How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Bush gave the job of remaking the military to his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who’d served in the same position in the Ford administration. You could see why Bush chose him. Not only was Rumsfeld obsessed with thrift, but since the Ford years he’d served as CEO of two technology companies. The first was Searle Pharmaceuticals, which had patented the first birth control pill and then, under Rumsfeld’s direction, brought a synthetic substitute for sugar, aspartame, to the market. The other company was General Instrument, which specialized in satellite television equipment. Now back in government, Rumsfeld was given the job to create a small-footprint, tech-savvy military: fewer tanks, more GPS-guided air strikes.

  He succeeded, at first. The initial invasions of Afghanistan, in 2001, and Iraq, in 2003, were, as Bush had hoped, swift and decisive. Air defenses were knocked out, major cities seized, and the Afghan and Iraq militaries left in shambles. Rumsfeld estimated that in the two months it took the coalition to dislodge the Taliban from Afghanistan’s main cities,49 it had killed between eight and twelve thousand Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, at a cost of 11 U.S. lives. The 122 U.S. service members killed in the first three weeks of the Iraq War largely died from accidents or friendly fire.50

  But the war on terror wasn’t ultimately a fight between countries, as the Gulf War had been. It was a “very new type of conflict,”51 Rumsfeld told the press a week after 9/11. “We’ll have to deal with the networks.”

  This metaphor of the network—a set of connected points—became ubiquitous,52 acquiring the same sort of buzzword cachet that quagmire had possessed in the Vietnam War. The connotation pointed in another direction, though. If quagmire described a fight on the ground, network suggested that the space of the battlefield would be different, or that it might not even make sense to speak of battle as taking place on a field.

  Having identified the adversary as a series of points, Rumsfeld happily deployed the precision weaponry that had come to dominate the military’s arsenals. In the early weeks of the Afghan war, coalition forces established a pattern. Special forces teams, CIA operatives, and their Afghan allies would scout enemy strongholds on the ground and then call out the coordinates to the planes overhead. The pilots called it “Taliban-plinking.”53

  From the cockpit, it was a video game, but it felt different from the ground. “The planes poured down their fire on us,”54 remembered Osama bin Laden, who was nearly killed. “The American forces barraged us with smart bombs, bombs weighing a thousand pounds, cluster bombs, and bunker busters. Bombers like the B-52 circled above us, one of them for more than two hours, dropping twenty to thirty bombs at a time.”

  Bombers and smart munitions were one thing. But the United States quickly debuted another, even more remarkable technology: the armed drone. Drones were almost perfectly adapted for the fight against Bin Laden. In fact, the Bush administration had first taken an interest in them when, shortly before September 11, counterterrorism officials had tested an unarmed Predator drone over Kandahar and spotted a tall man in white, flowing robes surrounded by a security detail—quite likely Bin Laden himself. Arming the drones would ensure that the United States could act should it sight him again.

  Drones carried pointillist warfare to its logical endpoint. Unlike manned planes, they could hover for hours, gathering information with high-resolution cameras. With information collection handled from the sky, even the small special forces teams on the ground weren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. What is more, by patiently stalking their prey, drones could target not just buildings but individuals—they could put “warheads on foreheads,” as the military vernacular had it.

  The face of battle in a war of points

  The enemy in this style of warfare was not a country, but a GPS coordinate.

  Thanks to drones, battles could be replaced by the targeted killing of individuals. With this, the lines of war blurred. What was a combat zone and what wasn’t could be confusing. The most conspicuous use of armed drones has been, in fact, in “friendly” nations. Drones have killed (by the CIA’s estimate) more than two thousand people in Pakistan,55 including Osama bin Laden’s son Saad. Drone warfare has crept into Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, too.

  What the revolution in military affairs promised was immaculate warfare: precise strikes, few civilian casualties, and, above all, no occupying armies. The Vietnam-learned aversion to territorial entanglement was, in fact, a key theme of the Bush administration. “We’re not a colonial power,”56 Rumsfeld told reporters. “We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate.”

  There is every reason to think that Rumsfeld spoke from the heart. One of his greatest blunders in Iraq was banking on what one official called a “Wizard of Oz moment,”57 when the wicked witch would be killed (perhaps in an air strike) and the liberated inhabitants of Oz would joyously take over. Expecting a seamless transition, the Pentagon’s planning for the postwar occupation was last-minute, haphazard, and badly underfunded. The occupation leadership didn’t even arrive in Iraq until weeks after Baghdad’s fall, by which point the city had no electricity, was running low on water, and was seeing its ministries and museums stripped of records and valuables.

  “We need to create a colonial office—fast,”58 wrote Max Boot, a conservative critic of the administration. The British historian Niall Ferguson agreed. The United States had proved to be “a surprisingly inept empire builder”59 and should take a page from Britain’s history. Zapping targets from above, Boot and Ferguson argued, was no substitute for governing.

  This criticism met with little sympathy in the White House. “We’re not an imperial power,” Bush insisted. “We’re a liberating power.”60 Rumsfeld was determined to keep the occupying force small. And so for the first three years of the Iraq War—until Rumsfeld’s resignation—troops kept mainly to their bases, most notably the heavily fortified “Green Zone”61 around the grounds of the former Republican Palace in Baghdad. In the Red Zone, outside, the city was collapsing. Inside, service members enjoyed air-conditioning, pools, gyms, bars, and the sounds of Freedom Radio.

  *

  “We covet no one’s land”—it was a line Rumsfeld and his colleagues repeated over and over.62 And it was right. However often the Bush administration was accused of imperialism, it exhibited very little interest in colonizing. “If we were a true empire,63 we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth’s surface,” noted Vice President Dick Cheney, not without warrant.

  Yet if the Bush administration had no evident lust for sheer acreage, there were certain small spots that it cared about very much. Even drones needed launchpads, and the war on terror relied on a string of bases running from the U.S. mainland to the hot spots and war zones.

  The problem, Rumsfeld confessed, was that often “the presence and activities of our forces grate on local populations.”64 In fact, the military had been kicked out of place after place.65 In Hawai‘i, activists in the 1990s wrested Kaho‘olawe, the smallest of the state’s main islands, from the hands of the military. Filipino politicians wrote a clause into their 1987 constitution banning the storage of nuclear weapons, and they evicted the United States entirely in 1992. The large naval base in Puerto Rico at Vieques provoked such fierce protest, including from Puerto Ricans in New York, that the military abandoned it in 2003. That was the same year the Saudi government once again closed its bases, including Dhahran, to the United States. Uzbekistan, which had granted the United States bases close to Afghanistan, followed suit two years later. In 2009, politicians in Kyrgyzstan voted to expel the United States, too.

  Even Okinawa, a bastion of U.S. power in Asia, looked shaky. When three marines raped a twelve-year-old girl in 1995, it provoked another long wave of protest. The next year, the politician Yukio Hatoyama established a new political party,66 the Democratic Party of Japan, and set out to remove bases from Japanese soil entirely. In 2009 he became the prime minister and promised that he’d close at least
the major marine base at Futenma. Ultimately, Hatoyama failed and, as a consequence, resigned. It was the second time a Japanese prime minister was brought down by the U.S. basing system.

  The more other bases faltered, the more military planners turned to Guam. Stationing forces on Guam, unlike stationing them in Saudi Arabia or Okinawa, did not require negotiating with foreign governments. Nor did Guamanians have congressional representation, as residents of Hawai‘i did directly or as Puerto Ricans did indirectly through the New York diaspora. When protests imperiled the Okinawa bases, the government proposed transferring some seventeen thousand marines and their dependents to Guam—a decision made without consulting anyone from the island.

  Had they been consulted, Guamanians would have voiced mixed opinions. Guam was already a crucial node in the U.S. military network—the “tip of the spear,” as many call it. As such, its economy depended utterly on the military; Guam has far more military enlistment than any state. Many on Guam saw in the base expansion the prospect of more jobs.67 Yet, at the same time, activists put up determined resistance,68 noting how the base expansion would plow under the ancient village of Pågat and draw Guam even more tightly into the military economy.

  “This is old-school colonialism all over again,”69 protested LisaLinda Natividad, a professor at the University of Guam. “It boils down to our political status—we are occupied territory.”

  Whether Guamanians supported the move was irrelevant, as a graduate student who secured an interview with a surprisingly candid air force analyst discovered. People on Guam were forgetting that “they are a possession,70 and not an equal partner,” the analyst explained. “If California says they want to do this or that, it is like my wife saying that she wants to move here or there: I’ll have to respect her wish and at least discuss it with her. If Guam says they want to do this or that, it is as if this cup here,” he continued, pointing to his coffee mug, “expresses a wish: the answer will be, you belong to me and I can do with you as best I please.”

  The planned move from Okinawa to Guam has stalled owing to complications on the Okinawan side. Yet one thing is clear: Guam may be a small island, but it matters tremendously that there is this one spot, far into the Pacific, that the U.S. military can use without asking anyone’s permission.

  *

  Guam wasn’t the only point in the U.S. Empire to prove useful. The Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Dick Cheney went on television and announced that the government would have to work “the dark side.”71

  “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,” Cheney explained. In practice, this meant indefinitely detaining and forcefully interrogating suspected terrorists. Laws prohibited this—both international treaties outlawing torture and constitutional guarantees of the right of due process. Yet as the Bush administration discovered, those laws didn’t hold with the same force everywhere.72

  The United States by law couldn’t torture. But it could transfer suspects to its allies for interrogation, even allies known for their loose adherence to international conventions. Through a process known as “extraordinary rendition,” the CIA used a secret air fleet to fly more than a hundred and possibly thousands of detainees to foreign countries, particularly Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Jordan. “They are outsourcing torture because they know it is illegal”73 is how one victim of the system put it. He’d been held and tortured for months (due to a false confession elicited from another torture victim) before being released without charges.

  The government also made use of what it called “black sites.”74 In these, detainees were held in CIA custody, but covertly and on foreign soil, where they could be dealt with more harshly. The program remains swathed in secrecy, but it appears that more than a hundred suspected terrorists were held this way in at least eight countries. In a throwback to the days of 1898, a small handful were waterboarded,75 a torture reminiscent of the “water cure” used on Filipino rebels.

  Extraordinary rendition and black site prisons required foreign partners. Yet the Bush administration figured out that it could use the U.S. Empire to similar effect. After considering erecting a prison on the U.S. islands of Tinian, Wake, and Midway,76 the administration fastened on Guantánamo Bay, held on indefinite lease from Cuba since 1903—a prize from the 1898 war with Spain.

  The lease gave the United States “complete jurisdiction and control” over Guantánamo Bay, though Cuba retained “ultimate sovereignty.” Similar legal frameworks had been used for the Panama Canal Zone and Okinawa. The virtue of this, advised lawyers John Yoo and Patrick Philbin of the Office of Legal Counsel, is that it gave the government a spot of land under its exclusive control that was nevertheless “foreign territory, not subject to U.S. sovereignty.”77

  The CIA established a prison at Guantánamo Bay. The officers named it after the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields,”78 on the presumption that detainees would linger there “forever.”

  Permanent detention was feasible, however, only if Guantánamo Bay was indeed foreign. Was it? Lawyers representing the detainees tested the matter. They filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the base was a “fully American enclave,”79 with a shopping mall, a McDonald’s, a Baskin-Robbins, a Boy Scout contingent, and a Star Trek fan club. The idea that Cuba retained sovereignty was, they maintained, a fiction. They noted that Fidel Castro refused to recognize the lease (he made a point of never cashing the annual $4,085 checks that the United States sent) and insisted repeatedly that the navy leave. If the United States wouldn’t leave when Castro asked, how could Cuba be the sovereign?

  This was one of those “Is it the United States or not?” questions that had dogged the empire for more than a century. The case went to the Supreme Court in 2004. To the White House’s surprise, the court ruled that Guantánamo detainees could seek justice in federal courts. Guantánamo Bay was held by lease, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, but “this lease is no ordinary lease.”80

  In its peculiar legal status, Guantánamo Bay was not far off from Guam. They’re a fitting pair: two U.S. outposts, spoils of a not-much-remembered nineteenth-century war, both in the United States without being of it. Such places may seem like bizarre vestiges of a long-ago imperialist era, but they aren’t. Small dots on the map like these are the foundation of the United States’ pointillist empire today.

  Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.

  CONCLUSION:

  ENDURING EMPIRE

  The island of Saipan is one of the most staggeringly beautiful places on earth. It’s got it all: blue skies, clear water, lush vegetation, warm beaches. It also, starting in the 1990s, boasted a huge garment-manufacturing center.1 The workers came from China, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, lured by promises of high wages. But they found themselves deeply in debt on arrival and forced to work furiously in sweatshops to pay for their travel and housing. At its peak, Saipan’s garment industry sent a billion dollars’ worth of clothing a year (wholesale) to such large retailers in the United States as the Gap, Anne Taylor, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Target, Walmart, and J. Crew.

  Why? Saipan is a small island near Guam, twice the size of Manhattan. It’s about five thousand miles from the U.S. mainland, where those garments were sold. And it’s nearly two thousand miles from China, where most of the labor force came from. There are factories in China. Why haul workers from Chinese slums to a small Pacific island just so they can make shirts for Ralph Lauren?

  The answer is that Saipan is in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The Northern Marianas, in turn, were part of Micronesian islands that the United States seized from Japan after the Second World War. This wasn’t an annexation, as the islands were a strategic trust territory under the ultimate sovereignty of the United Nations. But
the United States was nevertheless the sole administrator.

  Quarter from the Northern Marianas

  In an elongated process stretching from the 1970s to the 1990s, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was broken up. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau became sovereign states “freely associated” with the United States, receiving economic assistance in exchange for offering base sites. The Northern Marianas, however, became a commonwealth akin to Puerto Rico. In 1986, when the legislation finally went through, its residents—some thirty thousand people—became U.S. citizens.

  Like Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas were subject to some U.S. laws but not others. The federal minimum wage and much of immigration law were waived. The nearest Occupational Safety and Health Administration office was thousands of miles away. At the same time, for the purposes of trade, the Northern Marianas counted as part of the country. The combination was potent: a legal environment where foreign workers could toil for paltry wages with little oversight to stitch garments labeled made in the usa.

  Saipan functioned as a sort of standing loophole. Starting in 1995, as stories of its exploited workers made their way to the mainland, members of Congress sought to close it.2 Over the next decade or so, they would submit at least twenty-nine bills to change some part of the relevant law. Twice the Senate voted unanimously for wage and immigration reforms, only to have the bills die in the House Committee on Resources. A 1999 House bill had 243 cosponsors, a substantial majority. But it, too, died.