Wednesday, February 08, 2012

False Choice from US Military Presence: US or China?

In the realm of politics, the public is being hoodwinked with a false choice.

From the Bloomberg,

Obama is realigning Asia-Pacific forces as his administration moves to blunt China’s expanding influence in an area that accounts for half the world’s economy. At the same time, the Pentagon is seeking to cut about $490 billion from projected spending over a decade.

“The U.S. is shifting its projection of power to the Pacific region amid China’s rise,” said Tomohiko Taniguchi, a former Foreign Ministry official and a visiting professor at Keio Universityin Tokyo. The revised agreement is a “logical consequence” from the Futenma deadlock, he said.

False dilemma or false choice, according to Wikipedia.org, is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options (sometimes shades of grey between the extremes).

Today we are presented with having to choose between two supposedly opposing sides—either with the US or with China. Obviously a false choice.

Instead, the world should be asked to trade than to instigate war.

Yet, the world and the Philippines can do without having to indulge with confrontational (brinkmanship) politics, or worst, go into actual combat.

And as previously pointed out, except for Spratly’s and Senkaku, China has largely maintained a foreign policy based on trade, investments and non-aggression whether in Africa or in Asia.

China has been aggressively expanding trade in the region and has even been selling the idea of the yuan as the region’s reserve currency. Such actions does not square with supposed aggressive policies. Perhaps unless provoked.

China also knows she can’t win a conventional military war with the US which makes any militant actions senseless.

And as previously argued, China has been using these controversial islands mainly to extract geopolitical leverage. Other reasons may include flexing her military muscles or response to encirclement strategy or testing the region’s reaction.

Thus, the China threat seem more like a strawman.

On the other hand, the US has been engaged in a series of illegitimate wars—which have not been approved by US Congress—such as in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and others, has been saber rattling on Iran, and now, on China.

As Judge Andrew P. Napolitano writes,

In the last 50 years, the United States has seen a parade of wars that don’t serve our interests. We fought the Korean war at the behest of the United Nations. We fought in Vietnam because the French wouldn’t. We entered the First Gulf War because of the United Nations and of course that led to the Iraq War. Even in Afghanistan, while we entered under the pretext of hunting down the masterminds of 9/11, that war soon became an imperial exercise akin to the Soviet or British occupations of Afghanistan. The Constitution gives the power of declaring war to the Congress. But today in America, that power is effectively the President’s. President Obama has waged war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Pakistan, in Somalia, and in Uganda; all without a declaration of war. The last time Congress declared war was December 8th 1941.

So it isn’t a choice between China or the US but a choice being rammed on our throats for the benefit of those in Washington [who may partly be diverting public’s attention from the problems of the real economy, the mounting unwieldy fiscal deficits, the unsustainable welfare-warfare state and from the Federal Reserve’s inflationist policies], Washington’s military industrial clients and for local imperial lapdogs or sycophants who would use the war scare to exercise more political control over society.

Yet for a political economy considerably dependent on the war industry, there will always have to be an adversary to be invented as US advisor and diplomat George F. Keennan once warned

People who are egging for war should get enlisted and be brought to the front lines along with their families to prove their worth than to senselessly bluster. President Obama can do the honor.

Other than the above, invented wars are required to justify the preservation of the warfare state along with their huge budgets.

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