violent solution to their conflicts. Politicians are the slave-owners of previous centuries, prisoners of a brutish bygone era, moral luddites who refuse to believe in the ethical progress on plain view before their eyes. To them, the discrediting of eugenics, the establishment of universal human rights, women’s emancipation, and the growth of global environmental responsibility are as nothing; they still see the orgy of organized killing as a necessary response to human conflict – as if slavery could be an alternative to multiculturalism. They are the enemies of humanity, a demonic force to be resisted, dangerous lunatics.

I would attend Memorial Day services if the priests and clergy took the opportunity to preach a message of peace and non-violence: if they spoke of Jesus’ commands to turn the other cheek, to love your enemy, and to pray for those that persecute you; if they recounted how Jesus told Peter to put away his sword, and how he was called the Prince of Peace; how in his first sermon, Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’; how Christians are commanded to work towards the coming of God’s kingdom when swords will be beaten into ploughshares and no one will study war anymore. The Jesus I read about in the Gospels would never shoot someone in the face or drop a bomb on their house, tearing the bodies of children into pieces. He would never light someone on fire with a flame-thrower to hear their flesh bubble and burn in the heat. The Jesus I read about would lay down his life, rather than call down his army, even when he was unjustly persecuted by an occupying imperial power.

I would attend Memorial Day services if they spoke the truth about why we sent our best young men to war, instead of telling blatant lies about how they fought for our liberty, how they died so we might be enjoy democracy. More often than not, they were sacrificed on the altar of imperialism and greed or the venal stupidity of politicians. Few soldiers I know join to fight for country or patriotism; they most often fight instead for bread, opportunity denied them through unjust social structures, or their mates.

I would attend Memorial Day services if the clergy made it clear that according to Christian doctrine, war is evil, and that the Just War doctrine used to legitimize military force today was written by clergymen, not by Jesus Christ, and that it has little basis in scripture. The clergy need to make it clear that this man-made doctrine of Just War is based on the proposition that war is evil, even though sometimes it may be a greater evil not to go to war – but that the most important point is that war can never be good; it is inherently and irrevocably evil. This point has never been made in any Remembrance Day service I have ever attended or seen.

I would attend Memorial Day services if the clergy followed Christ’s example and refused to serve in the military, refused to bless militarized patriotism, prayed for our enemies instead, and if the church made clear its first loyalty to God’s kingdom of peace and justice.

I would attend Memorial Day services if such rituals were not part of the social infrastructure of military propaganda that primes people to accept violence as normal and makes war likely again.

Obama's Egyptian Dawn Under Military Rule

From the pages of Foreign Affairs, democracy promoter, Larry Diamond, on the low intensity democracy Obama is backing in the Middle East.

"The decades-long political winter in the Arab world seemed to be thawing early this year as mass protests toppled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February. It appeared as though one rotten Arab dictatorship after another might fall during the so-called Arab Spring. Analogies were quickly conjured to 1989, when another frozen political space, Eastern Europe, saw one dictatorship after another collapse. A similar wave of democratic transitions in the Arab world was finally possible to imagine, particularly given the extent to which previous transformations had been regional in scope: Portugal, Spain, and Greece all democratized in the mid-1970s; much of Latin America did shortly thereafter; Korea and Taiwan quickly followed the Philippines’ political opening in 1986; and then a wave of change in sub-Saharan Africa began in 1990. All of those were part of the transformative “third wave” of global democratization. In March, many scholars and activists reasonably imagined that a “fourth wave” had begun.

Two months later, however, a late spring freeze has seemingly hit some areas of the region. And it could be a protracted one. Certainly, each previous regional wave of democratic change had to contend with authoritarian hard-liners, opposition divisions, and divergent national trends. But most of the Arab political openings are closing faster and more harshly than happened in other regions -- save for the former Soviet Union, where most new democratic regimes quickly drifted back toward autocracy.

If Tunisia still provides grounds for cautious optimism, the Egyptian situation is already deeply worrying. Its senior officer corps, which currently controls the government, does not want to facilitate a genuine democratic transition. It will try to prevent it by generating conditions on the ground that discredit democracy and make Egyptians (and U.S. policymakers) beg for a strong hand again. The ruling officers have turned a blind eye to mounting religious and sectarian strife (and an alarming explosion in crime). The military has spent enormous effort arresting thousands of peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square and trying them in military tribunals over the last two months. (In April, one such detainee, a blogger named Maikel Nabil, was sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting the military establishment.”) Yet it claims that it cannot rein in rising insecurity. Many Egyptians see this as part of the military’s grand design to undermine democracy before it takes hold.

The parliamentary elections slated for September are unlikely to help: New political forces have no chance of being able to build competitive party and campaign structures in time. The Muslim Brotherhood, which initially said it would only contest a third of the parliamentary seats, has now announced its intention to contest half of all seats, forming a new political party (Freedom and Justice) for the purpose. If the electoral system retains its highly majoritarian nature, it might well win a thumping majority of the seats it contests (perhaps 40 percent in all), with most of the rest going to local power brokers and former stalwarts of the Mubarak-era ruling party, the National Democratic Party.

Both theory and political experience teach that regimes with spent legitimacy do not last, and the legitimacy of the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni dictators is utterly depleted.

Elsewhere in the region, Bahrain’s minority Sunni monarchy opted to crush peaceful protests and arrest and torture many of those with whom it might have negotiated some future power-sharing deal. With active Iranian support and a bizarre degree of American and Israeli acceptance, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a slow-motion massacre that could go on for weeks or even months. In Yemen, the government is paralyzed, food prices are rising, and the country is drifting. Having seen the fate of Mubarak, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is playing for time, but his legitimacy is irretrievably drained, and he lacks the ability to mobilize repressive force on the scale of Assad’s."

Anglo-American Joint Strategy Board Announced

President Obama has announced the formation of an Anglo-American Joint Strategy Board, cementing what he referred to as "the essential relationship" between the two powers. The details, such as they are, are provided below in a White House press release. Among other measures, the White House also announced that Britian and the Us would work more closely together to support their armed forces and veterans in various ways, including linking them ever more deeply into community life. Postgraduate student exchange programmes also receive a boost as do links between the British Voluntary Service Overseas organisation and the US Peace Corps.

It may not be 'special' but the relationship between the two Anglo-Saxon powers remains deep and enduring. This is not because of sentiment, though that does play a peripheral role. It is because Anglo-American elites share an understanding and definition of the world, and its 'problems' and issues, which tends to align them on the really biq questions of world politics: resistance to western power, rising Chinese influence, uprisings in the Arab world.

President Obama's Visit to the UK, May 2011

25 May 2011

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

___________________________________________________________________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FACT SHEET: The U.S.-UK Joint Strategy Board


The United States and the United Kingdom today are announcing the creation of a Joint Strategy Board. The Board will help enable a more guided, coordinated approach to analyze the “over the horizon” challenges we may face in the future and also how today’s challenges are likely to shape our future choices. It is designed to better integrate long-term thinking and planning into the day-to-day work of our governments and our bilateral relationship, as we contemplate how significant evolutions in the global economic and security environment will require shifts in our shared strategic approach.


The Joint Strategy Board, co-chaired by the U.S. National Security Staff and the U.K. National Security Secretariat, will include representatives from the Departments of State and Defense, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Joint Intelligence Organization. It will report to the U.S. and U.K. National Security Advisors, Thomas E. Donilon and Sir Peter Ricketts.


The Joint Strategy Board will meet quarterly alternating between sites in the United States and United Kingdom. The U.S. and U.K. National Security Advisors will review the status of the Board after one year and decide whether to renew its mandate.

Obama Elides America's record in the Middle East

President Barack Obama's recent speech on the Middle East is hailed by many as signalling new departures for the region. Even those those who read speeches carefully, or at least press accounts and commentaries on them, are encouraged by the tone and 'realism' in the words Obama used. They are encouraged by the 'moderate' language, the soothing tone, the reasonableness of it all. Here is a man struggling to redefine America's approach in line with its recent history in Iraq and recent uprisings across the Arab world. He's constrained, many eager and reluctant supporters argue, by entrenched forces so he can only do so much: the US foreign policy establishment, as Stephen Walt argues, is hard to shift and casts a permanent shadow over the White House. Two inherited wars from the Bush era continue to hamstring Obama. "Girl power" it is said - Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice - forced Obama's hand on Libya. The US military forced his hand over the 'surge' in Afghanistan. Israeli PM, Netanyahu, threatens the 'peace process' while Obama tries against entrenched interests to solve the problem.

The United States is now on the 'right side of history' in backing democratic forces in the Arab world, Obama suggests. It is on the side of the people against the vested interests, and is backing democratic change. Of course, it must uphold its 'vital interests' in defeating terrorism and maintaining the free flows of commerce and oil, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Therein lies the elision of history in Obama's latest speech to restore America's image in the world: the war on terror has been waged largely in the Middle east and involved the active support of pro-US elites in torture and rendition and disappearances. Billions of dollars of US aid has poured into the coffers of the militaries of the region, many of which are using those weapons systems and equipment to put down uprisings across the region - in Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, among others. Obama has hardly uttered a word on that oppression and even when he has the words are contradicted by the renewed aid packages to the military regime in Egypt, and the Saleh administration in Yemen.

In Egypt, the US supports a 'negotiated path to reform' under the auspices of the very regime that was headed by Hosni Mubarak. Even as Obama lauds democracy's stirrings in Egypt the military there are cracking down on strikes by underpaid workers suffering untrammeled neoliberal reforms forced by the US in a bid to keep open the flows of commerce.

On Israel Obama is said to lead the way to renewing the peace process: two states based on 1967 borders. Yet, in his speech, he pledged undying support for Israel, the only power with nuclear weapons in the region and which has violated UN resolutions for decades with American support. Israel continues to build illegal settlements on the West Bank; meanwhile Obama signed off Bush's $30 billion aid package to Israel and continues to sell weapons systems to Israel far superior to such aid and sales to US' Arab allies in the region - to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge. To the Palestinians he urged moderation and non-violence.

The 'Palestine Papers' published by The Guardian and other media a few months ago showed quite clearly the doube standards of the US and Israel in the peace process: the Palestine Authority offered practically everything Israel demanded. Like Israel, Obama refuses to recognise Hamas, despite its victory in democratic elections.

American policy towards a democratic Middle east remains wedded to its 'core interests'. Caught on the hop by the uprisings in the Arab world, Obama initially gave full backing to repressive regimes. Finding that the uprsings were serious and unlikely to fade away, he eventually backed change - but a negotiated change under the auspices of the very regimes that were the source of the problem so far as protestors were concerned. Such negotiated change is likely to produce 'low-intensity democracy' - regimes that have limited space for dissent because their own elites have a lot to lose, including massive American aid. But market reforms will proceed at full pelt.

No leader operates without constraints. Yet, it's clear that Obama chose after long deliberation to send in tens of thousands of additional US troops to Afghanistan. Contra Walt, Obama is part of the US foreign policy establishment - not its plaything or pawn.

The 'hesitation' that Obama exhibits before taking action is born of his own character and personality - a 'fence sitter' who deliberates excessively to look at the pros and cons of action, according to Britain's ambassador to the US. And the world situation today suits Obama's personality - it's complicated and changing. It requires an Obama rather than a Bush. In the end, however, American policy hardly seems to shift, despite Obama's continuous re-setting oratory.