Empire of Bases
by Prof. Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists
http://globalresearch.ca/, March
18, 2009
Before reading this article, try to answer
this question: How many military bases does the United States
have in other countries: a) 100; b) 300; c) 700; or d) 1,000.
According to the Pentagon's own list PDF,
the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in
Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand. These thousand bases
constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in
the world maintains on any other country's territory. In other
words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup.
The old way of doing colonialism, practiced
by the Europeans, was to take over entire countries and administer
them. But this was clumsy. The United States has pioneered a leaner
approach to global empire. As historian Chalmers Johnson says,
"America's version of the colony is the military base."
The United States, says Johnson, has an "empire of bases."
Its 'empire of bases' gives the United
States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as
it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic holdover
from the Cold War."
These bases do not come cheap. Excluding
U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States spends about
$102 billion a year to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam
Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. And in many cases
you have to ask what purpose they serve. For example, the United
States has 227 bases in Germany. Maybe this made sense during
the Cold War, when Germany was split in two by the iron curtain
and U.S. policy makers sought to persuade the Soviets that the
American people would see an attack on Europe as an attack on
itself. But in a new era when Germany is reunited and the United
States is concerned about flashpoints of conflict in Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East, it makes as much sense for the Pentagon to
hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post
office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies.
Drowning in red ink, the White House is
desperate to cut unnecessary costs in the federal budget, and
Massachusetts Cong. Barney Frank, a Democrat, has suggested that
the Pentagon budget could be cut by 25 percent. Whether or not
one thinks Frank's number is politically realistic, foreign bases
are surely a lucrative target for the budget cutter's axe. In
2004 Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the United States could save
$12 billion by closing 200 or so foreign bases. This would also
be relatively cost-free politically since the locals who may have
become economically dependent upon the bases are foreigners and
cannot vote retribution in U.S. elections.
Yet those foreign bases seem invisible
as budget cutters squint at the Pentagon's $664 billion proposed
budget. Take the March 1st editorial in the New York Times, "The
Pentagon Meets the Real World." The Times's editorialists
called for "political courage" from the White House
in cutting the defense budget. Their suggestions? Cut the air
force's F-22 fighter and the navy's DDG-1000 destroyer and scale
back missile defense and the army's Future Combat System to save
$10 billion plus a year. All good suggestions, but what about
those foreign bases?
Even if politicians and media pundits
seem oblivious to these bases, treating the stationing of U.S.
troops all over the world as a natural fact, the U.S. empire of
bases is attracting increasing attention from academics and activists--as
evidenced by a conference on U.S. foreign bases at American University
in late February. NYU Press just published Catherine Lutz's Bases
of Empire, a book that brings together academics who study U.S.
military bases and activists against the bases. Rutgers University
Press has published Kate McCaffrey's Military Power and Popular
Protest, a study of the U.S. base at Vieques, Puerto Rico, which
was closed in the face of massive protests from the local population.
And Princeton University Press is about to publish David Vine's
Island of Shame--a book that tells the story of how the United
States and Britain secretly agreed to deport the Chagossian inhabitants
of Diego Garcia to Mauritius and the Seychelles so their island
could be turned into a military base. The Americans were so thorough
that they even gassed all the Chagossian dogs. The Chagossians
have been denied their day in court in the United States but won
their case against the British government in three trials, only
to have the judgment overturned by the highest court in the land,
the House of Lords. They are now appealing to the European Court
of Human Rights.
American leaders speak of foreign bases
as cementing alliances with foreign nations, largely through the
trade and aid agreements that often accompany base leases. Yet,
U.S. soldiers live in a sort of cocooned simulacrum of America
in their bases, watching American TV, listening to American rap
and heavy metal, and eating American fast food, so that the transplanted
farm boys and street kids have little exposure to another way
of life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence,
local residents and businesses often become economically dependent
on the soldiers and have a stake in their staying.
These bases can become flashpoints for
conflict. Military bases invariably discharge toxic waste into
local ecosystems, as in Guam where military bases have led to
no fewer than 19 superfund sites. Such contamination generates
resentment and sometimes, as in Vieques in the 1990s, full-blown
social movements against the bases. The United States used Vieques
for live-bombing practice 180 days a year, and by the time the
United States withdrew in 2003, the landscape was littered with
exploded and unexploded ordinance, depleted uranium rounds, heavy
metals, oil, lubricants, solvents, and acids. According to local
activists, the cancer rate on Vieques was 30 percent higher than
on the rest of Puerto Rico.
It is also inevitable that, from time
to time, U.S. soldiers--often drunk--commit crimes. The resentment
these crimes cause is only exacerbated by the U.S. government's
frequent insistence that such crimes not be prosecuted in local
courts. In 2002, two U.S. soldiers killed two teenage girls in
Korea as they walked to a birthday party. Korean campaigners claim
this was one of 52,000 crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea
between 1967 and 2002. The two U.S. soldiers were immediately
repatriated to the United States so they could escape prosecution
in Korea. In 1998, a marine pilot sliced through the cable of
a ski gondola in Italy, killing 20 people, but U.S. officials
slapped him on the wrist and refused to allow Italian authorities
to try him. These and other similar incidents injured U.S. relations
with important allies.
The 9/11 attacks are arguably the most
spectacular example of the kind of blowback that can be generated
from local resentment against U.S. bases. In the 1990s, the presence
of U.S. military bases near the holiest sites of Sunni Islam in
Saudi Arabia angered Osama bin Laden and provided Al Qaeda with
a potent recruitment tool. The United States wisely closed its
largest bases in Saudi Arabia, but it opened additional bases
in Iraq and Afghanistan that are rapidly becoming new sources
of friction in the relationship between the United States and
the peoples of the Middle East.
Its "empire of bases" gives
the United States global reach, but the shape of this empire,
insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic
holdover from the Cold War. Many of these bases are a luxury the
United States can no longer afford at a time of record budget
deficits. Moreover, U.S. foreign bases have a double edge: they
project American power across the globe, but they also inflame
U.S. foreign relations, generating resentment against the prostitution,
environmental damage, petty crime, and everyday ethnocentrism
that are their inevitable corollaries. Such resentments have recently
forced the closure of U.S. bases in Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and
Kyrgyzstan, and if past is prologue, more movements against U.S.
bases can be expected in the future. Over the next 50 years, I
believe we will witness the emergence of a new international norm
according to which foreign military bases will be as indefensible
as the colonial occupation of another country has become during
the last 50 years.
The Declaration of Independence criticizes
the British "for quartering large bodies of armed troops
among us" and "for protecting them, by a mock trial,
from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the
inhabitants of these States." Fine words! The United States
should start taking them to heart._
Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology
and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in
nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology
of science. He has conducted considerable fieldwork in the United
States and Russia, where he studied the culture of nuclear weapon
scientists and antinuclear activists. Two of his books encapsulate
this work--Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the
Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of
the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of
Minnesota Press, 2004). He also coedited Why America's Top Pundits
Are Wrong
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