In Ecuador, the primary battleground has been Eloy Alfaro Air Base, located next door to Manta, Ecuador’s most important Pacific seaport. In 1999, claiming to be interested only in interrupting the narcotics traffic and assisting the local population, the U.S. military obtained a ten-year deal to use the airfield and then, after 9/11, turned it into a major hub for counterinsurgency, anti-immigrant activities, and espionage. Ecuadoreans are convinced that the Americans based at Manta provided the intelligence that enabled Colombian forces to launch a March 2008 cross-border attack, killing twenty-one Colombian insurgents on Ecuador’s turf.
In 2006, newly elected Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa declared that he wouldn’t renew the American lease when it expires in November 2009—unless, he tauntingly proposed the following year, the United States would let Ecuador have a base in Miami. Correa has since offered to lease the air base to the Chinese for commercial use. Ecuador also rejected a U.S. bid to set up a base on the island of Baltra in the Galápagos, a protected wildlife refuge. The 180 U.S. soldiers and several hundred contractors at Manta have since found a new home in Colombia.
Peru has proved problematic for the Pentagon. In July 2008, the United States sent close to a thousand soldiers to “dig wells and do public health work” in the southern Ayacucho region, an area once controlled by the Shining Path guerrillas. The U.S. deployment, while seemingly harmless, has provoked demonstrations in many Peruvian cities, where such “friendship” missions are viewed as a pretext for an expanded U.S. military presence. There is an airfield in Ayacucho—Los Cabitos—that the Americans would like to occupy, as it might provide easy access to Bolivia and Colombia.
The United States faces popular protests against its bases in numerous other countries. Disputes over military pollution and the handling of soldiers suspected of crimes have led to widespread resentment of U.S. troop presence in South Korea and the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. Meanwhile, in Italy, where the United States still has at least eighty-three military installations, demonstrations erupted in 2006 when it was revealed that the government would let the U.S. Army greatly enlarge its base in the northern city of Vicenza.
A town of about 120,000 nestled midway between Venice and Verona, Vicenza was home and showplace of the renowned Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, whose work so impressed Thomas Jefferson that he incorporated Palladian themes into his plantation at Monticello and the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. Vicenza already housed six thousand U.S. troops when, in late 2003, U.S. officials began secretly negotiating to bring in four more Army battalions from Germany. The Americans proposed closing Vicenza’s small municipal airport at Dal Molin, across town from the existing base, so they could build barracks and other facilities at the airport for 1,750 additional troops.
But locals still haven’t forgotten the 1998 incident in which a Marine pilot from nearby Aviano Air Base severed an Italian gondola cable with his jet, killing twenty skiers. The pilot, who’d been flying his Prowler faster and lower than Pentagon regulations permit, was later acquitted by a U.S. military court, although he did serve five months in prison for destroying evidence in the form of a cockpit video. Local opposition to the Vicenza proposal led judges to suspend work at Dal Molin in June 2008, leading to a standoff with the Berlusconi government, which supports the base expansion. A month later, the Council of State, Italy’s highest court, overturned the local decision, declaring that “the authorization of a military base is the exclusive competency of the state.”
Similar disputes are unfolding in Poland, the Czech Republic, South Korea, and Japan. For several years the Pentagon has been negotiating with the Polish and Czech governments to build bases in their countries for radar tracking and missile launching sites as part of its proposed anti-ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) network against an alleged threat from Iran. Russia, however, does not accept the U.S. explanation and believes these bases are aimed at it. In July 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice successfully concluded a missile defense deal with the Czech government, but it required ratification by the parliament, with two-thirds of the population said to be opposed. While the Polish government had been slow to sign on, Russia’s attack on Georgia appeared to change its attitude. In light of Russian assertiveness, the Poles quickly accepted the American proposal to base antimissile missiles on their soil.
In South Korea, America faces massive protests over its attempt to construct new headquarters at Pyeongtaek, some forty miles south of Seoul, where it hopes to locate 17,000 troops and associated civilians, for a total of 43,000 people. Pyeongtaek would replace the Yongsan Garrison, the old Japanese headquarters in central Seoul that U.S. troops have occupied since 1945.
Meanwhile, the United States and Japan are locked in a perennial dispute over the $1.86 billion Japan pays annually to support U.S. troops and their families on the main islands of Japan and Okinawa. The Japanese call this the “sympathy budget” in an expression of cynicism over the fact that the United States cannot seem to afford its own foreign policy. The Americans want Japan to pay more, but the Japanese have balked.
All overseas U.S. bases create tensions with the people forced to live in their shadow, but one of the most shameful examples involves the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. During the 1960s, the United States leased the island from Great Britain, which, on behalf of its new tenant, forcibly expelled the entire indigenous population, relocating the islanders some 1,200 miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Diego Garcia remains a U.S. naval and bomber base, espionage center, secret CIA prison, and transit point for prisoners en route to harsh interrogation at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. It has an anchorage for some twenty ships, a nuclear weapons storage facility, a 12,000-foot runway, and accommodations and amenities for 5,200 Americans and fifty British police. According to many sources, including retired general Barry McCaffrey, the base was used after 9/11 as a prison (called Camp Justice) for high-value detainees from the Afghan and Iraq wars.
Perhaps one sign of trouble brewing for America’s overseas enclaves has been the world’s condemnation of its long-term ambitions in Iraq. In June 2008, it was revealed that the United States was secretly pressing Iraq to let it retain some fifty-eight bases on Iraqi soil indefinitely, plus other concessions that would make Iraq a long-term dependency of the United States. The negotiations over a long-term American presence were a debacle for the rule of law and what’s left of America’s reputation, even though the lame-duck Bush administration backed down from its more outrageous demands in the end.
Like all empires of the past, the American version of empire is destined to come to an end, either voluntarily or of necessity. When that will occur is impossible to foretell, but the pressures of America’s massive indebtedness, the growing contradiction between the needs of its civilian economy and its military-industrial complex, and its dependence on a volunteer army and innumerable private contractors strongly indicate an empire built on fragile foundations. Over the next few years, resistance to military overtures is likely to grow, meaning the agenda of national politics will be increasingly dominated by issues of empire liquidation—peacefully or otherwise.
UPDATE 2010
According to the Defense Department’s Base Structure Report for fiscal year 2009, the Pentagon owned or rented 716 overseas bases and another 4,863 in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $124.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases and an estimated $720 billion to replace all of them.
Like earlier Base Structure Reports, the 2009 edition failed to mention any garrisons in the Iraq and Afghan war zones, as well as any bases or facilities used in countries such as Jordan and Qatar. By the summer of 2009, for example, there were still nearly three hundred U.S. bases and outposts in Iraq, with the number set to drop to fifty or fewer by August 31, 2010—President Obama’s deadline for removing combat troops from the country. However, that target date and a stated intention t
o remove all U.S. forces by the end of 2011 were seemingly abrogated months later by his secretary of defense Robert Gates, who admitted, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continues a train, equip and advise role beyond the end of 2011.” As a result, don’t count on U.S. bases necessarily disappearing from Iraq by 2012.
Elsewhere, bases continued to expand despite local opposition. In Afghanistan, a surge in base building meant that by early 2010, U.S. and coalition allies occupied nearly four hundred bases—from mega- to micro-sized—in the country, with more in the pipeline. In September 2009, the last U.S. troops left Ecuador’s Manta air base. Just months before, however, details emerged in the press of an agreement between the United States and Colombia to give Washington access to seven military bases in that country.
Despite protests by ordinary Italians as well as the mayor of Vicenza, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has pushed ahead with the expansion of the U.S. base being built in that town, which is scheduled to be completed in 2011.
Only in Japan did real roadblocks to U.S. base expansion emerge. In 2009, the Japanese government announced that it was reconsidering a 2006 agreement with the Bush administration to relocate U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa to a proposed airfield at Camp Schwab along the island’s rural northeastern coast. Subsequently, relations between the two allies soured. Early in 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of the joint U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty allowing the large-scale U.S. presence in the country, Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, announced plans to press for a more open and equal relationship between the two nations, while his country also considered updating the agreement to make the United States responsible for the environmental cleanup of sites used by the U.S. military.
10
BASELESS EXPENDITURES
July 2, 2009
The U.S. Empire of Bases—at $102 billion a year, already the world’s costliest military enterprise—just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27, 2009, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican City–sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.
Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9, Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing eighteen occupants, wounding at least fifty-five, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is going ahead with the purchase.
Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in our already bloated military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy—a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. Instead, these so-called embassies will actually be walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials, and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include rooftop helicopter pads for quick getaways.
While it may be comforting for State Department employees working in dangerous places to know that they have some physical protection, it must also be obvious to them, as well as to the people in the countries where they serve, that they will now be visibly part of an in-your-face American imperial presence. We shouldn’t be surprised when militants attacking the United States find one of our baselike embassies, however heavily guarded, an easier target than a large military base.
And what is being done about those military bases anyway—now close to eight hundred of them dotted across the globe in other people’s countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls, and other much-needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.
Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet republic that, back in February 2009, announced it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan War), has been persuaded to let us stay. But here’s the catch: in return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple, from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners. All this because the Obama administration, having committed itself to a widening war in the region, is convinced it needs this base to store and transship supplies to Afghanistan.
This development will probably not go unnoticed in other countries where Americans are also unpopular occupiers. For example, the Ecuadoreans have told us to leave Manta Air Base. Of course, they have their pride to consider, not to speak of the fact that they don’t like American soldiers mucking about in Colombia and Peru. Nonetheless, they could probably use a spot more money.
And what about the Japanese who, for more than fifty-seven years, have been paying big bucks to host American bases on their soil? Recently, they reached a deal with Washington to move some American Marines from bases on Okinawa to the U.S. territory of Guam. In the process, however, they were forced to shell out not only for the cost of the Marines’ removal, but also to build new facilities on Guam for their arrival. Is it possible that they will now take a cue from the government of Kyrgyzstan and just tell the Americans to get out and pay for it themselves? Or might they at least stop funding the same American military personnel who regularly rape Japanese women (at the rate of about two per month) and make life miserable for whoever lives near the thirty-eight U.S. bases on Okinawa? This is certainly what the Okinawans have been hoping and praying for ever since we arrived in 1945.
In fact, I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country, and so—on the analogy of a financial bubble or a pyramid scheme—if you’re an investor, it’s better to get your money out while you still can.
This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they’re cashing in quietly and slowly in order not to tank the dollar while they’re still holding on to such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: whether we’re being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging on to our military empire and all the bases that go with it will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.
Count on this: future generations of Americans traveling abroad decades from now won’t find the landscape dotted with near-billion-dollar “embassies.”
PART IV
THE PENTAGON TAKES US DOWN
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GOING BANKRUPT
January 22, 2008
The military adventurers of the Bush administration had much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were “the smartest guys in the room,” the title of Alex Gibney’s prizewinning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.
As a result, going into 2008, the United States found itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military estab
lishment. Its government no longer even attempted to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars had destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration put off these costs for future generations to pay—or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility was disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.
There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.
Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures—so-called military Keynesianism. By “military Keynesianism,” I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.
Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs—an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.
Dismantling the Empire Page 12