Imperium Americana’s Regional Warlords March to Their Own Drum Beats
Not since the days of the Roman Empire have regional warlords commanded so much authority to craft their own military and diplomatic policies apart from the central government. The United States calls its warlords «combatant commanders» and the title is not misleading. These combatant commanders are always looking for new wars and conflicts, all of which are in the personal interests of them and their top military echelons, but certainly not in the general interest of the American people.
American combatant commanders rule over their own virtual fiefdoms, which the Pentagon calls «areas of responsibility» or «AORs». The Roman Empire’s warlords were called «proconsuls» and they were military commanders appointed to govern newly-conquered territories. These Roman AORs, known as proconsular imperia, differed little from modern-day American AORs. However, the Roman proconsuls were much more answerable to the Roman emperors than American combatant commanders are presently to the President of the United States.
The U.S. military-intelligence complex has divided the world into AORs over which combatant commanders exercise authority over U.S. military, political, diplomatic, and, increasingly, economic decision-making. These commands – U.S. Central Command, Pacific Command, European Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, and Africa Command – also involve themselves in the military and political activities of nations within their AORs that are either allied with the United States or dependent on U.S. security arrangements. Conveniently, the chief of the U.S. European Command also served as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, the military chief of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Effectively, NATO is an integral part of U.S. military hegemony.
In the third century AD various Roman governors took up arms against one another to vie for the emperorship of the collapsing Roman Empire. Today, the same phenomenon is taking place among America’s warlords who are attempting to expand their AORs at their rival’s expense.
One of the most aggressive of America’s combatant commander warlords is the head of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, Admiral Harry Harris. While at the vanguard of Obama’s ill-conceived and dangerous military «pivot to Asia», Harris recently appeared to extend his AOR to the area already claimed by the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM. White CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel has been busy squaring off militarily with Iran in the Persian Gulf, Harris, in a speech in San Diego, spoke of his AOR encompassing the «Indo-Asia-Pacific» region, a clear indication that Harris is expanding his military governate to the Indian Ocean and South Asia.
Harris recently used the term «Indo-Asia-Pacific» to describe his military «rice bowl» before a group of military industrial complex group called the San Diego Military Advisory Council. Like a dictatorial Roman general, Harris warned Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his government against making any more anti-American statements. Duterte has rebelled against Harris’s wishes by adopting a conciliatory policy toward China in the South China Sea maritime dispute and demanding that the United States withdraw its Special Forces troops from the southern Philippines. Duterte hails from the southern island of Mindanao.
Further enraging Harris was the statement by Philippines Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay that his country would no longer be treated as America’s «little brown brother». The tradition of Harris’s Navy is that Filipino stewards once catered to every whim of U.S. naval officers, from cooking their meals and shining their shoes to cleaning their toilets and pressing their uniforms. The paternalistic attitude toward the Philippines by officers like Harris has never truly died out.
Harris let the San Diego militarist group know that his patience with Duterte is wearing thin and he issued the Philippines president a stark warning: «We have been allied with the Philippines for a long time. We have shed our blood with them… We fought side by side during World War II. I consider our alliance with the Philippines to be iron-clad».
In other words, Harris threw down the gauntlet and let Duterte know that the U.S. Pacific Command would not tolerate any movement of the Philippines toward either neutrality or a pro-China policy. What makes Harris’s statement alarming is that it was always in the purview of American presidents and secretaries of state to issue demarches to foreign leaders. Under Obama, that authority has now fallen to combatant commanders and it is a further sign that American diplomacy has been seized by the Pentagon and its highest echelons.
Harris’s extension of his military interests to South Asia means that his AOR and that of CENTCOM now maintain the same militarized «Line of Control» in disputed Kashmir as that of military rivals India and Pakistan. The region of Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan and Ladakh in Kashmir claim cultural and historical ties to the Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas and would like to go their own way. But they sit astride the PACOM-CENTCOM border. Perhaps Harris and Votel will play poker at the Fort Myer officers club near the Pentagon to decide who will have ultimate authority over these secessionist territories……More Here