How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  “The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,”12 Bin Laden reflected. And if one superpower could collapse easily, why not another?

  *

  Bin Laden wasn’t the only one thinking along such lines. In 1990 Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. It was a bold and sudden attack. Within four hours of crossing the border,13 the Iraqi army had reached Kuwait’s capital, attacked the emir’s palace, and set it aflame. Days later, Hussein annexed Kuwait. This gave him control of two-fifths of the world’s oil supply. And it looked very much as if he might invade Saudi Arabia next.

  Bin Laden, who regarded Hussein as unconscionably secular, volunteered to fight. He had driven the infidels from Afghanistan. Surely he could do the same on the Arabian Peninsula.

  But the Saudi government balked. “There are no caves in Kuwait,”14 the government’s representative, Prince Sultan, reminded Bin Laden. “What will you do when he lobs the missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?”

  “We will fight him with faith,” Bin Laden answered.

  The House of Saud knew from faith, but it had little confidence in Bin Laden’s plan. Instead, King Fahd had agreed to meet with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who’d flown to Jeddah a day after the invasion with General Norman Schwarzkopf and the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz in tow. Cheney wanted to reopen Dhahran to the U.S. military. “After the danger is over,15 our forces will go home,” he promised.

  “I would hope so,” Crown Prince Abdullah responded under his breath, in Arabic.

  Abdullah was nervous, but King Fahd agreed. “Come with all you can bring,”16 he told Cheney. “Come as fast as you can.”

  They did. The first planes landed at Dhahran within twenty-four hours, and they kept coming. The Pentagon put “everything aloft that could fly,”17 wrote Colin Powell—nearly all the transport planes the air force could spare plus 158 civilian planes drafted into service. Measured in ton-miles per day, the airlift to Saudi Arabia was ten times the size of the Berlin Airlift.18

  Major coalition airfields used in the Gulf War

  “You could have walked across the Mediterranean on the wings of C-5s,19 C-141s, and commercial aircraft moving across the region,” one pi lot marveled.

  The frenzy of the airlift reflected the severity of the threat. For years Hussein had funneled Iraq’s oil revenues and foreign aid (some from the United States) into its military, and it showed. Iraq had seized Kuwait with some three hundred thousand seasoned troops,20 four thousand tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft. The Iraqi army was the fourth largest in the world (ranking just below the U.S. Army),21 the Iraqi air force was the sixth largest. Garrisoned in Saudi Arabia, General Norman Schwarzkopf worried, he recollected, “about getting kicked back into the sea and losing thousands and thousands of lives.”22

  Schwarzkopf’s apprehensions weren’t just related to the size of Iraq’s military. The larger fear, hanging thickly in the air, was that the Gulf War would become “another Vietnam.” The generals in 1990 had all lived through that humiliating ordeal. They’d seen a superpower armed with the latest technology locked in an interminable and ultimately unwinnable fight. Quagmire was the metaphor they used: the ground that sucks you in.

  Military planners in the Vietnam War had hoped to avoid that ground and triumph through airpower,23 leveraging the United States’ considerable technological advantages. They sent B-52s on carpet-bombing runs and equipped helicopters with napalm. When trees interfered with the pilots’ views, the crews sprayed them with the defoliant Agent Orange. (“Only we can prevent forests” was their unofficial slogan.)

  In all, the United States dropped 5 million tons of bombs,24 more than 250 pounds for every person in Vietnam. But dropping bombs and achieving goals are two different things. One of the most important targets was the enormous Thanh Hóa Bridge,25 which carried both a highway and a railroad and served as a crucial link between the north and the south. The United States spent years trying to bomb it, flying more than eight hundred sorties and losing eleven aircraft in the process. Yet it succeeded in knocking the bridge out of commission only in 1972, at the very end of the war.

  Bombs and planes were, in the end, not enough. More than 2.5 million U.S. service members cycled through Vietnam during the war. But they fared no better than the planes did. In 1973 the last combat troops left. The greatest military power on earth had fought a peasant army and lost.

  So it was with understandable trepidation that Schwarzkopf and his colleagues watched Saddam Hussein ready his forces. Hussein’s tanks were “dug in,” stashed in sand-covered bunkers that would make them impossible to see until they attacked. He was preparing for a war of attrition, the kind of drawn-out, bloody confrontation that the United States had lost in Vietnam and the Soviet Union had lost in Afghanistan.

  It would be, Hussein promised, the “mother of all battles.”

  *

  Operation Desert Storm,26 the name for the coalition campaign against Iraq, began in Louisiana. Seven B-52G Stratofortresses took off from Barksdale Air Force Base on a bombing run. Their arrival in Baghdad fifteen hours later was timed perfectly to coincide with a virtual explosion of the skies. Bombers from England, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the remote island of Diego Garcia dropped their payloads. Tomahawk missiles fired from ships in the Gulf tore down Baghdad’s streets. Stealth planes entered Iraqi airspace and released precision-guided bombs.

  Ten minutes into the attack, much of Iraq’s infrastructural network, including the Baghdad power grid, had been disabled. Within hours, Hussein’s communications were knocked out.

  The barrage continued for forty-three days. Fighting an air war over a desert was much easier than fighting one over a jungle, it turned out. Yet the real key was technology. This was the first major conflict where the global positioning system (GPS) was used. That, plus “smart” bombs—some guided by laser, others with built-in navigation systems—yielded stunning results.

  “You pick precisely which target you want,”27 boasted the commander of the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing. “You can want the men’s room or you can want the ladies’ room.”

  Of course there was still Iraq’s army to worry about, with its thousands of dug-in tanks. But an important fact about those buried metal tanks was that they cooled at a different rate than the sand around them did. This meant that during the enchanted hours between dusk and midnight, fighter pilots could switch on their infrared vision and see the tanks clearly. They dropped five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs on them. “Tank plinking” is what the pilots called it. Plink, plink, plink—there went the tanks.

  Ultimately, Schwarzkopf marched across Iraq’s border. Yet the promised mother of all battles proved to be anything but. Schwarzkopf led his troops in a GPS-guided charge across the desert and caught the remnants of Iraq’s battered army by surprise (the Iraqis,28 assuming no army could navigate the trackless expanse, had expected the invasion to come via the roads). The ground war lasted one hundred hours, cost the coalition forces 366 lives, and consisted mainly of accepting Iraqi surrenders. Iraq was wrecked: its military hobbled, its troops terrified, and its infrastructure in ruins—a consequence of the war that Iraqis would have to live with for years to come.

  Several high-ranking Iraqi prisoners confessed that the ground campaign probably hadn’t even been necessary.29 A couple more weeks of the air war, and Iraq’s army—again, the world’s fourth largest—would have withdrawn without ever having faced an adversary on the ground.

  This was astonishing. It confirmed the thought, batted around by Soviet and U.S. theorists in the seventies and eighties, that technology was changing the face of war. A “revolution in military affairs,”30 they called it. What was the use of armored divisions, heavy artillery, large infantries, and foreign occupations in the age of GPS? Why even field an army when you could just call in air strikes from a nearby base?

  The Russian military theorist Vladimir Slipchenko noted th
at the very spatial categories of war were changing. In the future, he suggested, area-based military concepts such as front, rear, and flank would be irrelevant. There would be only “targets and non-targets.”31 Further, Slipchenko predicted, “there will be no need to occupy enemy territory.” Controlling territory wouldn’t matter, because war was no longer about area. It was about points.

  *

  It wasn’t only the fighting that had gone pointillist. To launch planes and fire missiles, the United States needed platforms. Bases and ships, not too far from the combat zone, were essential. Hence the buildup of a basing network in Saudi Arabia, especially at Dhahran.

  But hosting U.S. forces at Dhahran was no less of a touchy subject in the 1990s than it had been in the 1950s.32 Saudis near the base were unnerved by seeing female service members driving vehicles and wearing T-shirts. And radio broadcasts from Baghdad charged that U.S. forces were defiling Islam’s holiest sites.

  Washington had worried about exactly this. After the deal to reopen the base was struck, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia had confided to Robert Gates his terror about what would happen if a soldier “inadvertently pissed on a mosque.”33 Great efforts were taken to prevent friction.34 The military banned pornography and alcohol, told Christians to wear their cru-cifixes under their shirts, and took the extraordinary step of helicoptering Jewish service members out to ships anchored in the Gulf for their religious services, lest Saudi complain of rabbis in the Holy Land.

  “We had to avoid giving the impression that western ‘colonialists’ had unilaterally imposed their will,”35 explained Schwarzkopf. To that end, he convened a regular “Arab reaction seminar” to assess how locals might perceive the military’s actions.

  Yet no amount of precaution could change the basic fact that one country was stationing its troops in another’s land. It’s not hard to imagine how the people of the United States would have reacted to a Saudi base in, say, Texas. In fact, it’s not even necessary to imagine. In the eighteenth century, the stationing of British soldiers in North America was so repellent to the colonists that it fueled their revolution. Their Declaration of Independence denounced the king for “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” and exempting those troops from punishment for crimes.

  So it was not entirely a surprise when Saudi clerics complained. For Osama bin Laden,36 the bases weren’t only an affront to religion, they were maddening hypocrisy. At the behest of his government, Bin Laden had risked his life to oust infidels from the Muslim country of Afghanistan. And now that same government was inviting nonbelievers in? To the land of Mecca and Medina?

  “It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers—their filthy feet roaming everywhere,”37 he fumed. The United States, he charged, was “turning the Arabian Peninsula into the biggest air,38 land, and sea base in the region.”

  At the urging of the nervous Saudi government, Bin Laden left the country, making his way eventually to Afghanistan. But he did not drop the issue. That the U.S. troops stayed in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, in breach of Cheney’s promise, only added fuel to Bin Laden’s fire.

  In 1995, a car bomb went off in Riyadh in front of a U.S. training facility. It killed seven people, five from the United States, and wounded thirty-four others. The Saudi government arrested four suspects who confessed that they’d been inspired by Bin Laden. Whether or not he was responsible, he took credit.

  The next year, another bomb exploded, this one at a housing facility at Dhahran. Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel died, and 372 people were wounded. Again, Bin Laden claimed responsibility. It’s genuinely unclear whether he was involved,39 but someone hated the base enough to bomb it.

  In search of security, the air force issued a contract for a $150 million compound in a remote location in the Saudi desert. “You can see something coming for miles,”40 the spokesman explained. It was to be a military oasis, with forty-two hundred beds and eighty-five buildings, including a dining hall, a gym, a swimming pool, and a recreation facility. What was most remarkable, though, was the builder that the Saudi government hired to erect the base: the Bin Laden firm.

  If there is one episode that perfectly captures the dual nature of the U.S. basing empire, it’s this one. Participation and protest—the Beatles and the peace sign, Sony and the Okinawa riots—braided within a single family. The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them.

  Osama bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” in 1996, after the Dhahran bombing. On the face of it, this seemed an absurdly imbalanced war: an exile living in a cave complex in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, taking on the most powerful military in existence. Yet Bin Laden had absorbed the lessons of the revolution in military affairs. From his mountain base, he could, like some sort of Central Asian Doctor No, order pinpoint strikes without needing an army.

  What he did need was technology, and Bin Laden proved to be an astute consumer of it. The same year he declared jihad, he acquired one of the first commercially available satellite phones.41 It was the size of a laptop and retailed for about $15,000, but it allowed him to communicate globally. (This happened just as his brothers had become key investors in a different satellite phone company.)

  Bin Laden used his phone to coordinate the first attacks that we are certain were his doing: bombings, five minutes apart, of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people died, and several thousand were wounded. It was as if the first day of the Gulf War had been reflected in a mirror: satellite technology used to coordinate synchronized strikes on key targets, all ordered from another continent.

  It was no accident that the bombs went off on August 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the arrival of U.S. troops at Dhahran.

  Thirteen days later, President Bill Clinton ordered Tomahawk missiles fired simultaneously at al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan (Bin Laden was believed to be at one) and at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was suspected of having manufactured chemical weapon precursors for al-Qaeda. This was called Operation Infinite Reach.

  It was a disaster. Not only was Bin Laden not at the Afghan base, no other al-Qaeda leader was killed. The Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was destroyed, but it is doubtful that it had any role in making chemical weapons. The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials. Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths—Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands”—in one of the world’s poorest countries.42

  The botched missile strikes added to Bin Laden’s fame and gave him rich material for recruitment—The Economist warned that they might create “100,000 new fanatics.”43 The strikes also suggested a target for revenge. In 2000, suicide bombers in a small fiberglass boat approached the USS Cole, a billion-dollar, high-tech destroyer anchored off Yemen that had launched missiles in Operation Infinite Reach. The bombers set off hundreds of pounds of explosives, killing seventeen U.S. servicemen and disabling the ship, which had to be towed back home.

  The United States wasn’t the only one whose reach was infinite, in other words.

  The climax came the next year, with what al-Qaeda called its “planes operation.” Nineteen hijackers, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, commandeered four commercial aircraft. One hit the Pentagon (“a military base,”44 Bin Laden explained). Two more struck the World Trade Center. (“It wasn’t a children’s school!”) The fourth, en route to the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden had found a way to make air strikes without an air force.

  The attacks baffled many in the United States. “To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away,”45 wrote the members of the 9/11 Commission. So why was a Saudi man there attacking Wash
ington and New York?

  The answer is that for Bin Laden, the United States was not “very far away.” “Your forces occupy our countries,”46 he wrote in his message to the U.S. populace. “You spread your military bases throughout them.” Bin Laden’s list of grievances against the United States was long, ranging from its support of Israel to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (“Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history?” he asked.) But his chief objection, voiced consistently throughout his career, was the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia.

  This is worth emphasizing. After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.

  *

  Al-Qaeda’s planes operation seems to have been guided by a larger strategy: provoke the United States, draw it into a war in the Middle East, force infidel governments there into crisis (they would have to either accommodate the unpopular occupiers or fight them), and then defeat the United States on the ground, just as the mujahidin had defeated the Soviet Union. But for this to work, Bin Laden needed Washington to send troops, not just shoot a few Tomahawk missiles. He wagered that the resulting war would be a quagmire.

  In a way, Bin Laden got lucky with George W. Bush, who had recently succeeded Bill Clinton. Bush could have treated the 9/11 attacks as a crime, arrested the perpetrators, and brought them to justice. Instead, he declared a “war on terror” of global expanse and promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”47

  Yet despite his grand ambitions, Bush had little interest in the sort of ground campaign typical of the age of colonialism, the sort Bin Laden was banking on. As a presidential candidate, he’d come out strongly against occupations: “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say,48 we do it this way, so should you.” Instead, he called for an agile military, able to strike quickly and then leave. It was the revolution in military affairs.