Call it a fleet, a flotilla, an aircraft carrier strike group, or what it is, a belligerent embarrassment of gunboat diplomacy, but to invoke the archaic “armada” is to overlook Admiral Nelson of Trafalgar Square. Trump might as well dub his flagship Titannic. Go on Trump, do it.
We’re told President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima will the first by a sitting US president. Hiroshima being where America demonstrated its first atomic bomb. Ranked by scale of civilian casualties, Hiroshima has multiple sister cities who could share the honor of being sites of the greatest single day attrocity beneath US bombers. Travelogue wise, if there isn’t a sign saying “Washington slept here” obvously everywhere has a first for American presidents, so what makes Hiroshima newsworthy? Let’s agree as the objective of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, Hiroshima was the most calculated. Nagazaki was the reproductive test serving as reprise for the international stage. Obviously President Obama’s next visit should be to Nagazaki as proof that paying tribute via presidential visitation doesn’t amount to an apology, expression of regret, or even recognition of a lesson learned. The gesture may be a nod to self-reflection but it’s not guilt. What Obama is doing is taking a bow. The imperial pageant of unending curtain calls, for an old show called gunboat diplomacy.
North Korea’s leader as a mere toddler -that’s rich. Kim Jong Un is the preeminent adversary of our Pentagon. This New Yorker cover is wishful thinking I suppose if also insulting to our own sense of shame. The New Yorker depicts junior Kim’s military success as child’s play, though he continues to hold Western gunboat diplomacy in abeyance. The old saw is that North Korea has been starved of economic prosperty owing to its regime’s unfettered militarism. Sound more like someone else you know? The US can’t house its poor, can’t feed its children, can’t rebuild its infrastructure, nor provide safe drinking water to disfavored urban populations. The US spends more on war than everyone else put together. It can’t provide healthcare. Even Kim Jong Un can do that. Likewise Un doesn’t start wars, or expend ordnance to require the manufacture of more. North Korea’s war footing isn’t our capitalist sinkhole for weapons industry profiteers. That baby with the warheads would be better played by an average American preadolescent, shortly to be a PTSD’d amputee.
Remember the Maine? In 1898 a popular uprising was threatening Spanish rule in Cuba. 
The US Navy cruised to the rescue. The rescue of whom, we never got the chance to find out. An explosion aboard the USS Maine gave America the pretext to blame a Spanish torpedo. An America inflamed by a jingoist press declared war on Spain and promptly seized her colonies “to protect US interests,” by coincidence just as the indigenous populations were overcoming their colonizer and were about to win their freedom. Today a US attack fleet speeds toward Egypt. Washington asserts its mission is to evacuate US nationals if need be.
I’d like to imagine the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge will position itself off Egypt’s coast to facilitate the Egyptian government’s stable transition to Democracy.
Perhaps the fleet intends to augment the security which Hosni Mubarak is deliberately destabilizing in Egypt. Perhaps they will offer medical care for Egyptian protesters denied access to Cairo hospitals if their wounds incriminate the government. Perhaps sophisticated Navy electronics will provide an alternate internet backbone if Mubarak tries cut his people off the web. Perhaps the US Navy can help jam the state television station still broadcasting lies to the broader population. I’m hoping our navy can erect a gallows prominently on the bow, to threaten Mubarak, speaking in the only language the despicable dictator might understand, an urgency he doesn’t feel from the peaceful protesters of Tahrir Square.
Possible?
Is it more likely to be a false flag like the Maine? Remember the USS Liberty? That was a US intelligence ship attacked in 1967 by unmarked Israeli planes, hoping that Egypt would catch the blame? There was more to that story and anyway it didn’t work out.
Remember whatever boat it was attacked/not-attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident? That worked.
“Showing the Flag” doesn’t have to be false flag. Remember the USS Cole? Worked in Yemen. Traditional foreign policy teaches that gunboat diplomacy asserts military dominance. Actually it runs a calculated risk. It draws out indignation and a show of defiance. Because a military wants to flush out resistance sooner than being taken by surprise.
Remember the enterprising Marines in Iraq who drove around with a megaphone insulting the Prophet Mohammad? They repeated Jesus Killed Mohammad until every last proud Muslim to renounce their blasphemy was baptized in an obliteration of firepower.
Remember the Maine? Americans remember the Maine like it remembers the Alamo or 9-11. We have no idea. We have no sense of deja vu about the US spreading its forces in defense of empire. I’m really hoping this is not the equivalent of the Soviets sending their tanks into Hungary in 1956.
But Americans have nothing on the educated Egyptians. Whatever America’s gunships have in mind, the Arab world has seen it. Jan25 organizers continue to defy media expectations about the movement losing steam. Attendance keep rising, yesterday pro-Mubarak citizens were proclaiming their changed allegiance. Today the labor unions are recognizing the imperative of launching a general strike, and protesters are venturing outside of the central demonstrations, threatening government buildings and facilities.
With every successive day of victories for the Democracy-seeking demonstrators of Tahrir Square, I have every confidence that the Egyptians will outwit this latest US envoy convoy.
That’s right, it was not Puerto Rico, but Costa Rica, whose congress approved the mobilization of 46 US Navy vessels in its harbors, including the billeting of 7,000 uniformed US Marines to conduct humanitarian and drug-war operations. Did permission come with conditions? It did, but ours, not theirs. Before the US is to visit Costa Rica with 200 helicopters and combat planes, we stipulated that “US personnel in Costa Rica shall enjoy freedom of movement and the right to engage in activities they may consider necessary to fulfill their mission.”
Opposition parties in Costa Rica complain that such a huge military fleet in their waters will be disproportionate to the requirements of fighting the drug trade, and appears to have its sights further ashore.
Meanwhile the US armada off the coast of Iran is being joined by Israeli warships. Fidel Castro wonders at the likelihood they’ll move any direction but escalation sooner than retreat with tail between their legs if Iran complies with the latest UN demands.
After the airport in Haiti was passed into US control, the Guardian newspaper is reporting controllers are diverting aid flights in favor of US Army landings. International aid efforts are being sent to the Dominican Republic while the US concentrates on getting boots on the ground. Meanwhile the US Navy has positioned an aircraft carrier to serve as a “floating airport” for flights to where?
I’d like to get a picture of that, gunboat diplomacy in Port Au Prince, a moated Green Zone, towering over the rabid masses ashore. Will American soldiers be taunting the Haitians “Boukies” still, or resort to the term from Somalia everyone learned from Black Hawk Down: they called them “Skinnies.”
Finally the USS New York, famously built from the steel of the fallen twin towers, sails into NY for a photo-op near the site of the WTC, looking every bit to me like a fortified extension of the official 9/11 cover up.
The wreckage of Ground Zero was carted off before forensic engineers could test the material and explain the mysterious collapse. Now the steel is back, albeit just two army trucks’ weight worth, in the bow of a floating fortress whose foreboding facade informs us, with a wicked armored smirk, that its secret will be remain off-limits to civilians forever. New Yorkers have to look across the water and be reminded the military laughs at the police and firemen, who bravely ascended buildings which should never have vaporized, who died on September 11, 2001 for reasons forever to remain unexplained.
The USS NY sailing up to NYC is gunboat diplomacy against America’s own people.
I’m no naval engineer, but the USS NY’s twin funnels are the most grotesque mimicry of the now iconic towers.
But how fitting a tribute, that the WTC remains –we might pretend even the dust of its victims, if military contractor shoddy standards follow precedent, are concealed in the steel– were used to build an amphibious transport ship, whose only military purpose is offensive. Unless you count America’s questionable dominion in the Pacific and Caribbean, to where would we need to ship troops in defense of our homeland. Lamentably, the USS New York is the perfect reincarnation of the World Trade Center, which engaged in relentless attacks on economies overseas, until cut brutally short by boxcutters and Third World anger. Of late, Americans may have glimpsed from the financial crisis that the WTC was also waging war on our own domestic economy. As these revelations dawn, so too will the USS N.Y. turn its guns against us.
WASHINGTON DC- It’s not the “Department of Peace,” to contrast with the Department of Defense, although some detractors point out that we have the State Department for that, but visitors to DC will find in the NW corner of the National Mall, the US Navy has conceded a portion of its real estate adjacent the Lincoln Memorial for a US Institute of Peace. Dot org, not dot gov. And what do they mean by “Public Education Center?” It’s Pax Americana they’re institutionalizing, aka peacekeeping in the gunboat diplomacy sense of the word.
And sure enough, according to its website:
USIP has been operating on the ground in Iraq since 2004, working with Iraqis to reduce interethnic and interreligious violence, speed up stabilization and democratization, and reduce the need for a U.S. presence in Iraq.
Protests as US warship docks in Nagasaki What incredible arrogance and bad taste! This is your military and government, Americans! Look in the mirror and weep!