Living under the barrage of headlines datelined New York and Afghanistan, most of us have been oblivious to the profound restructuring of the world disorder being managed from Washington. Understandably, our attention is on the defeats of the Taliban and the return of notorious Afghan warlords to power, backed by withering US high- and low-tech bombing assaults. The possible metastasis of the war into nuclear Pakistan, and the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict, mean thinking about and preventing the unthinkable on several fronts.

Meanwhile, we learn that debate within the Bush Administration intensified over which of the sixty countries said to "host" terrorist organizations, will be next in the application of the "Bush Doctrine." George the Lesser used Thanksgiving to rally troops of the 101st Airborne Division--and the US people--with the cry that "Afghanistan is just the beginning of the war against terror." Condoleezza Rice was clear that Saddam Hussein "should not be indifferent to what was happening in Afghanistan." Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Iran have been publicly reminded that they are "either for or against us," and signals have been sent to North Korea that it could be next on Bush's hit list.

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld new New World Order has more in common with the darkest days of the cold war than just the reprise of nuclear threats, chilling rhetoric, the use of fuel air explosives, and women and children as "collateral damage." Both doctrines emerged, in part, to defend "liberal and corporate democracy." Each was well designed to obscure the popular mobilization, resource misallocation, and war-fighting essential to continue the two-century-old US project of imperial expansion.

The criminal and indiscriminate attacks of September 11, in Colin Powell's words, "hit the reset button" on US foreign and military policy. Reprising Bush the Elder's use of Iraq's attack on Kuwait to reconsolidate US global dominance for the post-Cold War era, the current Bush Administration has used its "war against terrorism" to consolidate incipient alliances with Russia and India, to disorient and diminish European Union and Chinese challenges to US regional hegemony, to discipline its Saudi, Egyptian, and other Arab clients, to expand its military presence in oil-rich Central Asia, to expand the US-Japan alliance, and to reconsolidate its domination of the Pacific Ocean.



The East Asian Front

Since early October, the Bush Administration has declared that "There has been a concerted effort by bin Laden and his people to expand their activities in East Asia, not only in the Philippines but in Malaysia and Indonesia." Increased numbers of US military advisers have been dispatched to the Philippines to join the thirty-year war against secessionist Islamic forces in remote Mindanao province. More complex strategies are being used to contain Islamic fundamentalists in Malaysia and Indonesia. North Korea and to a lesser extent China (our ally of convenience) have been put on notice.

As if to place Washington's growing role in low-intensity conflict and crisis management throughout the Asia Pacific in context, the Pentagon released its hastily revised Quadrennial Defense Review Report on September 30 (with barely a mention in the press). Consistent with US strategic doctrine since the late Reagan era, the Review identified the "Big Three" regions essential for US global dominance. One significant difference is that East Asia now comes first. Another change, remarked upon by Dennis C. Blair, Commander-in-chief of the Pacific Command, is that the Review "distinguishes within East Asia between the Northeast Asia problems centered around Korea and the rest of East Asia. This is the first time that Asia is explicitly recognized as being more than deterrence in Korea."



The Philippines

In the Philippines, a long-simmering war is being fought against the Abu Sayyaf group, a splinter of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), whose leaders are said to have fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Abu Sayyaf has pursued its secessionist struggle, replete with kidnappings and terrorist bombings, despite the negotiation of an autonomy agreement between the MNLF and Manila in 1996. According to unnamed "US officials" Al Qaeda's "connections in the Philippines include Islamic schools and charities through which millions of dollars have flowed to support the group and its allies across South and East Asia." As the New York Times reported in early October, Washington is committed to rooting out this "major operational hub" of Islamic forces associated with bin Laden.

This is not a new concern on Washington's part. Mindanao, the predominantly Moslem southern province, was never completely conquered or integrated by the "Christian" armies of Madrid, Washington, or Manila. And, to make the situation still more interesting, The Philippines lie astride the resource-rich South China Sea, in the sea lanes that link East Asian economies with Middle East oil, and within hours of Malaysia and Indonesia. Even while US troops were legally banned from the Philippines for most of the 1990s, Washington used the Agency for International Development to build a massive new naval and air base in southern Mindanao.

The war in Mindanao and Washington's commitments there have escalated sharply in recent weeks. In rapid succession, President Macapagal-Arroyo offered the US use of Philippine airspace and access to the former US Subic and Clark air and naval bases. Abu Sayyaf fighters were charged with responsibility for a terrorist attack in a Mindanao commercial district. Washington announced an increase in the number of US military advisors assigned to train elite Philippine units, and Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld met Philippine President Macapagal-Arroyo, promising her $100 million in assistance and refusing to rule out the commitment of US combat troops for this "second front in the US-led war on terrorism." And, in late November, Nur Misauri, the governor of Mindanao and former leader of the MNLF, shattered the 1996 autonomy agreement by attacking a Philippine military base. Misauri fled the country and was soon captured in Malaysia.



Malaysia

Across the Celebes Sea, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad responded to the September 11 attacks by working to improve ties with Washington and by further marginalizing Pas, Malaysia's Islamist opposition party. Going beyond his condemnation of the September 11 attacks, with the governments of Pakistan and Indonesia, Mahathir gave uncritical support for US air strikes against Afghanistan until the weeks immediately preceding Ramadan. Whatever intelligence cooperation there may have been between Washington and Kuala Lumpur has gone unreported, but remarkably little time was lost between the first reports that Nur Misauri might have fled Mindanao and his capture in Malaysia.

On his domestic front, Prime Minister Mahathir has taken an unexpected move to outflank his Islamic opponents and to pacify predominantly Islamic Malaysian public opinion. He invited leading scholars from Egypt's prestigious Al Azhar University to certify that (formerly secular) Malaysia is an Islamic state! While this may be a brilliant political stroke, far more will be needed to address the fears and anger of Malaysian protesters brandishing images of bin Laden.



Indonesia

The greatest stakes are in Indonesia, which President Megawati Sukarnoputri has warned "could disintegrate and become the Balkans of the East." Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous nation, and its largest Islamic nation. For US leaders, committed to controlling the world's oil resources, Indonesia's location is strategically more important even than its vast mineral wealth. Sumatra, one of Indonesia's two main islands, dominates the Strait of Malacca which connects the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea, making a potential chokepoint for the flow of oil between the Persian Gulf and the Japanese, South Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese economies.

Beginning with blood baths of the 1965 CIA-backed coup that replaced President Sukarno, Indonesia's national independence leader, with the Suharto dictatorship, the US has exercised its influence most directly through the Indonesian military (until recently the nation's only truly national institution.) After a difficult decade of US Congressional criticism of Indonesian human rights abuses, the collapse of the Indonesian economy in 1997-98, disastrous IMF dictates, continued US Executive Branch support for the Suharto dictatorship, and international isolation (including Congress' near severing of all US-Indonesian military relations in the wake of the most recent genocidal massacres in East Timor), US-Indonesian relations had reached a nadir. Demonstrations outside the US embassy and threats against US nationals have become the rule, rather than the exception.

Even before September 11, newly elevated President Megawati (Sukarno's daughter) sought to mend ties with Washington, in part to reopen the floodgates of US military aid to her allies in the Indonesian military. But, she has little room to maneuver between her desire for improved ties with Washington and her hungry and angry people. Shortly after she returned from Washington, where she demonstrated solidarity with our wounded nation, her Vice President said that the attacks could help the US "cleanse its sins." Compounding the situation, Washington's unpopular Ambassador to Jakarta publicly criticized Indonesia's military for not going on the offensive against Islamic militants who threatened to attack the US embassy and to sweep Americans from Indonesia.

Beyond the angry Indonesian demonstrators brandishing photographs of Osama bin Laden's outside the US embassy in Jakarta, there is increasing evidence of a growing Al Qaeda presence in Indonesia. The East Asian press has carried reports of Afghan nationals flying into the strife-torn Moluccan capital of Ambon last July, where they were warmly greeted by local police and Muslim militants, and were reported to have joined the Islamist Laskar Jihad campaign against the island's terrified Christian communities.

Meanwhile, since September 11, the Pentagon has sought closer cooperation with the Indonesian military for the "war on terrorism," and Congress has sent Jakarta a dual message by symbolically increasing its aid allocation but requiring evidence that the Indonesian military is "reforming" itself.



Japan

Not surprisingly, while the Japanese government was shattering limitations on wartime deployments of its unconstitutional military by dispatching ships and troops to the Indian Ocean and South Asia, the US (in the Quadrennial Defense Review) reaffirmed the centrality of the US-Japan military alliance. Despite decades of Okinawan resistance to US military colonialism, the prefecture is to become a still "more important...hub." Guam, closer to the Philippines, Indonesia, and the South China Sea is also slated to become a hub for US air and naval operations. Independent of the war in Afghanistan and its possible expansion into Pakistan, the Pentagon plans to have its offensive aircraft carriers spending more time in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans. They will be joined there by ships refitted to serve as platforms for so-called "theater" missile defenses, designed primarily to intimidate now-encircled China.

If the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon teach us nothing else, they are potent reminders that nations that live by the sword die by the sword. In a world subjected to decades of "US full spectrum dominance," to coercively enforced, growing, and deadly economic disparity, and to widespread injustices, people will be led to resist and in some cases to strike back.

There are, of course, alternatives. They begin with commitments to common security, to the rule of law--including the World Court and the International Criminal Court--to a dialogue among civilizations, and to "green" energy and transportation policies that decrease the perceived need to dominate others and which hold the promise of security for future generations of humankind and other living things.