Tomgram: Michael Klare, A New Cold War in Asia?

Posted by Michael Klare at 9:24am, December 6, 2011.

 

Last Friday, the U.S. military formally handed over its largest base in Iraq, the ill-named “Camp Victory,” to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  The next morning, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius officially declared counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East dead in -- if you don’t mind an inapt word -- the water.  (He is personally in mourning.)  He quoted one unnamed official describing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s planning for the new Pentagon budget in this fashion: “It’s not going to be likely that we will deploy 150,000 troops to an area the way we did in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

No indeed.  As a result, in the inter-service scramble for the biggest slice of the Defense Department’s budgetary pie, the winners, Ignatius tells us, are going to be the Air Force and the Navy.  Translated geopolitically, this means that the focus of future military planning will switch to the Pacific -- with this country’s largest foreign creditor, China (not al-Qaeda), as the new enemy.