Imperial Footprint: America’s Foreign Military Bases

Post Date May 10, 2010
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Category American Empire, DMZ-Hawai'i / Aloha 'Aina In the News, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands), World

http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=450

GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 11 ● Winter/Spring 2009—After Georgia

Book Review

Imperial Footprint: America’s Foreign Military Bases

ZOLTAN GROSSMAN

Zoltán Grossman is professor of geography at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, US.

The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts

edited by Catherine Lutz

London, Pluto Press, 2009. 356 pages

Hardback UK £60.00, US $95.00. Paperback UK £17.99, US $29.95

“Metaphorically,” observes Catherine Lutz, “the military is spoken of as an ‘arm’ of the state, as having ‘posture,’ ‘reach,’ ‘stance,’ and perhaps most tellingly, a ‘footprint’ ” (p. 21). In the twenty-first century, this military “footprint” can be seen in the form of the vast, global network of military bases belonging to the United States. Lutz’s new anthology, The Bases of Empire, asserts that “Bases are the literal and symbolic anchors, and the most visible centerpieces, of the U.S. military presence overseas. To understand where those bases are and how they are being used is essential for understanding the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world, the role of coercion in it, and its political economic complexion” (p. 6).

Lutz, a professor of international studies and anthropology at Brown University, introduces her anthology with a review of the growing military-bases network. As of 2007, the Pentagon officially massed “190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees” within 909 military facilities in forty-six countries and territories. Just one of these military installations—the Balad Air Base in Iraq—covers sixteen square miles with an additional twelve-square-mile “security perimeter”. The base can, in fact, be seen from outer space (and can be viewed on Google Earth by downloading the military-bases datafile at www.tni.org). Lutz observes that “While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war-making . . . they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution” (p. 4).

Like a good geographer, Lutz ties the global phenomenon of US bases to their local realities:

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on U.S. military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. (P. 4)

Lutz identifies four major historical periods when the United States has built new military bases, and during which “The presumption was established that bases captured or created during wartime would be permanently retained” (p. 14). The first period was after the United States began expanding into North America, when it annexed Native American and Mexican national territories, and “every Western fort . . . was a foreign military base” (p. 10). The second period was after the 1898 Spanish–American War, and the acquisition of new colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean, which served as “coaling stations” for a globalised US Navy. The third period was after 1945, during the Cold War and the immense extension of US economic power around the world. The fourth period was set in motion after 2001 in the so-called “global war on terror”, which is notable mainly for its similarity to earlier imperial projects, with the same rationales of protecting security and freedom.

It used to be that military bases were built to wage wars, but increasingly it seems that wars are being waged to build bases. After every US military intervention since 1990, the Pentagon has left behind clusters of new bases in areas where it never before had a foothold. The string of new bases stretches from Kosovo and adjacent Balkan states, to Iraq and other Persian Gulf states, into Afghanistan and other Central Asian states. Collectively on a map, the bases appear to form a new US sphere of influence in the strategic “middle ground” between the European Union and East Asia, and may well be intended to counteract the emergence of these global economic competitors.

In his contribution on “US Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism”, Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee analyses the reasons for the Pentagon’s “web of foreign fortresses that surpass those created by Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Queen Victoria” (p. 51). Gerson notes that bases do not simply project military force abroad, but have many other functions. These include encircling enemies (such as the Soviet Union or Iran), servicing warships and jets, securing fossil fuels from friend and foe alike, controlling and influencing governments and political dynamics, and serving as training and exercise centres, command-and-control facilities, and more recently as torture centres. In a sense, the bases serve as a “tripwire” to prevent any real changes to the status quo—the United States has to intervene in other world regions in order to protect the bases it has already stationed there.

Gerson recalls activists from Guam displaying two maps that illustrated the effects of US bases on their daily lives. One map showed the island’s “best fishing grounds, its best agricultural land, and its best drinking water. The other showed the locations of the U.S. military bases, installations, and military exercises. The two maps were identical” (p. 53). He also relates the tragedy of Diego Garcia, ostensibly a tiny British island-colony in the Indian Ocean. All of the island’s residents were evicted in the 1960s so that it could be occupied by an enormous US base that has served as a lynchpin in every US Middle East invasion and occupation since that time.

Some may be tempted to blame the administration of George W. Bush for the rapid growth in the number of US military bases around the world. But Gerson observes that “While the reckless unilateralism of the Bush–Cheney administration was widely regarded as a radical departure from more complex and nuanced methods of maintaining the empire, it reflected more continuity than change” (p. 57). During recent Republican and Democratic administrations, the Pentagon has used every crisis as a convenient opportunity to establish a permanent military presence in strategic parts of the world—particularly in the belt stretching from Poland to Pakistan.

The Bases of Empire is invaluable for its documentation of recent changes in US basing strategy. While most critical studies of US military bases seem stuck in Cold War or “post–Cold War” paradigms, this book focuses on the new conditions of the twenty-first century. Uppermost among the new strategies is former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “lily-pad” scenario, which has seen the proliferation of smaller and more widely scattered bases around the world—including in new regions such as East and West Africa. Because the new bases have fewer personnel (and virtually no military families), they are less visible and socially disruptive to the host nation than earlier sprawling megabases.

A key aspect of the lily-pad strategy is the increasing US use of foreign military installations through basing access agreements, and the prepositioning of weapons and supplies. The foremost example, as Ronald Simbulan observes, is the “Visiting Forces Agreement” (VFA), a controversial measure in the Philippines that offers the United States temporary access to its former bases there, allowing it to mount aggressive and nearly constant training exercises. Another major feature of the lily-pad strategy is the turning over of US military functions to private security contractors, to place a civilian fig leaf over armed occupation. As Lutz notes, Balad Air Base houses not only thirty thousand troops, but also ten thousand private contractors (who call the base “Mortarville” because it has been pounded so often by the shells of Iraqi insurgents). The Obama administration is increasing the use of civilian contractors in Afghanistan as well.

As part of the lily-pad strategy, followed closely by the current US defence secretary, Robert Gates, bases have been located in new host countries in order to substitute for bases that have become unpopular in other host countries. For example, new bases in eastern and central Europe—such as Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo—are substitutes for the unpopular and rapidly downsizing US presence in Germany. Operations in Guam and Hawaii have expanded because of the powerful anti-bases movements in the Philippines and Okinawa. The US bases in Iraq were intended partly to be substitutes for the US bases in Saudi Arabia—whose presence in the Muslim holy land fed the resentment that helped lead to the attacks of 11 September 2001. And since Ecuador has announced that the United States will no longer be allowed to use the air base at Manta, Washington has been planning to set up new military bases in Colombia, the region’s most notorious human-rights abuser. By playing this “shell game” with its bases, the Pentagon may also be trying to play off anti-base movements in different countries against one another.

Another new development in the past two decades has been the Pentagon’s ability to deliver force directly from the US “homeland”. The Air Force has undertaken bombing runs around the world (to Panama, Iraq, etc.) from air bases in the United States, rather than exclusively from foreign bases. A related development is the pronounced military build-up of island garrisons that are under US sovereignty or control so that they become virtual aircraft carriers. John Pike, webmaster of the defence website GlobalSecurity.org, predicts that the US military will “be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us” (p. 211).

The global proliferation of US bases might cause one to believe that the US military is an unstoppable steamroller that inevitably prevails over the hapless victims in its path, but The Bases of Empire highlights several case studies of successful popular resistance. As Lutz observes, nationalist revolutions or public campaigns have ejected large US military bases from at least twenty countries or territories—including the Philippines, Panama, Ecuador, and Vieques (Puerto Rico)—and reduced or modified the Pentagon’s presence in dozens of other countries. In certain other countries—such as Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan—even dictatorial regimes have (at least temporarily) scaled back US bases in the face of public dissent.

In 2007, anti-bases activists from around the world met in Ecuador to form the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, committed to ending the presence of all militaries outside their own borders. They met again in 2009 in a “Security without Empire” conference in Washington, D.C., buoyed by the strengthened citizens’ opposition to US bases in Italy, South Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic, and other countries. The network’s website at www.no-bases.org documents the struggles in each country, and discusses unified strategies and actions to overcome the bases “shell game” played by the Pentagon, and to prevent the growing global movement from becoming segmented and divided.

Lutz does a great service to the global movement by including case studies by anti-bases activists and scholars themselves, who deftly explore the local nuances and complexities unique to their regional situations. The contributors cover Latin America and the Caribbean (John Lindsay-Poland), Europe (David Heller and Hans Lammerant), Iraq (Tom Engelhardt), the Philippines (Roland Simbulan), Diego Garcia (David Vine and Laura Jeffery), Vieques (Katherine McCaffrey), Okinawa (Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato), Turkey (Ayşe Gül Altmay and Amy Holmes), and Hawaii (Kyle Kajihiro).

The authors discuss innovative strategies and tactics of the anti-bases movements, such as the “bombspotting” campaigns that have monitored nuclear weapons in Europe and tracked the caravans transporting such weapons in Britain. Other tactics include the activist occupations of naval bombing ranges on Vieques and Kaho’olawe (Hawaii) that not only stopped the shelling, but restored part of the islands for public use—pending the US Navy’s painfully slow munitions clean-ups. Local opposition has succeeded in preventing the expansion of bases in Okinawa (Japan), and blocked the use of US bases in Turkey as launching-pads for the US invasion of Iraq.

But the book does merely cheer on the anti-bases movements, or present them as a monolithic bloc. The contributors take a more original and innovative approach by describing the difficulties of building and maintaining social-movement alliances against the bases. For example, Diego Garcia activists have followed divergent strategies: to return the island to Mauritius, to return evicted residents to the island, or to return the region to a relatively demilitarised state. These strategies often conflict with one another and by no means entail a common goal—closure of the US base on the island—despite the use of the common yet ambiguous slogan, “Give Us Back Diego!” In contrast, political factions with different stances towards the colonial status of Puerto Rico agreed to frame their Vieques demands primarily around environmental health and safety for residents, as reflected in the slogan, “Not One More Bomb!”, and met with much greater success than did the Diego Garcia activists.

The opposition in Okinawa has similarly coalesced around safety for residents, and against the harassment and rape of local women by US military personnel. In the Philippines, various concerns about militarism, women’s rights, and environmental safety reinforced the Filipino nationalist movement, helping it to throw off decades of American neo-colonial control. In Hawaii, about 17 per cent of the population is part of the US military community, and 19 per cent are Native Hawaiians—many of whom oppose not only the bases (largely for desecrating sacred and natural sites), but also the original illegal US annexation of their islands.

The main hurdle that the anti-bases movement must overcome, however, is the stunning lack of awareness among American citizens of their “empire of bases”. In her foreword, feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe offers useful insights into why the US public and media have a “lack of curiosity” about the bases. Most Americans assume that the bases have been invited in by host countries, that the latter enjoy stability and material benefits as a result, and that contact with the most “civilised” military in the world “can only prove beneficial to the fortunate host society” (p. xi). Catherine Lutz’s book documents that most of these assumptions are untrue, and in fact are the opposite of the real experiences of local residents living near US military bases abroad. The Bases of Empire is a useful source for Americans asking why their foreign policy seems only to diminish national security for other countries, and for their own, and an invaluable handbook for Americans who really seek a new relationship with the rest of the world.

Atlantic Free Press Review of 'Bases of Empire' book

Post Date March 24, 2010
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http://atlanticfreepress.com/reviews/12902-the-bases-of-empire-the-global-struggle-against-us-military-posts-book-review-by-jim-miles.html

The Bases of Empire – The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts – Book Review by Jim Miles

Written by Jim Miles Contributor, Atlantic Free Press.

Tuesday, 23 March 2010 06:46

Corporations

One of the underlying themes arising from Lutz’s introduction and inclusive within the various essays is that “corporations and the military itself as an organization have profited from bases’ continued existence, regardless of their strategic value.” Military liaisons with other countries usually are “linked with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as access to oil and other raw materials and investment opportunities.”

The idea of corporate ‘investment’ via the military is reiterated throughout the essays. The introduction by John Lindsay-Poland to “U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean” says the bases there “have served explicitly to project and protect U.S. government and commercial interests in the region,” and are “tangible commitments to U.S. policy priorities such as ensuring access to strategic resources, especially oil and natural gas.” Further , the bases serve “to control Latin populations and resources.” In “Iraq as a Construction Site” Tom Engelhardt argues that “American [U.S.] officials are girding for an open-ended commitment to protect the country’s oil industry.”

The obverse of this is recognized in Roland Simbulan’s essay on “…U.S. Military Activities in the Philippines” where opposition to the bases “articulate…the possibility and desire for human security and genuine development through their common opposition to neoliberal globalization.” He notes that those opposed to the U.S. military bases also “consider themselves part of the anti-corporate globalization movement as well.”

More specifically, David Vine and Laura Jeffery highlight the power of trade in conjunction with the military in their essay “Give us Back Diego Garcia.” The Chagossians exiled from Diego Garcia ended up in Mauritius, where the U.S. and the U.K have used corporate-government threats “against Mauritian sugar and textile export quotas” to sideline the Mauritian agenda at the UN. They add more generally that former colonies are constrained by political and economic power that must “confront the power of governments like the [U.S.] and the ]U.K.]” The smaller the nation the more constraints apply “given their deep dependence on economic agreements with the major powers for their economic survival.” And again, the powerful can change laws to their liking and buy off opposition “with what for them are relatively small trade benefits.”

Larger nations are affected as well. Turkey’s decision to not participate in the invasion of Iraq brought forth concerns that the “price of non-cooperation was regarded as an impossible political and economic bargain for a country that relied heavily on IMF funding.” While debating the issue one of the main reference points was the “science of economics” showing that “acting alongside the USA would c certainly be in the benefit of Turkey in regard to the wealth of its population.” Economics is of course far from being a science, more in the realm of mythology, and the significant factor that most arguments for the military miss have little if anything to do with global/national economics as presented by the Washington consensus. And as exemplified in the case of “Okinawa,” by Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato, the situation becomes one in which the occupied territory provides “a considerable amount of financial aid…a cost born by host nations to maintain the U.S. military.”

Much of the devolves from the involvement of a local elite who would lose much of their power and personal wealth if the trade arrangements were abrogated. As argued within the text as a whole, a return to the indigenous populations original patterns of economy would benefit the population in areas much broader than just in monetary terms. Another example of this is Hawaii. Kyle Kajihiro writes that “the militarization of [Hawaii] involved collaboration by different sets of local elites.” The “haole elite, the descendents of missionaries and business owners, leveraged the [U.S.] desire for a navel base in [Hawaii] to their advantage.”

Corporations are an underlying theme, not the main theme, yet it is an issue that arises in each of the essays examining a particular base or set of bases in a country. There can be little doubt that U.S. “free trade capitalism” operates from the strength not of U.S. economic might, but that the economic might has been gained through the use of a militarized empire to promote corporate interests.

Resistance

Having made my connections to the work above, the subtitle of the text defines the greater thrust of the essayists in the book. The military bases around the world are not welcomed by the indigenous populations except for a few select elite who benefit with the financial and political power that arises from liaising with the U.S. For the majority, there is a resistance to the ongoing utilization of their land by the U.S. military. Apart from the globalization/economic arguments of the larger scale, there are many other common causes between the different protesting groups.

The losses are many in regions occupied by the U.S. military. Democracy, freedom, and equality, the main rhetorical features of U.S. arguments are all denied by the occupation forces and by the local elites that benefit from their association with them. In all cases presented, democracy has been limited, from the desires of the Okinawan people, the native Hawaiians, the citizens of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Latin America, Diego Garcia, to Turkey.

For one thing, the bases themselves create artificial divisions that would not exist if they were not there in the first place. Certainly small elements of the native population may do well, but the wealth generally stays with the elites. As in the case of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Diego Garcia, racism becomes a factor as the indigenous population is denied any credence in the face of the corporate power of the military and the local power structures.

Damages

There are other damages to people, societal structures, and the cultural and natural environments of the occupied areas. In all of the cases, the presence of the U.S. military has created social problems ranging from the abuse of women and children, through the denial of social services and a true legal system, to the overall restructuring or destruction of a society. The environment, the native lands and oceans so important to indigenous survival anywhere, suffers from toxic pollutants ranging from standard industrial and agricultural chemicals to the unique chemicals and biological weapons of the military. The focus in these essays is on ‘traditional’ weapons used in firing ranges on land and sea but also includes nuclear weapons in storage or transit and the use of depleted uranium.

The people who protest against these bases suffer from the lack of legal rights, the tendency for frontier justice in many places in Latin America and the Philippines, and the verbal and physical attacks perpetrated by the occupying forces. Since 2001, the role of terrorism has had a great impact on many of the protesters as terrorism becomes the new communism – the overall threat that is used to justify many new laws of control and the creation of outlaws – extra-judicial murder by declaring anyone opposed to the government as a terrorist. The Philippines is proposing to enact a National Identification System and an Anti Terrorism Bill “in which draconian measures are to be introduced to clamp down on critical and dissenting voices and curtail civil liberties and democratic rights.” In Hawaii, terrorism in the form of “Homeland security” names an amorphous threat and simultaneously unleashes fantasies about assault and vulnerability. Within its terms, opposition is rendered unintelligible; to oppose the security of the homeland is unthinkable….Hawaii pays a high price.”

International law obviously takes a definite hit under these conditions. Occupation of territory, environmental laws, laws about humane treatment of prisoners of war (Diego Garcia is considered to be a particular spot to which people are ‘rendered’), laws and actions of the International Criminal Court are all abrogated or avoided by the U.S. For the indigenous peoples of the Philippines, Hawaii, Diego Garcia, Latin America – for that matter all areas with U.S. military bases including the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – all are subject to the UN declaration of indigenous rights, and are “aware of the rights to self-determination accorded to indigenous peoples under international law.” Except for the U.S. who have not signed the declaration, for obvious reasons.

Be informed

One of the first steps in protesting and resisting U.S. occupation – at least for those not directly in the line of fire, literally or figuratively – is to become educated about the nature and principles that rule the world of the U.S. military occupations of foreign lands. The Bases of Empire is a well crafted study and an important contribution to the general understanding of the militarization of the globe and to specific problems as faced by individual groups. Collectively they represent a majority of the people within their regions and will need the support of as many outside voices as can understand their problems and concerns. This book contains a powerful set of ideas and well referenced information to help inform the world of the reality of U.S. militarization of the global community.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space – October 3-10, 2009

Post Date September 11, 2009
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Category Action Alerts and Events, Global Justice and Peace Movements, World

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International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space – October 3-10, 2009

Modern warfare, such as the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and attacks on Pakistan, uses Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and GPS-guided bombs. Directed by space satellites, and remotely controlled far from the battlefield, these weapons are responsible for massive civilian casualties.

In the 2003 “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, 70% of the weapons used by the Pentagon were directed to their targets by space technology. Our children are being trained through video games today to be the remote killers of tomorrow. Death at a distance is still blood on our hands.

We in the Global Network say it’s time to open our eyes and STOP the military’s use of space for war on Earth. It is time to preserve space for peace and to end war.

Chalmers Johnson: Three good reasons to liquidate U.S. Empire, and ten steps to get there

Post Date August 24, 2009
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Category American Empire, GI rights/resistance, Global Justice and Peace Movements, International politics & law, Militarization of Society, Social and Economic Impacts, War and Peace, World

photo

Soldiers line up at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. The US operates 865 bases in more than 40 countries and territories. (Photo: US Department of Defense)

Source: http://www.truthout.org/073009X

Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire: And Ten Steps to Take to Do So

Thursday 30 July 2009

by: Chalmers Johnson  |  Visit article original @ TomDispatch.com


However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there – 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony – that is, control or dominance – over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past – including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that “[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, “Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.” And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that “[w]e will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

“America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony.”

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

“Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them? He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases.”

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, “Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe.” According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush’s imperial adventures – if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history – to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories – the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain’s foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): “Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland.” An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which – just as British imperial officials did – has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own “political agent” who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):

“If Washington’s bureaucrats don’t remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world’s sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States.”

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: “We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers” (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of “collateral damage,” or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service’s focus on Afghanistan, “Pakistan has always been the problem.” They add:

“Pakistan’s army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch… from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]? and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan’s army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government.” (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train “freedom fighters” throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan’s consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: “Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India.”

Obama’s mid-2009 “surge” of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland’s continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union’s, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, “Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing.” He continued:

“New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults – 2,923 – and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.”

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. “The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious,” writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called “Status of Forces Agreements” (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret “understanding” as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of “national importance to Japan.” The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the “culture of unpunished sexual assaults” and the “shockingly low numbers of courts martial” for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that “no woman should join the military.”

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them – the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can’t or won’t.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters – along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth – that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

——–

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

[Note on further reading on the matter of sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and rapes in the military: On the response to the 1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil, “Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan SOFA,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15, 2009; “Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S. Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being Prosecuted,” Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009; Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001; Minoru Matsutani, “’53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived GI Prosecutions,” Japan Times, October 24, 2008; “Crime Without Punishment in Japan,” the Economist, December 10, 2008; “Japan: Declassified Document Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over U.S. Forces,” Akahata, October 30, 2008; “Government’s Decision First Case in Japan,” Ryukyu Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, “Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military,” Antiwar.com, May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, “The Plight of Women Soldiers,” the Nation, May 5, 2009.]

UN Secretary General: "My plan to stop the bomb"

Post Date August 04, 2009
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My plan to stop the bomb

The world is at a turning point – nuclear disarmament is back on the global agenda. We must grab this chance to secure our future

Ban Ki-moon, August 3, 2009

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 marked an end and a beginning. The close of the second world war ushered in a cold war, with a precarious peace based on the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Today the world is at another turning point. The assumption that nuclear weapons are indispensable to keeping the peace is crumbling. Disarmament is back on the global agenda – and not a moment too soon. A groundswell of new international initiatives will soon emerge to move this agenda forward.

The cold war’s end, 20 years ago this autumn, was supposed to provide a peace dividend. Instead we find ourselves still facing serious nuclear threats. Some stem from the persistence of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons and the contagious doctrine of nuclear deterrence. Others relate to nuclear tests – more than a dozen in the post-cold war era, aggravated by the constant testing of long-range missiles. Still others arise from concerns that more countries or even terrorists might be seeking the bomb.

For decades, we believed that the terrible effects of nuclear weapons would be sufficient to prevent their use. The superpowers were likened to a pair of scorpions in a bottle, each knowing a first strike would be suicidal. Today’s expanding nest of scorpions, however, means that no one is safe. The presidents of the Russian federation and the US – holders of the largest nuclear arsenals – recognise this. They have endorsed the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, most recently at their Moscow summit, and are seeking new reductions.

Many efforts are under way worldwide to achieve this goal. Earlier this year, the 65-member Conference on Disarmament – the forum that produces multilateral disarmament treaties – broke a deadlock and agreed to negotiations on a fissile material treaty. Other issues it will discuss include nuclear disarmament and security assurances for non-nuclear-weapon states.

In addition, Australia and Japan have launched a major international commission on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. My own multimedia “WMD – WeMustDisarm!” campaign, which will culminate on the International Day of Peace (21 September), will reinforce growing calls for disarmament by former statesmen and grassroots campaigns, such as “Global Zero”. These calls will get a further boost in September when civil society groups gather in Mexico City for a UN-sponsored conference on disarmament and development (pdf).

Though the UN has been working on disarmament since 1946, two treaties negotiated under UN auspices are now commanding the world’s attention. Also in September, countries that have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) will meet at the UN to consider ways to promote its early entry into force. North Korea’s nuclear tests, its missile launches and its threats of further provocation lend new urgency to this cause.

Next May, the UN will also host a major five-year review conference involving the parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which will examine the state of the treaty’s “grand bargain” of disarmament, non-proliferation and the peaceful use of nuclear energy. If the CTBT can enter into force, and if the NPT review conference makes progress, the world would be off to a good start on its journey to a world free of nuclear weapons.

My own five-point plan to achieve this goal begins with a call for the NPT parties to pursue negotiations in good faith – as required by the treaty – on nuclear disarmament, either through a new convention or through a series of mutually reinforcing instruments backed by a credible system of verification. Disarmament must be reliably verified .

Second, I urged the UN security council to consider other ways to strengthen security in the disarmament process, and to protect non-nuclear-weapon states against nuclear weapons threats. I proposed to the council that it convene a summit on nuclear disarmament, and I urged non-NPT states to freeze their own weapon capabilities and make their own disarmament commitments. Disarmament must enhance security .

My third proposal relates to the rule of law. Universal membership in multilateral treaties is key, as are regional nuclear weapon-free zones and a new treaty on fissile materials. President Barack Obama’s support for US ratification of the CTBT is welcome – the treaty only needs a few more ratifications to enter into force. Disarmament must be rooted in legal obligations .

My fourth point addresses accountability and transparency. Countries with nuclear weapons should publish more information about what they are doing to fulfil their disarmament commitments. While most of these countries have revealed some details about their weapons programmes, we still do not know how many nuclear weapons exist worldwide. The UN secretariat could serve as a repository for such data. Disarmament must be visible to the public .

Finally, I am urging progress in eliminating other weapons of mass destruction and limiting missiles, space weapons and conventional arms – all of which are needed for a nuclear weapon-free world. Disarmament must anticipate emerging dangers from other weapons .

This, then, is my plan to drop the bomb. Global security challenges are serious enough without the risks from nuclear weapons or their acquisition by additional states or non-state actors. Of course, strategic stability, trust among nations and the settlement of regional conflicts would all help to advance the process of disarmament. Yet disarmament has its own contributions to make in serving these goals and should not be postponed.

It will restore hope for a more peaceful, secure and prosperous future. It deserves everybody’s support.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/nuclear-disarmament/print

Obama's Empire: An Unprecedented Network of Military Bases That is Still Expanding

Post Date July 30, 2009
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Category American Empire, Global Justice and Peace Movements, Guam / Northern Marianas, World

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Published on Thursday, July 30, 2009 by The New Statesman

Obama’s Empire: An Unprecedented Network of Military Bases That is Still Expanding

The 44th president of the United States was elected amid hopes that he would roll back his country’s global dominance. Today, he is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding.

by Catherine Lutz

In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, “to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad”, it was vital to maintain “the strongest military on the planet”. Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush’s defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: “We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security.”

Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.

The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.

The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile “security perimeter”. From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to “trouble spots” around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as “four and a half acres of sovereign US territory”). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.

The global expansion of US bases – and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower – is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and south Asia (CENTO) and south-east Asia (SEATO), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAS) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War – such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines – became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.

Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.

On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.

Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of “deployment” or “forward operating” bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that “while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein”.

The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, “Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel.”

Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. “Main operating bases” are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. “Forward operating sites” are “expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment”, such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, “co-operative security locations” are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as “lily pads”. These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.

Moreover, these bases are the anchor – and merely the most visible aspect – of the US military’s presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility – and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and “given” to the US by another of the war’s victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon’s claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations’ missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: “When soldiers come, war comes.” On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of “foreign aid” for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers’ local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers’ violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.

Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself – including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance – is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy’s removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military’s activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.

Many are also concerned by other countries’ overseas bases – primarily European, Russian and Chinese – and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island’s people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.

In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine’s recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous pro tests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.

The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on “force protection”, in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become “defence staging posts” or “forward operating locations” rather than military bases. Regulating documents become “visiting forces agreements”, not “status of forces agreements”, or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.

The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that “we pursue no bases” in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.

© 2009 The New Statesman

Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of “The Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle against US Military Posts [1]” (Pluto Press, £17.99)

Chalmers Johnson on the Cost of Empire

Post Date May 15, 2009
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Category American Empire, DMZ-Hawai'i / Aloha 'Aina In the News, Environmental Impacts, Global Justice and Peace Movements, Social and Economic Impacts, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands), World

Chalmers Johnson on the Cost of Empire

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090514_chalmers_johnson_on_the_cost_of_empire/

Posted on May 15, 2009

By Chalmers Johnson

In her foreword to “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” an important collection of articles on United States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject failures as a government and a democracy: “There is virtually no news coverage-no journalists’ or editors’ curiosity-about the pressures or lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access would be good for their countries.” The American public, if not the residents of the territories in question, is almost totally innocent of the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an antidote to such parochialism.

Catherine Lutz is an anthropologist at Brown University and the author of an ethnography of an American city that is indubitably part of the American military complex: Fayetteville, N.C., adjacent to Fort Bragg, home of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School (see “Homefront, A Military City and the American Twentieth Century,” Beacon Press, 2002). On the opening page of her introduction to the current volume, Lutz makes a real contribution to the study of the American empire of bases. She writes, “Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories.” She cites as her source the Department of Defense’s Base Structure Report for fiscal year 2007. This is the Defense Department’s annual inventory of real estate that it owns or leases in the United States and in foreign countries. Oddly, however, the total of 909 foreign bases does not appear in the 2007 BSR. Instead, it gives the numbers of 823 bases located in other people’s countries and 86 sites located in U.S. territories. So Lutz has combined the foreign and territorial bases-which include American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Johnston Atoll, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Wake Island. Guam is host to at least 30 military sites and Puerto Rico to 41 bases.

Combining the two numbers is a good idea. Some of the most deplorable conditions in the American military empire exist in U.S. territories, notably in Puerto Rico, where the citizens fought a long battle to stop the naval bombardment of Vieques Island, and in Guam, where the government plans to relocate more than 8,000 Marines from Okinawa together with a $13 billion expansion of Air Force and Navy facilities. The result will be an almost 15 percent increase in Guam’s population, which will significantly exceed the capacity of the island’s water and solid-waste systems. (See “U.S. Military Guam Buildup Spurs Worry over Services,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 12, 2009.) In the book under review here, Lutz also includes an essay on the state of Hawaii, with its 161 military installations (in 2004) covering 6 percent of the state’s land area (22 percent of the state’s most densely populated island, Oahu). The military is easily Hawaii’s largest polluter, including the secret use of depleted uranium ammunition at the Shofield range, evidence of which was uncovered in 2006.

It should be noted that the BSR for fiscal 2008 has been available since the summer of last year and it somewhat alters Lutz’s figures. It gives details on 761 bases in other people’s countries and 104 U.S. territories, which produces a Lutz total of 865. Such small variations from year to year have been typical of the American empire throughout the Cold War. Some 865 bases located in all the continents except Antarctica is not only a staggeringly large number compared even with the great empires of the past, but one the U.S. clearly cannot afford given its severely weakened economic condition.

Nonetheless, there has been no public discussion by the Obama administration over starting to liquidate our overseas bases or beginning to scale back our imperialist presence in the rest of the world. One must also remember that the BSR is an official source that often conflicts with other reports on the numbers of American military personnel located all over the world. It omits many bases that the Department of Defense wants to conceal or play down, notably those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel. For example, just one of the many unlisted bases in Iraq, Ballad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12-square-mile “security perimeter.”

One other subject that Lutz touches on in her introduction and that cries out for a book-length study is the political machinations that every American embassy and military base on earth engages in to undermine and change local laws that stand in the way of U.S. military plans. For years the United States has interfered in the domestic affairs of nations to bring about “regime change,” rig elections, free American servicemen who have been charged with extremely serious felonies against local civilians, indoctrinate the local officer corps in American militarist values (as at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga.), and preserve and protect the so-called Status of Forces Agreements that the United States imposes on all nations with U.S. bases. These SOFAs give our troops extraterritorial privileges such as freedom from local laws and from passport and travel regulations, and they absolve the U.S. from a country’s anti-pollution requirements, noise restrictions and environmental laws.

Mapping U.S. Power

The first essay in Lutz’s collection is by one of the few genuine veterans of military base studies, Joseph Gerson, the New England director of programs for the American Friends Service Committee. He is the editor (along with Bruce Birchard) of “The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of U.S. Military Bases” (Boston: South End Press, 1991). His essay on “U.S. Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives” is particularly good on the hypocrisy and opportunism that imperialism imposes on our foreign policy, regardless of our intentions. For example, he notes, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, the “abuses and usurpations” that King George III of England imposed on us though his “standing armies kept among us, in times of peace.”

Today the “abuses and usurpations” of American standing armies “include more than rape, murder, sexual harassment, robbery, other common crimes, seizure of people’s lands, destruction of property, and the cultural imperialism that have accompanied foreign armies since time immemorial. They now include terrorizing jet blasts of frequent low-altitude and night-landing exercises, helicopters and warplanes crashing into homes and schools and the poisoning of environments and communities with military toxins; and they transform ‘host’ communities into targets for genocidal nuclear as well as ‘conventional’ attacks.” When it comes to opportunism, Gerson notes that the Navy’s Indian Ocean tsunami relief operations of 2005 helped open the way for U.S. forces to return to Thailand and for greater cooperation with the Indonesian military.

John Lindsay-Poland’s essay “U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean” is informed by his extensive background in organizing and supporting struggles for the closure and environmental cleanup of U.S. military bases in Panama and Puerto Rico. His essay is comprehensive and historically detailed, although it appears to have been completed in late 2007 or early 2008 and some of the information has been overtaken by recent events. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has refused to renew our lease on Manta Air Base when it expires in November 2009; and the U.S. Army’s 2005 attempt to woo Paraguay flopped. After the Americans are expelled from the Manta base in November the only physical facilities of the U.S. military in South America will be in Colombia.

In 2005 and 2006, the United States tried to seduce Paraguay into giving the U.S. a permanent base by sending several hundred soldiers to provide medical assistance and dig wells. As it turned out, these ancient ploys did not work. Suspicions of the American military’s motives were aroused throughout the cone of South America, and the local population pronounced itself fully capable of digging wells unassisted by foreign troops. Lindsay-Poland notes that the “medical attention [in Paraguay] was one-time only, and … U.S. personnel handed out unlabeled medicines indiscriminately, regardless of the differences in medical conditions.”

David Heller and Hans Lammerant have contributed one of the most useful essays in the volume on “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Bases in Europe.” Information on this subject is scarce and the U.S. press is frightened of reporting what little is available for fear of raising a taboo topic. Heller has been actively involved with anti-nuclear and anti-militarist campaigns in Britain, Belgium and other European countries since the early 1990s. Lammerant has long supported the Belgian branch of War Resisters International.

They reveal that there are today still an estimated 350 to 480 free-fall B-61-type tactical nuclear weapons in the territories of the NATO allies, compared with a maximum of 7,300 land, air, and sea-based nuclear weapons based in Europe in 1971. The bombs are housed at eight air bases in six NATO countries, all of which enjoy Bechtel-installed Weapons Storage and Security Systems, type WS-3. These devices are vaults installed in the floors within a “protective aircraft shelter” and allow for the arming of bombs and aircraft inside hangars, offering high degrees of secrecy and (supposedly) security. Heller and Lammerant note that the weapons based in Europe are “secret, deadly, illegal, costly, militarily useless, politically motivated, and deeply, deeply unpopular.” Before they were all withdrawn, ground-launched nuclear missiles were based at Greenham Common and Molesworth in Britain, Comiso in Italy, Florennes in Belgium, and Wuescheim in the former West Germany. Pershing II missiles were based at Schwaebisch-Gmuend, Neu Ulm, and Waldheide-Neckarsulm in West Germany.

One of the themes stressed by Catherine Lutz as editor of this book is the prominent role played by women and women’s organizations in resisting American military imperialism over the years. All of the chapters offer details on the contributions of women to anti-base resistance activities, particularly in the case of the nuclear bases in Europe. Following the U.S. decision to station nuclear weapons at Greenham Common in the south of England, local women created “Women for Life on Earth” and maintained a constant presence in front of the base from 1981 to 2000 (even though the nuclear weapons were secretly removed in 1991).

Heller and Lammerant conclude their essay with details on the early-warning radars, anti-missile bases, military hubs to support operations in Africa, and facilities extant or being constructed at Thule in Greenland, Vardo in Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Vicenza in northern Italy. On March 17, 2009, the Czech government rejected a proposal by the Pentagon to install a U.S. military radar base in the Czech Republic because the lower house of the Czech parliament seemed certain to vote against it.

Tom Engelhardt’s contribution, “Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site,” is a cobbled-together version of two essays first published on TomDispatch, of which Engelhardt is editor. All source citations have been removed from the Lutz version, but readers can consult the original essays-“A Basis for Enduring Relationships in Iraq,” Dec. 2, 2007, and “Baseless Considerations,” Nov. 4, 2007.

The essays are tours de force on the construction of probably permanent American military bases in occupied Iraq and of the massive fortress– as large as the Vatican-in the Green Zone of Baghdad that is the “American Embassy.” Engelhardt’s work is a model of how to glean information from the public press on subjects that the American military is trying to keep secret. This is the best research we have to date on the bases in Iraq and the billions of dollars that flowed into the coffers of Halliburton Corp. to build them. (Truth in reporting: Engelhardt is the editor of all three of my books in the Blowback Trilogy.)

Global Resistance

Roland G. Simbulan’s “People’s Movement Responses to Evolving U.S. Military Activities in the Philippines” is a detailed analysis of how the United States has tried to get back into its former colony after the Philippine Senate voted on Sept. 16, 1991, to close all American military facilities and ordered U.S. troops to withdraw. Simbulan is a professor at the University of the Philippines and he played an active role in the “people’s power” movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and led to the 1991 rejection of the bases treaty.

Simbulan is justified in calling his country’s active protests against the Americans and their domestic lackeys “the most vibrant social movement in Southeast Asia,” but he is at pains to stress that the Americans are unreconciled to their colonial defeat. They continue with unabated creativity to invent “visiting forces agreements” aimed at restoring the U.S. troops’ old extraterritorial privileges and “joint military exercises” against domestic criminal gangs such as the Abu Sayyaf bandits in Mindanao and other Islamic provinces of the southern Philippines.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has also tried to overstate the threat of Islamic radicalism in the Philippines, even though there has been a slow-burning insurgency by indigenous Muslims for over 20 years, and it has pressured the Philippine government to abandon the anti-nuclear weapons provisions of its 1987 constitution. Americans may also be implicated in a clandestine campaign of selective killings of political activists, peasant and trade union leaders, human rights workers, lawyers and church people “in a pattern that was strikingly similar to that of Operation Phoenix”-the terrorist exercise run by the CIA in Vietnam that took the lives of some 30,000 suspected members of the National Liberation Front. Simbulan has written an important analysis of why the Philippines seems unable to get out from under the shadow of the United States despite the victories of “people power” almost 20 years ago.

David Vine’s and Laura Jeffrey’s article entitled “Give Us Back Diego Garcia: Unity and Division Among Activists in the Indian Ocean,” is a lively treatment of the seemingly hopeless efforts of the indigenous people of the island of Diego Garcia to obtain some measure of justice. In 1964, they were expropriated and forcibly expelled by the British government at the insistence of the U.S. Navy so that it could turn the entire island into an American military base.

This essay builds on Vine’s important monograph “Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia,” Princeton University Press, 2009. Vine is a professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. Jeffrey holds a postdoctoral fellowship in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Chagossians, the exiled people of Diego Garcia, now living in Mauritius and the United Kingdom.

In 1960, U.S. government officials secretly approached their British counterparts about acquiring the tiny island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean as a site for a military base. By 1964, the United Kingdom agreed to detach Diego Garcia and the rest of the surrounding Chagos archipelago from its colony Mauritius and several island groups from colonial Seychelles to create a strategic military colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. In a flagrant violation of human rights, Britain then removed the native inhabitants of Diego Garcia and Chagos, dumping them in Mauritius and Seychelles, 1,300 miles away, where they live today in abject poverty.

By 1973, the United States had completed the nucleus of a super-secret base that would grow faster than any other U.S. base since the Vietnam War. After the attacks of 9/11, the United States used Diego Garcia’s twin parallel runways, each over two miles in length, to launch its fleet of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers in its assault on Afghanistan, and its 2003 “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq. Diego Garcia also became the site of a secret CIA detention and torture facility for suspected terrorists.

According to John Pike, who runs the military analysis Web site GlobalSecurity.org, Diego Garcia lies at the center of American imperialist plans in case the nations of East Asia should decide that they have had enough of American military forces based on their territories. According to Pike, “[Diego Garcia] is the single most important military facility we’ve got.” The military’s goal, Pike says, is that “we’ll be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us from bases on their territory.” With characteristic hypocrisy, the Pentagon has named the Diego Garcia base “Camp Justice.”

Environmental Issues

Environmental and health issues have become the most important new focus in the long-standing conflicts between the U.S. military and civilian communities. Chief evidence is the victory of popular mobilization and civil disobedience against the Navy’s 60-year-long bombing of Vieques, a 51-square-mile island municipality six miles off the southeast coast of the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Katherine T. McCaffrey’s expert treatment of the four-year-long movement to force an end to the bombing of Vieques is one the most important pieces in Lutz’s anthology. The bombing of a Caribbean island inhabited by 10,000 American civilians also exposed Puerto Rico’s lack of sovereignty and the second-class status of its residents within the U.S. polity. Emphasis on environmental issues overcame the Puerto Ricans’ traditional reluctance to politicize their plight and created a broad popular movement that mobilized women and caused the Catholic and Protestant churches to join hands.

On April 19, 1999, the Vieques movement was further strengthened and united when it acquired a martyr. Two U.S. Navy F-18 jet aircraft traveling at supersonic speeds accidentally dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound that the Navy used to survey the shelling. A civilian security guard, David Sanes, who was patrolling the area, was knocked unconscious and subsequently bled to death. The result was that civilians occupied the site for more than a year, causing the Navy to move its bombing range to North Carolina. Given their access to the site, the occupiers also discovered that the Navy was using depleted uranium ammunition on Vieques. In May 2003, the Navy was finally forced off the island. McCaffrey concludes, “After decades of secrecy surrounding its activities, the military is emerging as the single largest polluter in the United States, single-handedly producing 27,000 toxic-waste sites in this country.”

From Vieques, mobilization based on environmental and health concerns spread to the Navy-controlled island of Kahoolawe in Hawaii, where it was equally successful in forcing the Navy to pull out. Kahoolawe had been occupied and bombed by the U.S. Navy since the outbreak of World War II. Kyle Kajihiro’s essay “Resisting Militarization in Hawaii,” touches on this and other military issues in Hawaii. Kajihiro is the American Friends Service Committee’s program director in Hawaii, who since 1996 has been active in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. His article is less a scholarly analysis of the popular protests against the huge military presence in Hawaii than a well-informed, impassioned brief for the rights of the Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiians). Kajihiro also points out that for the first time since World War II, tourism is now a bigger part of the Hawaiian economy than the military installations. His essay is a valuable contribution to the comparatively small literature on the problems of militarism within the United States.

The essay by Ayse Gul Altinay and Amy Holmes, “Opposition to the U.S. Military Presence in Turkey in the Context of the Iraq War,” is important for three reasons. First, there is very little published on the bases in Turkey; second, Incirlik Air Base on the outskirts of Adana, Turkey, is the largest U.S. military facility in a strategically vital NATO ally; and third, the decision on March 1, 2003, of the Turkish National Assembly not to deploy Turkish forces in Iraq nor to allow the United States to use Turkey as an invasion route into Iraq was one of the Bush administration’s greatest setbacks. Public opinion polls in January 2003 revealed that 90 percent of Turks opposed U.S. imperialism against Iraq and 83 percent opposed Turkey’s cooperating with the United States. Nonetheless, major U.S. newspapers either ignored or trivialized Turkey’s opposition to U.S. war plans.

Altinay is a professor of anthropology at Sabanci University, Turkey, and the author of “The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Holmes is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Johns Hopkins University and has written extensively on American bases in Germany and Turkey.

Turkey is not an easy place to do research on American bases. Some 41 percent of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Turkey between 1947 and 1965 were secret. It was not known that the U.S. had stationed missiles on Turkish territory until the U.S. promised to remove them in return for the USSR’s withdrawing its missiles from Cuba. Incirlik became even more central to U.S. strategy after 1974. In that year, Turkey invaded Cyprus and the United States imposed an arms embargo on its ally. As a result, Turkey closed all 27 U.S. bases in the country except for one, Incirlik. As Altinay and Holmes write, “It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the Incirlik Air Base for U.S. power projection in the Middle East, particularly since the early 1990s; for more than a decade, the entire Iraq policy of the United States hinged on Incirlik.”

My choice of the best article in the Lutz volume is Kozue Akibayashi’s and Suzuyo Takazato‘s “Okinawa: Women’s Struggle for Demilitarization.” The persecution of the native population of the island of Okinawa, Japan’s most southerly and poorest prefecture, by the American occupiers and the Japanese government since at least the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 has been told often and is reasonably well known in mainland Japan and among the U.S. armed forces. Akibayashi and Takazato expertly retell the essence of the story here, but what makes the article a standout is their emphasis on the mistreatment of Okinawan women and girls and their theoretically sophisticated conclusions.

Akibayashi is a researcher at the Institute for Gender Studies of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. Takazato is one of the best-known activists in the struggle of Okinawan women to escape the threat of sexual violence by American military personnel. She is an elected member of the City Council in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, and one of the founders of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, which was created in the wake of the gang rape on Sept. 4, 1995 of a 12-year-old Okinawa schoolgirl by two U.S. Marines and a sailor. The purpose of Takazato’s organization was to prevent a recurrence of attacks by the U.S. military on Okinawan women and to protect the young victim of Sept. 4 from unwanted publicity. The organization subsequently created the Rape Emergency Intervention Counseling Center in Okinawa, and has worked to end the U.S. military occupation of the island chain. Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts to get American military commanders to enforce discipline among their troops and strong representations to the Japanese government to take an interest in the plight of the Okinawans, little has changed. This has led Akibayashi and Takazato to two significant conclusions.

(1) “Integral elements of misogyny infect military training. …The military is a violence-producing institution to which sexual and gender violence are intrinsic. … The essence of military forces is their pervasive, deep-rooted contempt for women, which can be seen in military training that completely denies femininity and praises hegemonic masculinity.”

(2) “The OWAAMV [Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence] movement illustrates from a gender perspective that ‘the protected,’ who are structurally deprived of political power, are in fact not protected by the militarized security policies; rather their livelihoods are made insecure by these very policies. The movement has also illuminated the fact that ‘gated’ bases do not confine military violence to within the bases. Those hundred-of-miles-long fences around the bases are there only to assure the readiness of the military and military operations by excluding and even oppressing the people living outside the gated bases.”

These two propositions-misogyny in the official education of American troops and hypocrisy in describing the benefits to locals of foreign military bases-are significant. I believe that they should inform future research on the American empire around the world to see if they can be verified in many different contexts and to further develop their various implications. Meanwhile, these erudite essays should cause Americans to reflect on the nature of U.S. imperialism just at the point where it is most probably starting to decline due to economic constraints and popular exhaustion with the wars and deaths it has caused.

Bogota Declaration 2009: Faith and Resistance for Peace and Life in the Age of U.S./Global Empire

Post Date March 26, 2009
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Peace for Life Second People’s Forum
BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA • 20-23 MARCH 2009
Organized in partnership with Colombian NGOs led by
Proyecto Justicia y Vida

BOGOTÁ DECLARATION 2009

Faith and Resistance for Peace and Life in the Age of U.S./Global Empire

With the powers of dance, music, testimonies and prayers, and enriched by multiple analyses, we Colombian peoples’ movements, and international delegates in solidarity, issue this joint call to the international community. In March 2009 at Bogotá, Colombians through Proyecto Justicia y Vida, joined with the Second People’s Forum of Peace for Life to focus Colombia’s armed conflict and struggle within a larger global context, under the theme, “Without Fear of Empire: Global People’s Resistance.” Peace for Life defines its peace and justice objectives in relation to the core issues of empire, state terrorism and militarized neoliberal globalization, especially as forged by the imperial power of the U.S.

The international delegation brought solidarity and support, with over 50 political activists, scholars, laity, pastors, priests, and peoples attending from every continent. Hundreds of Colombians met in common purpose with international guests coming from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Fiji, Germany, India, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Tonga, United Kingdom, and the United States.

RESISTANCE’S PAIN AND POWER

Together, we Colombians and international delegates, weave the strength of our resistance with our faith for a common struggle. Our struggle grows strong amid the destruction of peoples and lands that the U.S global empire-with its transnational corporations and Neoliberal policies-inflicts upon the peoples of Colombia and so many others.

Colombia today is burdened by the nightmare of more than 50 years of armed conflict, as guerrilla groups have waged an ongoing struggle against unjust Colombian governments. The present government exploits this long-standing conflict to advance the special interests of its elite, the 3 percent of the population who owns over half of Colombia’s arable land. The conflicts inside the country are many and complex, but we lift our cry especially against the U.S. global empire, which, often with Europe’s complicity, endlessly multiplies the people’s pain.

There is some hope, because today the power of the U.S. global empire is in decline, due to its own internal economic crisis, and the unyielding resistance of people’s movements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Moreover, there are the rival powers of a stronger China, Russia, and especially the new governments brought to power by peoples’ movements across Latin America (in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, for example). Nevertheless, the empire remains a threat. It has divided the entire globe into strategic command regions, and maintains over 800 military bases worldwide. The U.S. is now making a desperate and brutal assault on the people of Colombia, in order to secure empire’s traditional hold over all the Americas and, by extension, over the globe. Empire is hungry for the resources of Colombia, Latin America’s fifth largest economy. It has a particular hunger for narco-trafficking, exploiting it and so destroying humanity. It now seeks to strengthen its strategic position in Colombia, located between Central and South America, and bordering Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. Empire especially covets the oil of Colombia, the third largest Latin American supplier of oil to the U.S. (after Venezuela and Mexico). To feed its domestic demand for oil, the U.S. imports more oil from Latin America than even from the Middle East. And with gains and investments from these resources, the empire plays a ruthless game, a “casino capitalism,” a speculation of high finance that brings the people low.

And so, Colombia’s peoples are bleeding. Women, children, the aged-especially those from Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasant/campesino communities-are now being displaced and dispossessed from their lands. Indigenous peoples’ struggle for their land and culture is met by the Colombian state’s continued repression and threats of “extinction.” Middle classes have been exploited by their banks and lending agencies. Millions of displaced persons and refugees have been created by strategic maneuvers of elites who expropriate land for economic gain and power. These displacements are not just a simple transfer of peoples from one place to another; they are the brutal, forced loss of home and housing, being coerced to live without dignity, seeing loved-ones killed, tortured, poisoned by defoliating spraying of coca fields, denuding and polluting mother earth. Moreover, when leaders for peace and justice have come forward to work in peaceful and political ways, they routinely have been assassinated by military and paramilitary agents.

We have seen this bleeding before. We recognize the bleeding of Colombian peoples as U.S. Empire’s work elsewhere. It is, for example, the same bleeding we see when the empire of America and Israel work together to dispossess Palestinian peoples of their lands, enforcing more than 60 years of colonization, apartheid discrimination, and illegal occupation of Palestine. In Colombia today, Israel works as a full partner with the United States in the funding and training of military and paramilitary forces to enact illegal dispossession of lands and peoples, as they do in Palestine.

It is the same bleeding from empire that, historically, we have seen in the invasions and occupations of the Philippines for its resources and strategic position, in the partition and brutal militarization of the divided Koreas, in the more than a million lives lost in the U.S. war in Vietnam, in the militarized colonization of Puerto Rico, in the economic isolation and invasion of Haiti, in the brutal interventions into democratic struggles in Nepal, in the invasions of Grenada and Panama, and in the embargos and attacks on the people’s revolution in Cuba. Today we see the bleeding continue, in the war and occupation of Iraq (a million of its civilians sacrificed to empire), in the suffering of young women and men in the sweat factories of empire’s “free trade export zones,” in the uninvestigated feminicides (murders of women) in Guatemala, in the networks of human trafficking (in women, especially), in the empire’s torture cells of Abu-Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, in the empire’s feeding on the callous neglect and exploitation of Dalit people, in the imperial actions and inactions in Rwanda, the Congo and Sudan, and in the empire’s current spiraling into greater militarization and war in Afghanistan. Even as we meet in Bogotá, we also hear the cries from Sri Lanka, where civilians are dying from attacks by a government supported by the US in the name of a “struggle against terrorism.”

Empire has its own religion, often believing that this bleeding is a necessary sacrifice for globalization, for civilization, for the future of all peoples. Too many Christian churches preach this theology, condoning the sacrifice of the poor, or becoming complicit by their silence with this sacrifice of the earth and her poor. We reject this theology of sacrifice for imperial globalization. We refuse to be the sacrificial lambs for the empire’s pretexts and projects, whether called “war on terrorism,” “war on drugs,” or “development.”

THE CALL AND PLEDGE OF A COUNTER-IMPERIAL FAITH

We, nevertheless, are not just bleeding. We are also breathing life, and celebrating life’s emergence, even in the throes of U.S. imperial power. We breathe in our rage and mourning, and live out a new culture of memory, remembering to be led toward justice and peace by our many departed ancestors and martyrs. We breathe and calmly discern in empire the structural demons of greed and violence that we must name and resist everywhere. We breathe within a fragile ecosystem of air and water, and are thus united and empowered with all peoples of this one earth, which births and nurtures us all. In Bogotá, we Indigenous, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and other peoples of conscience, celebrate together this new spirituality of breath and life. This spirituality breaks down the politics and religions of self-centeredness, egoism, individualism, and greed, and brings peace and life with justice.

Thus our shared pain and lamentation have arisen in faith, with a new counter-imperial spirituality, nurtured by many faiths that guide our concrete popular movements and organizing. We are especially led by and have as our exemplars the women and mothers of the dispossessed in Colombia and among the dispossessed of every land. This spirituality is part of a revolution of spiritual values and practices the world over. We call all peoples of faith and conscience to this revolution-whether they be from any religion or no religion-to participate in the spiritualities of many faiths resisting empire today in their own settings.

We join our Colombian brothers and sisters to call for prosecution of the Colombian state’s and financial sectors’ crimes against humanity, especially as transnational corporations have ravaged the country. War and dispossession against all, especially farmers, must be ended. Colonization and racism against Colombia’s indigenous peoples must be dismantled, especially for the Raizal peoples of Colombia’s Caribbean region. We bring the same urgency to prosecuting crimes against international law in Colombia as we do to those in Palestine.

We call also to our brothers and sisters under repression or in crisis inside the U.S. imperium. We celebrate your faith and spirituality of resistance against your government’s imperial power. Your economic crisis is part of the multiple chaos being visited upon us throughout the world, driven by the imperial adventures and interventions of U.S. global power. Your bleeding within the U.S. is one of the many rivulets of blood flowing from the open wounds of empire around the world.

As all who hear our call join with us, we pledge our resolve to resist the many strategies of empire today. Here at this Forum, we have analyzed and mourned our planet in peril, but in hope and joy we are building new structures to hasten the time of a liberation from empire for all the oppressed of the earth.

Adopted by the participants of the Peace for Life Second People’s Forum held on 20-23 March 2009 in Bogotá, Colombia

The Second People’s Forum of Peace for Life was organized in partnership with Proyecto Justicia y Vida and a consortium of Colombian NGOs and social movements: Sociedad Latinoamericana de Economia Politica y Pensamiento Critico (SEPLA); Colombianas y colombianos por La Paz; Movimiento de Cristianos y Cristianas por la Paz; Comisión Interfranciscana de Justicia, Paz y Reverencia con la Creación; Movimiento de Maestros y Maestras; Movimiento Campesino Colombiano; Movimiento Indígena Colombiano; and Movimiento de Víctimas de Crímenes del Sector Financiero. Other local organizations, including progressive Christian groups like Red Ecumenica, were also represented at the Forum. Sixty-two (62) international delegates from 22 countries and more than 300 local activists participated in the event.

Empire of Bases

Post Date March 18, 2009
Comments 0 Comments
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Category American Empire, World

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12785

Empire of bases

by Prof. Hugh Gusterson
Global Research, March 18, 2009
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Before reading this article, try to answer this question: How many military bases does the United States have in other countries: a) 100; b) 300; c) 700; or d) 1,000.

According to the Pentagon’s own list PDF, the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand. These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country’s territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup.

The old way of doing colonialism, practiced by the Europeans, was to take over entire countries and administer them. But this was clumsy. The United States has pioneered a leaner approach to global empire. As historian Chalmers Johnson says, “America’s version of the colony is the military base.” The United States, says Johnson, has an “empire of bases.”

Its ’empire of bases’ gives the United States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic holdover from the Cold War.”

These bases do not come cheap. Excluding U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States spends about $102 billion a year to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. And in many cases you have to ask what purpose they serve. For example, the United States has 227 bases in Germany. Maybe this made sense during the Cold War, when Germany was split in two by the iron curtain and U.S. policy makers sought to persuade the Soviets that the American people would see an attack on Europe as an attack on itself. But in a new era when Germany is reunited and the United States is concerned about flashpoints of conflict in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it makes as much sense for the Pentagon to hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies.

Drowning in red ink, the White House is desperate to cut unnecessary costs in the federal budget, and Massachusetts Cong. Barney Frank, a Democrat, has suggested that the Pentagon budget could be cut by 25 percent. Whether or not one thinks Frank’s number is politically realistic, foreign bases are surely a lucrative target for the budget cutter’s axe. In 2004 Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the United States could save $12 billion by closing 200 or so foreign bases. This would also be relatively cost-free politically since the locals who may have become economically dependent upon the bases are foreigners and cannot vote retribution in U.S. elections.

Yet those foreign bases seem invisible as budget cutters squint at the Pentagon’s $664 billion proposed budget. Take the March 1st editorial in the New York Times, “The Pentagon Meets the Real World.” The Times’s editorialists called for “political courage” from the White House in cutting the defense budget. Their suggestions? Cut the air force’s F-22 fighter and the navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer and scale back missile defense and the army’s Future Combat System to save $10 billion plus a year. All good suggestions, but what about those foreign bases?

Even if politicians and media pundits seem oblivious to these bases, treating the stationing of U.S. troops all over the world as a natural fact, the U.S. empire of bases is attracting increasing attention from academics and activists–as evidenced by a conference on U.S. foreign bases at American University in late February. NYU Press just published Catherine Lutz’s Bases of Empire, a book that brings together academics who study U.S. military bases and activists against the bases. Rutgers University Press has published Kate McCaffrey’s Military Power and Popular Protest, a study of the U.S. base at Vieques, Puerto Rico, which was closed in the face of massive protests from the local population. And Princeton University Press is about to publish David Vine’s Island of Shame–a book that tells the story of how the United States and Britain secretly agreed to deport the Chagossian inhabitants of Diego Garcia to Mauritius and the Seychelles so their island could be turned into a military base. The Americans were so thorough that they even gassed all the Chagossian dogs. The Chagossians have been denied their day in court in the United States but won their case against the British government in three trials, only to have the judgment overturned by the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. They are now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.

American leaders speak of foreign bases as cementing alliances with foreign nations, largely through the trade and aid agreements that often accompany base leases. Yet, U.S. soldiers live in a sort of cocooned simulacrum of America in their bases, watching American TV, listening to American rap and heavy metal, and eating American fast food, so that the transplanted farm boys and street kids have little exposure to another way of life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, local residents and businesses often become economically dependent on the soldiers and have a stake in their staying.

These bases can become flashpoints for conflict. Military bases invariably discharge toxic waste into local ecosystems, as in Guam where military bases have led to no fewer than 19 superfund sites. Such contamination generates resentment and sometimes, as in Vieques in the 1990s, full-blown social movements against the bases. The United States used Vieques for live-bombing practice 180 days a year, and by the time the United States withdrew in 2003, the landscape was littered with exploded and unexploded ordinance, depleted uranium rounds, heavy metals, oil, lubricants, solvents, and acids. According to local activists, the cancer rate on Vieques was 30 percent higher than on the rest of Puerto Rico.

It is also inevitable that, from time to time, U.S. soldiers–often drunk–commit crimes. The resentment these crimes cause is only exacerbated by the U.S. government’s frequent insistence that such crimes not be prosecuted in local courts. In 2002, two U.S. soldiers killed two teenage girls in Korea as they walked to a birthday party. Korean campaigners claim this was one of 52,000 crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea between 1967 and 2002. The two U.S. soldiers were immediately repatriated to the United States so they could escape prosecution in Korea. In 1998, a marine pilot sliced through the cable of a ski gondola in Italy, killing 20 people, but U.S. officials slapped him on the wrist and refused to allow Italian authorities to try him. These and other similar incidents injured U.S. relations with important allies.

The 9/11 attacks are arguably the most spectacular example of the kind of blowback that can be generated from local resentment against U.S. bases. In the 1990s, the presence of U.S. military bases near the holiest sites of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia angered Osama bin Laden and provided Al Qaeda with a potent recruitment tool. The United States wisely closed its largest bases in Saudi Arabia, but it opened additional bases in Iraq and Afghanistan that are rapidly becoming new sources of friction in the relationship between the United States and the peoples of the Middle East.

Its “empire of bases” gives the United States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic holdover from the Cold War. Many of these bases are a luxury the United States can no longer afford at a time of record budget deficits. Moreover, U.S. foreign bases have a double edge: they project American power across the globe, but they also inflame U.S. foreign relations, generating resentment against the prostitution, environmental damage, petty crime, and everyday ethnocentrism that are their inevitable corollaries. Such resentments have recently forced the closure of U.S. bases in Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Kyrgyzstan, and if past is prologue, more movements against U.S. bases can be expected in the future. Over the next 50 years, I believe we will witness the emergence of a new international norm according to which foreign military bases will be as indefensible as the colonial occupation of another country has become during the last 50 years.

The Declaration of Independence criticizes the British “for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” and “for protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States.” Fine words! The United States should start taking them to heart.
Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has conducted considerable fieldwork in the United States and Russia, where he studied the culture of nuclear weapon scientists and antinuclear activists. Two of his books encapsulate this work–Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He also coedited Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005); a sequel, The Insecure American, is in preparation. Previously, he taught in MIT’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society.

The Battle Over Bases

Post Date March 11, 2009
Comments 0 Comments
Author
Category Global Justice and Peace Movements, World

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/vine.php?articleid=14383

March 11, 2009

The Battle Over Bases

by David Vine

In 2003 and 2004, President George W. Bush announced his intention to initiate a major realignment and shrinkage of what his administration described as an economically wasteful and outdated U.S. overseas basing structure. The plan was to close more than a third of the nation’s Cold War-era bases in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. Troops were to be shifted east and south, to be closer to current and predicted conflict zones from the Andes to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Over a planned six to eight years, as many as 70,000 U.S. troops and 100,000 family members and civilians would return to bases in the United States.

In place of big Cold War bases, the Pentagon would focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even more austere “lily pad” bases across the so-called “arc of instability.” Guam and Diego Garcia were readied for major expansions, building on pre-9/11 plans.

The plan quickly faced resistance and criticism, most prominently from the Congressional Budget Office and a congressional commission on overseas bases, both of which questioned the costs associated with closing bases and moving troops. Since that time little of the original plan has been implemented. In Germany, the military still maintains 268 installations, including massive bases at Ramstein and Spangdahlem; the planned removal of two army brigades is now in doubt after the commander of the army’s forces in Europe recently called for them to stay in Germany. In Japan, the planned move of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam may be delayed beyond a 2014 target date. The only notable shift has been in South Korea, where U.S. troops left the demilitarized zone and moved from Seoul to expanded bases south of the capital, aided by the South Korean government’s violent seizure of land from villagers in Daechuri.

Rather than shrinking since the announced reorganization, the overseas base network has for the most part expanded in scope and size, as a result of the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its broader efforts to assert U.S. geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, Central Asia, and globally. Since the invasions of 2001 and 2003, the United States has created or expanded bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there may be upward of 100 and 80 installations, respectively, with plans to expand the basing infrastructure in Afghanistan as part of a troop surge.

In Eastern and Central Europe, installations have been created or are in development in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic, and are contributing to rising tensions with Russia. In Africa, as part of the development of the new African Command, the Pentagon has created or investigated the creation of installations in Algeria, Djibouti, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, and Uganda. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States maintains a sizable collection of bases throughout South America and the Caribbean, with the Pentagon exploring the creation of new bases in Colombia and Peru in response to its pending eviction from Manta, Ecuador.

In total, the Pentagon claims it has 865 base sites outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C. Notoriously unreliable, this tally omits bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other well-known and secret bases. A better estimate is 1,000. While ultimately the motivation behind the Bush reorganization plan was the neoconservative dream of endless U.S. global domination, the previous administration was right to criticize the basing network as outdated, bloated, and profligate. In the midst of an economic crisis, there has never been a more critical time to dramatically shrink the U.S. web of overseas bases.

Reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.

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