Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report Identifies Security Challenges in the Persian Gulf
Washington, DC - Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) today released a staff report examining the evolving security framework in the Persian Gulf. The report, “The Gulf Security Architecture: Partnership with the Gulf Cooperation Council,” identifies challenges and opportunities associated with promoting U.S. interests and a stable security environment in the Gulf region. Home to more than half of the world’s oil reserves and over a third of its natural gas, the stability of the Gulf is critical to the global economy...
The United States should preserve the model of “lily pad” bases throughout the Gulf, which permits the rapid escalation of military force in case of emergency. The Obama Administration has adopted this architecture by retaining only essential personnel in the region while ensuring access to critical hubs such as Camp Arifjan, Al Udeid, Al Dhafra, Jebel Ali, and Naval Support Activity Bahrain. An agile footprint enables the United States to quickly deploy its superior conventional force should conflict arise, without maintaining a costly and unsustainable presence. Sustaining physical infrastructure and enabling functions such as intelligence, surveillance, and logistics, while keeping certain war reserve materiel forward positioned, is more important than deploying large numbers of U.S. forces...
On May 18, 2013, at 4:36 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
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> On May 18, 2013, at 5:20 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
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>> "2. The permanent presence of US troops in the Middle East is small - about 5000 troops, mostly in the Gulf states and Turkey - and their deployment predates the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration.
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> The deployment of materiel is anything but small. And "permanent" deployment of troops is just an official and meaningless number when the "temporary" deployment (including secret forces) can be much larger (rien ne dure comme le provisoire, n'est-ce pas?), with bases ready for full-scale invasion forces whenever that decision is made.
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>> "3. Following the invasion, American oil companies were not given privileged access to Iraqi oil by the al-Maliki government
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> What the oilsters wanted was not concessions but profits. Since 2003 Iraqi oil has been off the market, the price of oil soared and never came back down, and the oilsters took in hundreds of billions in excess profits.
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> The destruction of Iraq as a society has been US policy ever since the Kuwait provocation. Bush completed what his daddy and Clinton had begun. How is that not a success?
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> Shane Mage
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> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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