From: "Howard Engelskirchen" <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com>
Subject: BHA: Re: RE: Re: Global Governance
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 11:21:21 -0500


On the subject of global governance . . .


  America's Empire of Bases
  By Chalmers Johnson

  As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do
not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through
its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often
ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast
network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually
constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own
geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class.
Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't
begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the
degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional
order.

  Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies,
technicians, teachers, dependents, 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 whose names sum up
our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F.
Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt,
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and
Ronald Reagan. 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-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the
Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and
maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep
uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed,
amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole
sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales.
On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense
Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and
depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000
bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly
a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its
subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.

  At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases

  It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases.
Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive.
According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for
fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real
estate, 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 -- surely far too low a
figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- 
and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military
high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel,
plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian
officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The
Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars,
hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844
more.

  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 and maintained ever since by
Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S.
military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called
arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.

  For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, which has been an American
military colony for the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists only one
Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps
bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in
the center of that modest-sized island's second largest city. (Manhattan's
Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails
to note all of the $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, but no
one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure,
although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years.

  For their occupants, these are not unpleasant places to live and work.
Military service today, which is voluntary, bears almost no relation to the
duties of a soldier during World War II or the Korean or Vietnamese wars.
Most chores like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail call, and cleaning
latrines have been subcontracted to private military companies like Kellogg,
Brown & Root, DynCorp, and the Vinnell Corporation. Fully one-third of the
funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq (about $30 billion), for
instance, 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 in
their heavily guarded compound, and the first Burger King has already gone
up inside the enormous military base we've established at Baghdad
International Airport.

  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,
headquarters of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, whose job is to
police some 1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra to
Taji. Anaconda occupies 25 square kilometers and will ultimately house as
many as 20,000 troops. Despite extensive security precautions, the base has
frequently come under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of July, 2003,
just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded at the local field
hospital.

  The military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist towns in the
Bible Belt rather than the big population centers of the United States. For
example, even though more than 100,000 women live on our overseas bases -- 
including women in the services, spouses, and relatives of military
personnel -- 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 armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained world serviced
by its own airline -- the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range
C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers,
KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from
Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides
seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna
Citation luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the armed forces' ski and
vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234
military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, called a C-32A
in the Air Force.

  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. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and
senior members of the Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee such as
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence
without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become
part of the new justification for a major enlargement of our empire -- and
an announced repositioning of our bases and forces abroad -- in the wake of
our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is Andy Hoehn,
deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his colleagues
are supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush's preventive war
strategy against "rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have
identified something they call the "arc of instability," which is said to
run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North
Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and
Indonesia. This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be
called the Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the
world's key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our footprint
onto that, we don't look particularly well-positioned to deal with the
problems we're now going to confront."

  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. By following
the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever
larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and
imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other.
Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a
quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its
capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing
mortal damage to our republican institutions. The only way this is discussed
in our press is via reportage on highly arcane plans for changes in basing
policy and the positioning of troops abroad -- and these plans, as reported
in the media, cannot be taken at face value.

  Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying
the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the
entrance to the Red Sea, claims that in order to put "preventive war" into
action, we require a "global presence," by which he means gaining hegemony
over any place that is not already under our thumb. 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 has been proposing -- this
is usually called "repositioning" -- many new bases, including at least four
and perhaps as many as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are
already under construction -- at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil air
base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian border, and at
Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the north. (This does not count
the previously mentioned Anaconda, which is currently being called an
"operating base," though it may very well become permanent over time.) In
addition, we plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of
Kuwait -- 1,600 square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square miles -- that we
now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone
bureaucrats to relax.

  Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls our new
"family of bases" include: In 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 (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00 civilians since
1992, when, to quash an election, the military took over, backed by our
country and France); and in West Africa -- Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra
Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for
all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string
of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in
such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the
United Arab Emirates.

  Most of these new bases will be what the military, in a switch of
metaphors, calls "lily pads" to which our troops could jump like so many
well-armed frogs from the homeland, our remaining NATO bases, or bases in
the docile satellites of Japan and Britain. To offset the expense involved
in such expansion, the Pentagon leaks plans to close many of the huge Cold
War military reservations in Germany, South Korea, and perhaps Okinawa as
part of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's "rationalization" of our armed
forces. In the wake of the Iraq victory, the U.S. 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, which would free up the 2nd Infantry Division on the
demilitarized zone with North Korea for probable deployment to Iraq, where
our forces are significantly overstretched.

  In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in Germany, also in
part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's domestically popular defiance
of Bush over Iraq. But the degree to which we are capable of doing so may
prove limited indeed. At the simplest level, 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 reposition most of
them and build even slightly comparable bases, together with the necessary
infrastructure, in former Communist countries like Romania, one of Europe's
poorest countries. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann in Hanau, Germany, has said to the
press "There's no place to put these people" in Romania, Bulgaria, or
Djibouti, and she predicts that 80% of them will in the end stay in Germany.
It's also certain that generals of the high command have no intention of
living in backwaters like Constanta, Romania, and will keep the U.S.
military headquarters in Stuttgart while holding on to Ramstein Air Force
Base, Spangdahlem Air Force Base, and the Grafenwöhr Training Area.

  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. This is a standing
grievance in Okinawa, where the American environmental record has been
nothing short of abominable. Part of this attitude is simply the desire of
the Pentagon to put itself beyond any of the restraints that govern civilian
life, an attitude increasingly at play in the "homeland" as well. For
example, the 2004 defense authorization bill of $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.

  While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to create ever
more lily pads in the Third World remains unchecked, there are several
reasons to doubt that some of the more grandiose plans, for either expansion
or downsizing, 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 U.S. 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
U.S. base at Bishkek, and in December 2003, the dictator of Uzbekistan,
Islam Karimov, declared that he would not permit a permanent deployment of
U.S. forces in his country even though we already have a base there.

  When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic politics may come
into play. By law the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closing Commission
must submit its fifth and final list of domestic bases to be shut down to
the White House by September 8, 2005. As an efficiency measure, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld has said he'd like to be rid of at least one-third of
domestic Army bases and one-quarter of domestic Air Force bases, which is
sure to produce a political firestorm on Capitol Hill. In order to protect
their respective states' bases, the two mother hens of the Senate's Military
Construction Appropriations Subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and
Dianne Feinstein, are demanding that the Pentagon close overseas bases first
and bring the troops now stationed there home to domestic bases, which could
then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein included in the Military
Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission to
investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer needed. The Bush
administration opposed this provision of the Act but it passed anyway and
the president signed it into law on November 22, 2003. The Pentagon is
probably adept enough to hamstring the commission, but a domestic base-closi
ng furor clearly looms on the horizon.

  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 U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only
increased the threat of al-Qaeda. From 1993 through the 9/11 assaults of
2001, there were five major al-Qaeda attacks worldwide; in the two years
since then there have been seventeen such bombings, including the Istanbul
suicide assaults on the British consulate and an HSBC Bank. Military
operations against terrorists are not the solution. 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."

  In his notorious "long, hard slog" memo on Iraq of October 16, 2003,
Defense secretary Rumsfeld wrote, "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are
winning or losing the global war on terror." Correlli-Barnett's "metrics"
indicate otherwise. But the "war on terrorism" is at best only a small part
of the reason for all our military strategizing. 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.

  Chalmers Johnson's latest book is The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan). His previous book,
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, has just been
updated with a new introduction.


Copyright C2004 Chalmers Johnson



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