A famous phrase in American politics, “speak softly and carry a big stick”, is attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt during a speech. Not 12 days later, President William McKinley was assassinated, and Vice President Roosevelt succeeded him in the presidency and adopted a policy that he described as “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis”. In other words, Roosevelt was talking about pre-emptive wars which George W. Bush so crudely engaged in, following the terrorist attacks of 11/9/2001, backfiring against his country while increasing terrorism around the world as they were waged against it. Has the situation changed with Barack Obama? Many have pointed out that the U.S National Security Strategy did not mention any references to the War on Terror. However, the other tenants of the strategy do not seem to be new: these include defeating al-Qaeda and the extremists who support it in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the whole world, curbing the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons (the focus is on Iran and North Korea, not Israel), boosting peace and security in the greater Middle East, and spreading democracy and freedom around the world. I think that the above points were also present in the policy of the Bush administration, and are not very different from the latter's national security strategy, or from any speech he gave in Sharm el-Sheikh during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. If there is any difference between Bush and Obama, it would be that the first is a cowboy who challenged al-Qaeda to confront him, and the second wears silk gloves and follows the advice of Theodore Roosevelt. The budget of the U.S Department of Defence reached the record figure of 708 billion dollars, and my limited experience with this budget tells me that many defence allocations are also included in the budgets of other departments, which means that with the figure mentioned above, the budget along with the other allocations and annexes will amount to a trillion dollars in a bankrupt country. In fact, the Obama administration asked, while presenting the budget for next year, for an additional 30 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Personally, I don't remember a year since 2001 where the administration did not ask for additional funding for its wars. As is known, there are 737 U.S military bases around the world, with around 200 thousand U.S troops out of 1.8 million personnel in the armed forces, in addition to half a million staff working for the Department of Defence. The spending here also involves hundreds of billions. All the above coincided with a large increase in the special forces, in both numbers and equipment. In the beginning of this year, these forces operated in 60 countries and now, they operate in 77 countries from the Far East to Latin America, including the Middle East, Africa and everywhere else. The stated goal is to fight al-Qaeda and terrorist groups, and the weapon of choice is unmanned aircraft and drones, which the United Nations requested to be dropped because of the civilian casualties. The Washington Post described the operations of these Special Forces as a ‘covert war', as they work alone or in collaboration with the forces of some countries. When I and colleague Ghassan Charbel were in Yemen two months ago, we saw American soldiers taking over shifts of other soldiers, and I remember this because I saw two soldiers leaving their shifts with each carrying a bag of Qat tied to his waist, and one of them laughingly told me that he is happy with his stockpile. The Special Forces carry out both joint and solitary operations, and train local forces on counter-terrorism operations. Its budget increased 5.7 percent under the Obama administration, reaching 6.3 billion dollars, with contingency appropriations of 3.5 billion dollars. John Brennan, the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism described these forces by saying: we will not content ourselves with responding after an attack. We will fight al-Qaeda and the extremist groups linked to it wherever they are plotting and training in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. However this resembles what the Bush administration used to say: “We're fighting them there, so we don't have to fight them here, in the streets of the American cities”. Thus, I don't see a big difference between the strategies of the previous and current administrations, except that President Obama speaks softly, and does not seem enthusiastic about waging pre-emptive wars, unlike his predecessor who used to seek them. I say this, then I defend Obama. He is not weak or hesitant, like his Republican opponents claim. Instead, I find him to be practical, flexible and pragmatic who avoids confrontations as much as possible. Perhaps he will have greater freedom to act after the midterm elections, as he is yet to carry out the promises he made to the Islamic World in his speech in Cairo a year ago. He is also yet to confront Benjamin Netanyahu in what pertains to the peace process or settlements inside Jerusalem itself, and did not yet close down the Guantanamo detention centre nor reached a solution with Iran, but only continued the same policy of sanctions as before. Despite the above and despite everything else, Barack Obama remains a thousand times better than George W. Bush. It remains for him to achieve the hopes expected from his presidency. [email protected]
