US SPREADING MILITARY TENTACLES 'EVERYWHERE IT CAN
Press TV
he United States is trying to spread its military tentacles “everywhere that it can in the world” because it cannot compete “with the rest of the world economically,” says Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report.
On Friday, Stars and Stripes reported that the US is planning to spend $580 million to double the size of its naval military base in Bahrain, which is home to the US 5th fleet.
“I think the dramatic expansion of the 5th fleet facilities in Bahrain shows that even though President Obama says the US is shifting its military weight to the Pacific, it is also steadily increasing its presence in the Middle East and the fact is that the United States is constantly increasing its military presence everywhere that it can in the world,” said Ford in a phone interview with Press TV on Monday.
The US has recently been considering a shift, or “pivot”, towards the Asia Pacific region as a strategy to counter China’s increasing global influence. During a visit to South Korea on Dec. 6, US Vice President Joe Biden said Washington’s “decision to rebalance to the Pacific basin is not in question.”
Meanwhile, under the pretext that the US military presence in the Middle East is needed due to security reasons, Washington refuses to decrease the number of its forces there.
On Friday, Obama told Congress that US troops stationed in Jordan will remain there until the situation in neighboring Syria improves.
“The US has 900 bases in 130 countries. So, it’s difficult to put the Bahrain expansion into some kind of independent or unique category. It does appear to be, if one looks at it from one angle, part of a continuing effort to surround Iran,” Ford said.
“We know that the United States wants to keep 9 bases in Afghanistan as part of its so-called and phony withdrawal from that country. We know that it wants more bases than that in Iraq,” he added.
“The US has a policy today that one could call ‘a world military occupation policy’ so that it can intimidate the peoples of the world from every point in the world that it can insert itself,” Ford said.
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