S
Smart American
Guest
YUP, THERE ARE TERRORISTS UNDER YOUR BED! WHERE DID I HEAR THAT
BEFORE? OH, IT USE TO USE TO BE COMMUNISTS HIDING UNDER YOUR BED UNTIL
AMERICANS BOUGHT WATER BEDS! AINT IT A HOOT?
WEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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 Schr
BEFORE? OH, IT USE TO USE TO BE COMMUNISTS HIDING UNDER YOUR BED UNTIL
AMERICANS BOUGHT WATER BEDS! AINT IT A HOOT?
WEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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 Schr