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PSI, US 1,000-Ship Navy: Control Of World's Oceans, Prelude To War

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Message Rick Rozoff

Proliferation Security Initiative And US 1,000-Ship
Navy: Control Of World's Oceans, Prelude To War
Rick Rozoff


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.

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Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
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