America's empire of bases

Chalmers Johnson

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognise -
- or do not want to recognise — that the United States dominates 
the world through its military power. A vast network of American 
bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a 
new form of empire. Our military deploys well over half a million 
soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependants and civilian 
contractors in other nations.

To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating 
some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers.

We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor 
what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are 
saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, 
which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, 
like the now well-publicised Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a 
subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation. Whole sectors of the 
American economy have come to rely on the military for sales.

Seven hundred and more foreign bases

It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of 
bases. The Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in 
about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the United 
States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that 
it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the 
foreign bases.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover 
all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status 
Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo — 
even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 
1999. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, 
Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan.

The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the US$5-billion-
worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which 
have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. 

If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military 
empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people's 
countries.

For their occupants, these are not unpleasant places to live and 
work. Most chores like laundry, mail call, and cleaning latrines 
have been subcontracted to private military companies. Fully one-
third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq 
(about $30 billion), are going into private American hands for 
exactly such services.

Where possible everything is done to make daily existence seem 
like a Hollywood version of life at home. According to the 
Washington Post, in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters in 
white shirts, black pants and black bow ties serve dinner to the 
officers of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Some of these bases are so gigantic they require as many as nine 
internal bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors to get 
around inside the earthen berms and concertina wire. That's the 
case at Camp Anaconda just north of Baghdad. It occupies 25 
square kilometers and will ultimately house as many as 20,000 
troops.

The military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist 
towns in the Bible Belt rather than the big population centres of 
the United States. For example, even though more than 100,000 
women live on our overseas bases, obtaining an abortion at a 
local military hospital is prohibited.

Since there are some 14,000 sexual assaults or attempted sexual 
assaults each year in the military, women who become pregnant 
overseas and want an abortion have no choice but to try the local 
economy, which cannot be either easy or pleasant in Baghdad or 
other parts of our empire these days.

Our "footprint" on the world

Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we've allowed into 
our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to describe the 
military impact of our empire. Establishing a more impressive 
"footprint" has now become part of the new justification for a 
major enlargement of our empire.

There are "rogue states", "bad guys", and "evil-doers". The 
Pentagon has identified something they call the "arc of 
instability", which is said to run from the Andean region of 
South America through North Africa and then sweeps across the 
Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is more or 
less identical with what used to be called the Third World. No 
less crucially it covers the world's key oil reserves.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by 
counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the 
military base. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins 
joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other.

According to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the 
idea is to create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from 
"frontier stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we 
get some intelligence on them.

"Lily Pads" in Australia, Romania, Mali, Algeria . . . 

In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area 
in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon is 
proposing at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent 
bases in Iraq.

Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls 
our new "family of bases" include the impoverished areas of the 
"new" Europe — Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia — 
Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, 
Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even, unbelievably, 
Vietnam; in North Africa — Morocco, Tunisia, and especially 
Algeria, and in West Africa — Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Sierra 
Leone.

Most of these new bases will be what the military calls "lily 
pads" to which our troops could jump like so many well-armed 
frogs from the homeland, our NATO bases in Europe, or bases in 
the docile satellites of Japan and Britain.

To offset the expense involved in such expansion, the Pentagon 
has leaked plans to close many of the huge Cold War military 
reservations in Germany and South Korea. The US has already 
withdrawn virtually all of its forces from Saudi Arabia and 
Turkey, partially as a way of punishing them for not supporting 
the war strongly enough.

It wants to do the same thing to South Korea, perhaps the most 
anti-American democracy on Earth today. 

In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in 
Germany, also in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's 
domestically popular defiance of Bush over Iraq.

But the degree to which we are capable of doing so may prove 
limited. The Pentagon's planners do not really seem to grasp just 
how many buildings the 71,702 soldiers and airmen in Germany 
alone occupy, and how expensive it would be to build even 
slightly comparable bases, together with the necessary 
infrastructure in countries like Romania, one of Europe's poorest 
countries.

One reason why the Pentagon is considering moving out of rich 
democracies like Germany and South Korea and looks covetously at 
military dictatorships and poverty-stricken dependencies is to 
take advantage of what the Pentagon calls their "more permissive 
environmental regulations".

The Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys our 
forces so-called Status of Forces Agreements, which usually 
exempt the United States from cleaning up or paying for the 
environmental damage it causes.

For example, the 2004 defence authorisation bill of US$401.3 
billion that President Bush signed into law in November 2003, 
exempts the military from abiding by the Endangered Species Act 
and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Grandiose plans

There are several reasons to doubt that some of the more 
grandiose plans will ever be put into effect or, if they are, 
that they will do anything other than make the problem of 
terrorism worse than it is.

For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of US military 
power on its borders and is already moving to checkmate American 
basing sorties into places like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and 
Uzbekistan. The first post-Soviet-era Russian airbase in 
Kyrgyzstan has just been completed forty miles from the US base 
at Bishkek.

By far the greatest defect in the "global cavalry" strategy, 
however, is that it accentuates Washington's impulse to apply 
irrelevant military remedies to terrorism. As the prominent 
British military historian, Correlli Barnett, has observed, the 
US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the threat of 
al-Qaeda.

From 1993 through to the 9/11 assaults of 2001, there were five 
major al-Qaeda attacks world-wide. In the two years since then 
there have been seventeen such bombings.

As Barnett puts it, "Rather than kicking down front doors and 
barging into ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums 
of 'freedom and democracy', we need tactics of cunning and 
subtlety, based on a profound understanding of the people and 
cultures we are dealing with — an understanding up till now 
entirely lacking in the top-level policy-makers in Washington, 
especially in the Pentagon".

But the real reason for constructing this new ring of American 
bases along the equator is to expand our empire and reinforce our 
military domination of the world.

* * *

Abridged from Common Dreams News Center.
For full text go to http://www.commondreams.org