Slovene Commentary Says Success of US Troop Redeployment 'Difficult To Assess'
Commentary by Barbara Kremzar: "The Pentagon's New Map"
Originally published on 8/17/2004 by Delo (Internet Version-WWW) in Slovene .
[FBIS Translated Text] Germany, which used to be home to the biggest US military contingent in Europe, is at least slightly saddened. With the closure of military bases, from where the Americans would scare for decades the Soviet Union and also led a military attack on [former President Slobodan] Milosevic's Serbia, whilst both presidents Bush used to settle scores with Saddam Husayn from there, the Americans will finally bid farewell to nice little American towns and the Germans to quite big financial gains. But the punishment of the ally that condemned the war of the president son is merely a less important element in the biggest redeployment of the US army after the end of the Cold War. It's been months that [Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon had been drawing up its new map of the world in which different threats call for different kinds of alliances.
Because the new terrorist threats are so extensive from the American perspective, the little treats, which certain Eastern European allies are going to get in the shape of new, more flexible bases, will not bring much Cold War nostalgia. It is not by chance that the defence secretary travelled to Russia and not to Poland just before the announcement of the new strategy. Washington needs Russia's quiet approval - or at least not loud opposition - of the anti-terrorist and energy front in Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but also approval of the anti-ballistic and other missiles system in Alaska.
But above all, the Americans will try to bring closer to its targets in the Arabic-Persian Gulf the Russians - and Chinese and Japanese and the Europeans - both by trying to convince them of yet another "Islamic" nuclear bomb and by establishing peace in Iraq. The number of fallen US soldiers in this country is fast approaching the number thousand and the US army is already feeling the burden of long-lasting fighting. If it wants to avoid a general call-up, which with the inclusion of the boys from the neighbourhood would certainly spark off a new Vietnam syndrome, Washington cannot keep its servicemen and reservists in peaceful Germany.
It is as yet difficult to assess the final success of the announced changes, but the world can by all means only hope that the devisers of the new US strategy, which can no doubt win wars, have considered also the long-term consequences of military movements better than in the Iraq case. Because of terrorism, the American public agrees that the only remaining superpower must take care of stability of a large part of the world. But military analysts Thomas P. M. Barnett in the book The Pentagon's New Map also writes that the "USA had spent so much energy trying to prevent the horrors of a global war that it forgot to dream about a global peace".
Ljubljana Delo (Internet Version-WWW) in Slovene -- leading centrist daily
