THE OBAMA DOCTRINE :MAKING A VIRTUE  OF NECESSITY BY JAMES PETRAS   http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/11/the-obama-doctrine-making-a-virtue-of-necessity/  The fourth dimension of the “Obama doctrine” the use of foreign mercenary armies has been tried and failed in a number of cases where incumbent client rulers are under siege from resistance forces.  The US financed the Ethiopian dictatorship’s armed invasion of Somalia to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital.  After a prolonged futile effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary forces  performed no better. They were followed by the entry of the US-backed Kenyan armed forces which has only led to massacres and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugees in Northern Kenya and Southern Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistance. These third party mercenary invasions have totally failed to secure the puppet regime; in fact, they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.US backed “Third Party” mercenary armed interventions in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put down a majoritarian uprising, has temporarily propped up the despotic monarchy but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy mass movements.The fifth dimension of the Obama doctrine is to use highly trained heavily armed “Special Forces” (SF) contingents of 500 more to assassinate insurgent leaders, to terrorize their rural supporters and to “give backbone” to the local military officials.  Obama’s dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in point.  Up to now there is no reports of any decisive victories, even in this tiny country.  The prospects for future use of this imperial tactic is probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance with weak resistance movements, and only as a “complement” to local standing armies.The final and probably most important element in the Obama doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings and the reshuffle of elite figures to ‘co-opt’ popular pro-democracy movements in order  to derail them from ending their countries’ client relationship to Washington.Washington and the EU have incited and armed sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian nationalist Assad regime in Syria.  Playing off of legitimate democratic demands and harnessing fundamentalist hostility to a secular state, the US and EU, with the collaboration of Turkey and the Gulf states, have engaged in a triple policy of external sanctions, mass uprisings and armed resistance against the secular civilian majority and nationalist armed forces backing Basher Assad.  Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual “regime change”.Parallel to the “outsider” political strategy in Syria, the Obama doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in Egypt and Tunisia.