Text Fwd: [nousbases] Empire of bases - Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article

Text Fwd from Stephanie Westbrook, Agatha Haun on March 29, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/aqq4zu
Empire of bases
By Hugh Gusterson | 10 March 2009
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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.