Paul Simon
2008-12-26 15:56:46 UTC
The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never
Talk About It
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 8, 2008.
America garrisons the globe in ways that are truly unprecedented, but
if you live in the United States, you rarely hear a word about it.
Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year,
there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S.
soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid
in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of
countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not
indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune
of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with
accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating
bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay,
often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at
tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads"
(from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap
quickly into a region in crisis).
At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37
major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height
of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide.
Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have
hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are
761 active military "sites" abroad.
The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and
even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive
aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is,
the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know
about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our
politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in
base denial.
Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than
you care to know, stop here.
Where the Sun Never Sets
Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender and it's been a long, long
night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive
expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no
tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world were our oyster;
and we're still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial
equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But let's start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it
seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and
blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed -- or perhaps more
accurately, Washington hailed itself -- not just as the planet's "sole
superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its "global
policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders
took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that
famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping
police stations -- aka military bases -- in or near the oil heartlands
of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful
wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.
As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new,
post-Soviet version of "containment." With the USSR gone, however,
what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one
spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened
to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.
Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant
mega-war against Japan and Germany, and then the stalemated "police
action" in South Korea (1950-1953) -- vast structures which added up
to something like an all-military American version of the old British
Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in
Japan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea.
(Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South
Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our
major bases in the Philippines in 1992.)
But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global
policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was
nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel
of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush
administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed
ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations Well, they were
often something to behold -- and they still are.
Let's start with the basics: Almost 70 years after World War II, the
sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases" --
in Chalmers Johnson's phrase -- which at this moment stretches from
Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Rumania to Okinawa. And new bases
of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more
to come). For instance, an American missile system is slated to go
into Poland and a radar system into Israel. That will mean Americans
stationed in both countries and, undoubtedly, modest bases of one sort
or another to go with them. (The Israeli one -- "the first American
base on Israeli territory" -- reports Aluf Benn of Haaretz, will be in
the Negev desert.)
There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially
39 of them have American "facilities," large and/or small. But those
are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply
aren't counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country
finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases;
because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares
bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no
matter how elaborate, somehow don't count. In other words, that 39
figure doesn't even include Iraq or Afghanistan. By 2005, according to
the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases in Iraq, ranging
from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named
Camp Victory that house tens of thousands of troops, private
contractors, Defense Department civilians, have bus routes, traffic
lights, PXes, big name fast-food restaurants, and so on.
Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil.
In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in
their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There
are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Air Base,
located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which
even has a full-scale hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian
contingent of troops).
You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the
establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news
stories, that books by the score would pour out on America's version
of imperial control. But here's the strange thing: We garrison the
globe in ways that really are -- not to put too fine a point on it --
unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States,
you basically wouldn't know it; or, thought about another way, you
wouldn't have to know it.
In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted
that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some
exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no debate at
all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at
best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys.
There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less
seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.
Missing Bases
Americans have, of course, always prided themselves on exporting
"democracy," not empire. So empire-talk hasn't generally been an
American staple and, perhaps for that reason, all those bases prove an
awkward subject to bring up or focus too closely on. When it came to
empire-talk in general, there was a brief period after 9/11 when the
neoconservatives, in full-throated triumph, began to compare us to
Rome and Britain at their imperial height (though we were believed to
be incomparably, uniquely more powerful). It was, in the phrase of the
time, a "unipolar moment." Even liberal war hawks started talking
about taking up "the burden" of empire or, in the phrase of Michael
Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but, in that period, still at
Harvard and considered a significant American intellectual, "empire
lite."
On the whole, however, those in Washington and in the media haven't
considered it germane to remind Americans of just exactly how we have
attempted to "police" and control the world these last years. I've had
two modest encounters with base denial myself:
In the spring of 2004, a journalism student I was working with emailed
me a clip, dated October 20, 2003 -- less than seven months after
American troops entered Baghdad -- from a prestigious engineering
magazine. It quoted Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked
with facilities development" in Iraq, speaking proudly of the several
billion dollars ("the numbers are staggering") that had already been
sunk into base construction in that country. Well, I was staggered
anyway. American journalists, however, hardly noticed, even though
significant sums were already pouring into a series of mega-bases that
were clearly meant to be permanent fixtures on the Iraqi landscape.
(The Bush administration carefully avoided using the word "permanent"
in any context whatsoever, and these bases were first dubbed "enduring
camps.")
Within two years, according to the Washington Post (in a piece that,
typically, appeared on page A27 of the paper), the U.S. had those 106
bases in Iraq at a cost that, while unknown, must have been staggering
indeed. Just stop for a moment and consider that number: 106. It
boggles the mind, but not, it seems, American newspaper or TV
journalism.
TomDispatch.com has covered this subject regularly ever since, in part
because these massive "facts on the ground," these modern Ziggurats,
were clearly evidence of the Bush administration's long-term plans and
intentions in that country. Not surprisingly, this year, U.S.
negotiators finally offered the Iraqi government of Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki its terms for a so-called status of forces agreement,
evidently initially demanding the right to occupy into the distant
future 58 of the bases it has built.
It has always been obvious -- to me, at least -- that any discussion
of Iraq policy in this country, of timelines or "time horizons,"
drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on
the ground weren't taken into account. And yet you have to search the
U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have
bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over
Iraq policy.
I could go further: I can think of two intrepid American journalists,
Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post and Guy Raz of NPR, who actually
visited a single U.S. mega-base, Balad Air Base, which reputedly has a
level of air traffic similar to Chicago's O'Hare International or
London's Heathrow, and offered substantial reports on it. But, as far
as I know, they, like the cheese of children's song, stand alone. I
doubt that in the last five years Americans tuning in to their
television news have ever been able to see a single report from Iraq
that gave a view of what the bases we have built there look like or
cost. Although reporters visit them often enough and, for instance,
have regularly offered reports from Camp Victory in Baghdad on what's
going on in the rest of Iraq, the cameras never pan away from the
reporters to show us the gigantic base itself.
More than five years after ground was broken for the first major
American base in Iraq, this is, it seems to me, a remarkable record of
media denial. American bases in Afghanistan have generally experienced
a similar fate.
My second encounter with base denial came in my other life. When not
running TomDispatch.com, I'm a book editor; to be more specific, I'm
Chalmers Johnson's editor. I worked on the prophetic Blowback: The
Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published back in
2000 to a singular lack of attention -- until, of course, the attacks
of 9/11, after which it became a bestseller, adding both "blowback"
and the phrase "unintended consequences" to the American lexicon.
By the time The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of
the Republic, the second volume in his Blowback Trilogy, came out in
2004, reviewers, critics, and commentators were all paying attention.
The heart of that book focused on how the U.S. garrisons the planet,
laying out Pentagon basing policies and discussing specific bases in
remarkable detail. This represented serious research and breakthrough
work, and the book indeed received much attention here, including
major, generally positive reviews. Startlingly, however, not a single
mainstream review, no matter how positive, paid any attention, or even
really acknowledged, his chapters on the bases, or bothered to discuss
the U.S. as a global garrison state. Only three years later did a
major reviewer pay the subject serious attention. When Jonathan
Freedland reviewed Nemesis, the final book in the Trilogy, in the New
York Review of Books, he noticed the obvious and, in a discussion of
U.S. basing policy, wrote, for instance:
"Johnson is in deadly earnest when he draws a parallel with Rome. He
swats aside the conventional objection that, in contrast with both
Romans and Britons, Americans have never constructed colonies abroad.
Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to
them. America is an 'empire of bases,' he writes, with a network of
vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match
for any Roman or Raj outpost."
Not surprisingly, Freedland is not an American journalist, but a
British one who works for the Guardian.
In the U.S., military bases really only matter, and so make headlines,
when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them
scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost
income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.
Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad
firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well kept secrets on
the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense
Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time
on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the
near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit
strange.
The Foreshortened American Century
In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply
isn't news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do
pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S.
taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul
(largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands
of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points
out the following: "An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the
overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting
indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially
budgeted one-fifth that amount."
And that's only the most obvious way Americans pay. It's hard for us
even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face
that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W.
Bush's two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also
presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated
recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has
been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning
for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the
military's Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)
In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able
to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and
successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later,
cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our
base-world abroad.
In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two "superpowers," the
lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years.
Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits,
the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves
triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It
now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just
heading for the exit far more slowly.
As of now, "the American Century," birthed by Time/Life publisher
Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in
full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century -- whether
it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China,
the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos -- will not be an
American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or
later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores
of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax
Americana.
[Note on Sources: It's rare indeed that the U.S. empire of bases gets
anything like the attention it deserves, so, when it does, praise is
in order. Mother Jones online launched a major project to map out and
analyze U.S. bases worldwide. It includes a superb new piece on bases
by Chalmers Johnson, "America's Unwelcome Advances" and a number of
other top-notch pieces, including one on "How to Stay in Iraq for
1,000 Years" by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (the second part of
whose Pentagon expansion series will be posted at this site soon).
Check out the package of pieces at MJ by clicking here. Perhaps most
significant, the magazine has produced an impressive online
interactive map of U.S. bases worldwide. Check it out by clicking
here. But when you zoom in on an individual country, do note that the
first base figures you'll see are the Pentagon's and so possibly not
complete. You need to read the MJ texts below each map to get a fuller
picture. As will be obvious, if you click on the links in this post, I
made good use of MJ's efforts, for which I offer many thanks.]
Talk About It
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 8, 2008.
America garrisons the globe in ways that are truly unprecedented, but
if you live in the United States, you rarely hear a word about it.
Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year,
there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S.
soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid
in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of
countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not
indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune
of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with
accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating
bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay,
often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at
tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads"
(from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap
quickly into a region in crisis).
At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37
major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height
of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide.
Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have
hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are
761 active military "sites" abroad.
The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and
even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive
aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is,
the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know
about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our
politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in
base denial.
Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than
you care to know, stop here.
Where the Sun Never Sets
Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender and it's been a long, long
night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive
expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no
tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world were our oyster;
and we're still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial
equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But let's start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it
seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and
blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed -- or perhaps more
accurately, Washington hailed itself -- not just as the planet's "sole
superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its "global
policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders
took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that
famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping
police stations -- aka military bases -- in or near the oil heartlands
of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful
wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.
As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new,
post-Soviet version of "containment." With the USSR gone, however,
what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one
spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened
to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.
Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant
mega-war against Japan and Germany, and then the stalemated "police
action" in South Korea (1950-1953) -- vast structures which added up
to something like an all-military American version of the old British
Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in
Japan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea.
(Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South
Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our
major bases in the Philippines in 1992.)
But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global
policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was
nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel
of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush
administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed
ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations Well, they were
often something to behold -- and they still are.
Let's start with the basics: Almost 70 years after World War II, the
sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases" --
in Chalmers Johnson's phrase -- which at this moment stretches from
Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Rumania to Okinawa. And new bases
of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more
to come). For instance, an American missile system is slated to go
into Poland and a radar system into Israel. That will mean Americans
stationed in both countries and, undoubtedly, modest bases of one sort
or another to go with them. (The Israeli one -- "the first American
base on Israeli territory" -- reports Aluf Benn of Haaretz, will be in
the Negev desert.)
There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially
39 of them have American "facilities," large and/or small. But those
are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply
aren't counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country
finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases;
because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares
bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no
matter how elaborate, somehow don't count. In other words, that 39
figure doesn't even include Iraq or Afghanistan. By 2005, according to
the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases in Iraq, ranging
from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named
Camp Victory that house tens of thousands of troops, private
contractors, Defense Department civilians, have bus routes, traffic
lights, PXes, big name fast-food restaurants, and so on.
Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil.
In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in
their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There
are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Air Base,
located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which
even has a full-scale hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian
contingent of troops).
You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the
establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news
stories, that books by the score would pour out on America's version
of imperial control. But here's the strange thing: We garrison the
globe in ways that really are -- not to put too fine a point on it --
unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States,
you basically wouldn't know it; or, thought about another way, you
wouldn't have to know it.
In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted
that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some
exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no debate at
all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at
best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys.
There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less
seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.
Missing Bases
Americans have, of course, always prided themselves on exporting
"democracy," not empire. So empire-talk hasn't generally been an
American staple and, perhaps for that reason, all those bases prove an
awkward subject to bring up or focus too closely on. When it came to
empire-talk in general, there was a brief period after 9/11 when the
neoconservatives, in full-throated triumph, began to compare us to
Rome and Britain at their imperial height (though we were believed to
be incomparably, uniquely more powerful). It was, in the phrase of the
time, a "unipolar moment." Even liberal war hawks started talking
about taking up "the burden" of empire or, in the phrase of Michael
Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but, in that period, still at
Harvard and considered a significant American intellectual, "empire
lite."
On the whole, however, those in Washington and in the media haven't
considered it germane to remind Americans of just exactly how we have
attempted to "police" and control the world these last years. I've had
two modest encounters with base denial myself:
In the spring of 2004, a journalism student I was working with emailed
me a clip, dated October 20, 2003 -- less than seven months after
American troops entered Baghdad -- from a prestigious engineering
magazine. It quoted Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked
with facilities development" in Iraq, speaking proudly of the several
billion dollars ("the numbers are staggering") that had already been
sunk into base construction in that country. Well, I was staggered
anyway. American journalists, however, hardly noticed, even though
significant sums were already pouring into a series of mega-bases that
were clearly meant to be permanent fixtures on the Iraqi landscape.
(The Bush administration carefully avoided using the word "permanent"
in any context whatsoever, and these bases were first dubbed "enduring
camps.")
Within two years, according to the Washington Post (in a piece that,
typically, appeared on page A27 of the paper), the U.S. had those 106
bases in Iraq at a cost that, while unknown, must have been staggering
indeed. Just stop for a moment and consider that number: 106. It
boggles the mind, but not, it seems, American newspaper or TV
journalism.
TomDispatch.com has covered this subject regularly ever since, in part
because these massive "facts on the ground," these modern Ziggurats,
were clearly evidence of the Bush administration's long-term plans and
intentions in that country. Not surprisingly, this year, U.S.
negotiators finally offered the Iraqi government of Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki its terms for a so-called status of forces agreement,
evidently initially demanding the right to occupy into the distant
future 58 of the bases it has built.
It has always been obvious -- to me, at least -- that any discussion
of Iraq policy in this country, of timelines or "time horizons,"
drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on
the ground weren't taken into account. And yet you have to search the
U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have
bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over
Iraq policy.
I could go further: I can think of two intrepid American journalists,
Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post and Guy Raz of NPR, who actually
visited a single U.S. mega-base, Balad Air Base, which reputedly has a
level of air traffic similar to Chicago's O'Hare International or
London's Heathrow, and offered substantial reports on it. But, as far
as I know, they, like the cheese of children's song, stand alone. I
doubt that in the last five years Americans tuning in to their
television news have ever been able to see a single report from Iraq
that gave a view of what the bases we have built there look like or
cost. Although reporters visit them often enough and, for instance,
have regularly offered reports from Camp Victory in Baghdad on what's
going on in the rest of Iraq, the cameras never pan away from the
reporters to show us the gigantic base itself.
More than five years after ground was broken for the first major
American base in Iraq, this is, it seems to me, a remarkable record of
media denial. American bases in Afghanistan have generally experienced
a similar fate.
My second encounter with base denial came in my other life. When not
running TomDispatch.com, I'm a book editor; to be more specific, I'm
Chalmers Johnson's editor. I worked on the prophetic Blowback: The
Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published back in
2000 to a singular lack of attention -- until, of course, the attacks
of 9/11, after which it became a bestseller, adding both "blowback"
and the phrase "unintended consequences" to the American lexicon.
By the time The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of
the Republic, the second volume in his Blowback Trilogy, came out in
2004, reviewers, critics, and commentators were all paying attention.
The heart of that book focused on how the U.S. garrisons the planet,
laying out Pentagon basing policies and discussing specific bases in
remarkable detail. This represented serious research and breakthrough
work, and the book indeed received much attention here, including
major, generally positive reviews. Startlingly, however, not a single
mainstream review, no matter how positive, paid any attention, or even
really acknowledged, his chapters on the bases, or bothered to discuss
the U.S. as a global garrison state. Only three years later did a
major reviewer pay the subject serious attention. When Jonathan
Freedland reviewed Nemesis, the final book in the Trilogy, in the New
York Review of Books, he noticed the obvious and, in a discussion of
U.S. basing policy, wrote, for instance:
"Johnson is in deadly earnest when he draws a parallel with Rome. He
swats aside the conventional objection that, in contrast with both
Romans and Britons, Americans have never constructed colonies abroad.
Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to
them. America is an 'empire of bases,' he writes, with a network of
vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match
for any Roman or Raj outpost."
Not surprisingly, Freedland is not an American journalist, but a
British one who works for the Guardian.
In the U.S., military bases really only matter, and so make headlines,
when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them
scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost
income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.
Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad
firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well kept secrets on
the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense
Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time
on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the
near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit
strange.
The Foreshortened American Century
In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply
isn't news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do
pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S.
taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul
(largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands
of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points
out the following: "An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the
overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting
indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially
budgeted one-fifth that amount."
And that's only the most obvious way Americans pay. It's hard for us
even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face
that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W.
Bush's two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also
presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated
recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has
been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning
for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the
military's Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)
In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able
to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and
successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later,
cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our
base-world abroad.
In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two "superpowers," the
lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years.
Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits,
the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves
triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It
now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just
heading for the exit far more slowly.
As of now, "the American Century," birthed by Time/Life publisher
Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in
full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century -- whether
it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China,
the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos -- will not be an
American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or
later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores
of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax
Americana.
[Note on Sources: It's rare indeed that the U.S. empire of bases gets
anything like the attention it deserves, so, when it does, praise is
in order. Mother Jones online launched a major project to map out and
analyze U.S. bases worldwide. It includes a superb new piece on bases
by Chalmers Johnson, "America's Unwelcome Advances" and a number of
other top-notch pieces, including one on "How to Stay in Iraq for
1,000 Years" by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (the second part of
whose Pentagon expansion series will be posted at this site soon).
Check out the package of pieces at MJ by clicking here. Perhaps most
significant, the magazine has produced an impressive online
interactive map of U.S. bases worldwide. Check it out by clicking
here. But when you zoom in on an individual country, do note that the
first base figures you'll see are the Pentagon's and so possibly not
complete. You need to read the MJ texts below each map to get a fuller
picture. As will be obvious, if you click on the links in this post, I
made good use of MJ's efforts, for which I offer many thanks.]