Control Of the World's Oceans. Prelude To War?

Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the US 1,000-Ship Navy by Rick Rozoff

Global Research, January 30, 2009

Stop NATO In of the most monumental and sweeping, though frequently overlooked, efforts by the former Bush administration to project worldwide military dominance and in so doing further vitiate international relations is what its initiator, John Bolton, in his capacity of Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security at the time called the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Officially launched on May 31, 2003, the PSI was the broadest application of international power projection by the US in the post-Cold War era, entailing as it does nothing less than the ability to conduct naval surveillance, interdiction and eventually unbridled military action in all the world's oceans. Following and supplementing Operation Enduring Freedom and its six areas of responsibility from South Asia to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean Sea, and the NATO prelude to and prototype of the Proliferation Security Initiative, so-called Operation Active Endeavor which has for over seven years now placed the entire Mediterranean Sea under its control, the PSI is a military operation unilaterally devised and implemented by Washington without prior consultation with the nations and peoples in the targeted areas. And like Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Active Endeavor (in the second category that follows), its self-proclaimed mission is unlimited in geographical scope and in historical time. The PSI was announced with the alleged objective to, according to the ever complacent New York Times, "interdict nuclear materials and contraband". A broad enough charter to include most any naval operation anywhere and for any actual purpose Washington wants to employ it. One that, though, right off paralleled Washington's manipulative conflation of weapons of mass destruction with 'global terrorism,' as will be seen further on. And simply to extend US and allied naval presence and war fighting capabilities to geostrategically vital and coveted sea lanes, waterways, coastal regions, energy and military transit routes and into whichever seas at whichever times doing so meets current political and strategic exigencies. The main focus of the PSI in the preponderance of allusions to it in its early days was North Korea. Later Iran would be increasingly identified as a putative rationale for extending it into the Persian Gulf and, if the US and its allies could devise some method of getting there, the landlocked Caspian Sea. Indeed former Defense Secretary Donald Misfield was an avid advocate of what he deemed a Caspian Guard. The Caspian Sea is, of course, an inland body and not accessible to navies except for those of its five littoral states. As will be demonstrated below, the PSI didn't take long to hunt for 'North Korean contraband' in the Aegean and Black Seas, the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea, inter Alia, if its main concentration remains Asia. The same May 22, 2006 New York Times article from which the earlier citation emanates also included this revealing addendum: "The initiative also involves efforts to restrict financing and suspect commercial transactions for Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and other countries." The countries mentioned are four of the seven indicted by the US government immediately after the 9/11/2001 attacks as "state supporters of terrorism," to wit Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan. The current author wrote on September 12, 2001 that of the above seven states, only one, Sudan, had any previous connection with Osama bin Laden, one severed over five years before; that none of them had recognized the Taliban order in Afghanistan (though firm US allies Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had, and the Emirates is the only Arab nation with a military contingent in Afghanistan to compound the irony); and that three of the seven targeted countries - Iran, Iraq and Syria - had been victims of the very extremism that they were accused of supporting. The "state supporters of terrorism" were supplemented and in most cases superseded by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice during her Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State in January of 2005 when she unveiled the new hit list, the "outposts of tyranny": Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar (Burma), North Korea and Zimbabwe. Of the above nations, some have multi-party parliamentary systems; some are one party states; five have secular governments, one has a religious one; regarding religious background, three are predominantly Christian, two Buddhist and one Muslim. The sole conceivable link they have in common is that each has been the subject of intense and unrelenting efforts by the US and the West in general to isolate it locally and stigmatize it internationally preparatory to intended 'regime change.' And all six have close state-to-state relations with both Russia and China. (read the rest of the article)