The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

7

THE SPOILS OF WAR

Over the years, the real purposes of many of these overseas bases has changed from tactical and strategic locations of military value to elaborate American housing and logistic installations away from home. They provide locations and facilities for some units that would have no reason for existence if based in the United States, and they furnish justification for interesting and attractive overseas travel and adventure for the troops and their families.

COLONEL JAMES A. DONOVAN, USMC (RET.),

Militarism, U.S.A. (1970)

Wars and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. They cannot be separated. Imperialism is the single-greatest cause of war, and war is the midwife of new imperialist acquisitions. Wars usually begin because political leaders convince a people that the use of armed force is necessary to defend the country or pursue some abstract goal—Cuban independence from Spain, preventing a Communist victory in a Korean civil war, keeping the banana republics of Central America in the “free world,” or even bringing democracy to Iraq. For a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the “homeland” usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so. Commonly, preparedness for a possible resumption of hostilities will be invoked. Over time, if a nation’s aims become imperial, the bases form the skeleton of an empire. In recent centuries, wars launched from such bases have been the primary means through which imperialism has prospered and expanded, although an induced economic dependence can sometimes achieve the same effect. Since the end of World War II, American governments have offered many rationales for the bases they were collecting around the world, including containing Communism, warding off the “domino theory,” fighting “ethnic cleansing,” and preventing the spread of “weapons of mass destruction.”

From the time of the Romans and the Han dynasty Chinese to the present, all empires have had permanent military encampments, forts, or bases of some sort. These were meant to garrison conquered territory, keeping restless populations under control, and to serve as launching points for further imperial conquests. What is most fascinating and curious about the developing American form of empire, however, is that, in its modern phase, it is solely an empire of bases, not of territories, and these bases now encircle the earth in a way that, despite centuries-old dreams of global domination, would previously have been inconceivable.

Yet, although our own nation is filled with military installations—there are 969 separate bases in the fifty states—ours has, oddly enough, never been a warrior culture.¹ Our people are largely not in uniform, nor (until the recent “war on terrorism”) were military uniforms common in our cities and airports; our streets seldom see a military parade; our concerts are rarely filled with martial music; and yet ours is also a thoroughly militarized empire—though our model of a warrior seems most likely to be a military bureaucrat. The modern American empire can only be perceived, and understood, by a close look at our basing policies, the specific way we garrison the earth. To trace the historical patterns of base acquisition and to explore our basing systems worldwide is to reveal the sinews of what has until very recently, for most Americans, been a largely hidden empire.

Our imperial history is littered with bases on foreign soil. Our foreign policy is now largely made in the Pentagon and implemented by commanders who spend their lives cloistered in our myriad outposts, which constitute a deeply interconnected world with its own customs, habits, and ways of living as well as its own hierarchies and professional classes who are increasingly detached from the rest of us. It is hard even to remember that on the eve of World War II our regular army was a mere 186,000 men. Now, the 1.4 million-strong “peacetime” military, funded by a defense budget larger than most national budgets, is made up of both men and women living in a closed-off, self-contained base world serviced by their own airline—the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales—that links outposts from Greenland to Australia. Starting with our turn-of-the-century imperial beginnings, I want to explore here how that world of bases was assembled to become an imperial motor driving the United States on to ever more wars.

Though, as I said earlier, we were already a great continental empire by 1898, the Spanish-American War first set us on our modern path of imperialism. Some of the bases we acquired at that time—Guantánamo Bay, Pearl Harbor, Guam—are still overseas military outposts or are on territories that we later directly annexed. Under the influence of Wilsonian idealism, we did not follow our British, French, and Japanese allies in exploiting victory in World War I to acquire new colonies. It was not until World War II that our empire of bases achieved its global reach, and the United States still seems to regard its continuing occupation of the territory of its former Axis foes as something akin to a natural birthright. The Korean War, though ended in stalemate, nonetheless projected us onto the Asian mainland. After Vietnam, our base numbers were cut—not just in Southeast Asia but in other places where our defeat emboldened governments or peoples to oppose our military presence in their countries; the three most important such cases were Spain, Greece, and the Philippines. With the end of the Cold War, we resumed our march toward empire. Our 1999 war against Serbia, our two wars with Iraq, and our war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan allowed us to expand our empire of overseas bases into the broad southern Eurasian region stretching from the Balkans in the west to the Chinese border in the east, an oil-rich area that opened up to our imperial dreams after the demise of the Soviet Union. Iran is now the only serious obstacle to our military domination of the whole region.

As mentioned in the last chapter, the Pentagon calculates “plant replacement values” in U.S. dollars for all the overseas bases whose existence it publicly acknowledges. The total value of these 725 recognized overseas military bases as of September 11, 2001, was $117,838.5 million (c. $118 billion). Of this $118 billion, the bases acquired from the vanquished of World War II and still in our possession were said to be worth $78 billion—$38 billion in Germany and $40 billion in Japan, or 66 percent of the total. The Pentagon prices the garrisons it established in Korea as a result of the Korean War at $11.5 billion. In other words, according to the Department of Defense’s calculations, in “value” terms World War II and Korea accounted for three-quarters of our contemporary empire of bases. The Pentagon does not, however, include in its calculations any of our recent bases in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, or Central Asia. Plant replacement values have not been published for these areas because our government is reluctant to admit that they are actually imperial outposts. (In some cases, too, Islamic governments in the Persian Gulf do not want to publicize our “footprint” there.) But the fact is, we vastly enlarged and consolidated our Persian Gulf bases in preparation for the renewed war against Iraq, a development discussed in the next chapter. But first some groundwork.

THE SPANISH - AMERICAN WAR AND OUR LATIN AMERICAN BASES

Most of our bases in Latin America derived from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Following the American declaration of independence from the British Empire in 1776, Americans generally thought of their new country as the quintessential anti-imperialist state. For its first century there was some basis for this belief, so long as one was willing to regard the lands of Native Americans and Mexicans as essentially uninhabited. The American Revolution inspired a wave of uprisings across the Caribbean and South America that led to the independence of almost all the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. These rebellions in turn provoked the Monroe Doctrine, through which—according to the official account to be found in American textbooks—the United States appointed itself the protector of the nations of the Western Hemisphere against further European incursions.

The Monroe Doctrine itself actually reflected the ideas of John Quincy Adams, a member of the Federalist Party, not President James Monroe, a Republican. When Adams decided in 1823 to run as a Republican in the upcoming presidential election, he needed to counter suspicions that he had “pro-British” leanings, and the Monroe Doctrine was designed to this end.² By the time it was actually proclaimed a fundamental principle of our foreign policy, during the presidency of James K. Polk (1845-49), who added more territory to the United States than any president other than Thomas Jefferson, its effect was already imperialist. It was first invoked in a dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory and again to warn off any European powers that might care to interfere in the controversies that led to the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Traditional interpretations of American imperialism follow a vein already familiar from writings about British imperialism—namely, we “conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” were “reluctant imperialists,” and lacked “rationality of purpose” in what we were doing.³ As the international relations analyst Ronald Steel has remarked, “The theme of reluctance is one of the most pervasive explanations found in the histories of colonialism.”⁴ In addition to arguing that we never really intended to become imperialists, American historians divide U.S. actions to conquer other peoples into a continental strand and a maritime strand, maintaining that only the maritime strand constituted “real” imperialism. The continental strand—the westward movement of conquest over indigenous peoples and Mexicans—is usually considered mere “expansionism,” as if some inexorable pressure beyond planning or will forced us on.

The shift from the continental to the maritime strand at the end of the nineteenth century was, according to Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis of 1893, caused by the closing of the frontier. Serious scholarship has long ago revealed the ideological intent of Turner’s thesis, but his was certainly one of the more sophisticated defenses of America’s turn to overseas expansion. Even so, prominent American historians like Yale University’s Samuel Flagg Bemis have argued that the imperialism that began in 1898 was “a great aberration in American history,” one that in his view would ultimately be corrected by twentieth-century liberal political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.⁵

The Monroe Doctrine assumed ever-new opportunistic forms. In December 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt enunciated the Roosevelt Corollary to it, calling for intervention throughout the Americas to suppress political movements that might interfere with the payment of Latin American debts. Because the United States was a “civilized nation,” Roosevelt wrote, it had a duty to exercise “an international police power” to stop “chronic wrongdoing” wherever it occurred among America’s neighbors to the south. Theodore Roosevelt’s successor as president, William Howard Taft, the former governor of the Philippines, proclaimed something he called “dollar diplomacy”—another euphemism for imperialism—and invoked Roosevelt’s Corollary to promote and protect American business interests overseas, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America.⁶ Between 1898 and 1934, the United States sent marines to Cuba four times, Honduras seven times, the Dominican Republic four times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico three times, Colombia four times, and Nicaragua five times (where they built bases and maintained an uninterrupted presence for twenty-one years except for a short period in 1925).⁷ As the political scientist David Abernethy observes, “The country that had proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine to protect the independence of Spanish-speaking countries on the New World mainland now found itself in the anomalous position of replacing Spain as a colonial ruler and repressing national independence movements.”⁸ The Roosevelt Corollary was supplanted only in 1934, by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy.

The first war devoted explicitly to creating military bases outside mainland North America was the Spanish-American War. Though officially it was launched to assist Cuban rebels against Spanish rule and avenge the sinking of the USS Maine, the actual reason was to establish military and naval bases in the Caribbean and the Western Pacific, in accordance with plans of then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State John Hay, several leading Republican senators, including Henry Cabot Lodge and Albert Beveridge, naval theorist Captain Alfred T. Mahan, and various other supporters like Brooks Adams and Elihu Root. As a result of victory in that war, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were made colonies, Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone (in which numerous military bases were located) were annexed, and a military base was established in Cuba.

After World War II, we gave the Philippines its independence but, until the Philippine Senate expelled us in 1992, we maintained two of our largest overseas bases there—Clark Air Base at Angeles City and Subic Bay Naval Base at Olongapo, both on the island of Luzon. Ever since 1992, the Pentagon has been trying to find a way to reestablish a military presence in the islands, whether by exaggerating the threat of China, through military “exchanges” under so-called visiting forces agreements, or more recently under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” During 2002, the Bush administration succeeded in reintroducing forces into the Philippines to train Filipinos to fight Muslim guerrillas in the southern islands.

WORLD WAR II AND THE GERMAN BASES

World War II fatally weakened all the major colonial empires and simultaneously left the United States as the most powerful nation on earth, indeed an imperial power of the first order. With the onset of the Cold War, America decided not just to hang on to its wartime territorial gains but to expand them into a huge ring of bases reaching from Iceland to Japan that would completely surround the USSR and China, whose Communist Party had emerged victorious from a bitter civil war.

Whether or not most of these bases would have proved of real importance in a Soviet-American war, their possession was justified as a crucial part of a policy of“containing” Communism. It was sometimes argued as well that the bases needed to be retained just to keep them out of Soviet hands. Containment and strategic denial became the rationales for a new version of imperialism that replaced the old and discredited practice of colonialism. Military bases, vaguely legitimized through alliances and mutual security pacts, became the institutional form this new imperialism took. Even in Latin America, where the United States had for over a century maintained a more traditional form of political and economic domination, using older imperial explanations for its acts, it now began to apply Cold War ideology, claiming that the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua and the training of thousands of Latin American military officers in the techniques of domestic repression were an essential part of containing Communism and Soviet influence in the hemisphere.

The two biggest prizes of World War II were Germany and Japan. The American army occupied all of Japan, while the standoff between the United States and the USSR in Germany, where the two victorious armies had met at the Elbe River in 1945, became the supreme symbol of the Cold War. In the four-power division of occupied Germany, the United States controlled the southern and central states of Bavaria, parts of what is today Baden-Württemberg, and Hesse. France occupied the western regions, Britain the north, the USSR the eastern half of the country, and all four powers jointly governed the capital, Berlin. Facing the USSR from Germany’s south-central quarter, a territory about the size of the state of Oregon, some 285,000 U.S. combat troops, armed with nuclear weapons, were deployed at just under 800 bases. Across the artificial border created where the armies stopped, the USSR stationed approximately 380,000 troops and some 20,000 tanks, one of the largest land armadas ever assembled. Initial NATO military planning for repelling a Soviet invasion contemplated a defensive line at the Rhine River; therefore the main NATO command and air bases were located behind the Rhine, in France. But in May 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War, the French government, led by former General Charles de Gaulle, declared its intention to regain “full sovereignty [over] French territory.” It would no longer “accept the presence of foreign units, installations, or bases in France falling in any respect under the control of authorities other than French authorities.”⁹ France opted out of NATO because, as supreme commander, an American general dominated it. (In 1993, France rejoined.)

On April 1, 1967, NATO was evicted from France, and Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) moved to Brussels. Major U.S. Army commands relocated to Stuttgart and Heidelberg, and south-central Germany became even more congested with American military bases. Even though the threat of war with the USSR was already receding, the United States developed a new “defensive” strategy, placing its air bases as close to the French border as possible. American strategists put six combat airfields (Bitburg, Hahn, Ramstein, Sembach, Spangdahlem, and Zweibrüchen) in the small German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which became, as it remains today, an American sphere of influence. U.S. commanders posited that a Soviet invasion, if it came, would be launched through a gap between the Rhön and Vogelsberg Mountains where the terrain was advantageous for invading tanks. The small central German city of Fulda, only twenty miles from the East German border, was directly in the path of the projected invasion. The army therefore created a “military community” in Fulda that occupied the city center and twenty-two other sites around the town, all part of the 104th Area Support Group headquartered in nearby Hanau. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the city’s importance vanished overnight. The last U.S. soldiers said good-bye to Fulda in the summer of 1994.

Many bases in Germany are actually made up of numerous separate minibases or “sites,” a fragmentation that multiplies the effects of our military presence on surrounding civilian communities. The Department of Defense likes to count only major bases in its reports, thereby understating their numbers, whereas people who live near them think that counting “sites” is what matters. Keith B. Cunningham and Andreas Klemmer, researchers with the Bonn International Center for Conversion, have studied the economic effects of base closings in Germany and the longer-term implications of continuing to maintain American bases in Central Europe that have no military functions. According to them, at the time of German unification, the United States had forty-seven major military bases in Germany (thirty-seven “military communities” and ten air bases).¹⁰ But a shift in the terms of calculation, they write, reveals that “the United States maintained 285,000 troops in Germany at almost 800 discrete sites. By 1995, those numbers had fallen to approximately 94,000 troops at about 260 sites.”¹¹

What the army calls a military community exists only in Germany. In the United States, major military bases are normally large, self-contained reservations more or less separated from civilian urban areas and often constituting the equivalent of small or medium-sized towns or cities in their own right. For example, Fort Hood, Texas, sixty miles northeast of Austin, occupies 217,337 contiguous acres and has a population of about 130,000 people. By contrast, “each [German] Military Community consists of one or more barracks, or Kasernen, near the city center which acts as the administrative and social center of the community. The soldiers and their families may live in nearby U.S.-operated ‘family housing complexes’ or find their own housing within neighboring German communities. Most Military Communities also operate training ranges and airfields outside the city center. Additionally, the community likely supports a number of other, isolated sites such as radio stations, depots, warehouses, and hospitals. All of this causes the average community to operate more than seventeen different sites in at least two different German cities.... Shortly after the end of the Cold War, the Military Communities were reorganized under the command umbrella of Area Support Groups (ASGs) to facilitate consolidation. Thirteen ASGs were established in Germany in 1991, containing a total of thirty-four Military Communities.”¹²

It is doubtful that any American city or town, with the possible exception of Honolulu, would put up with what the Germans, the Koreans, the Okinawans, and many others have experienced for more than half a century. The American film and television producer Michael Goldfarb caught the atmosphere of Cold War Germany in a description of a 1970 drive through Frankfurt: “At a red light an American Army jeep pulls up with a bunch of G.I.’s. We keep driving around the city trying to find the Department of Motor Vehicles or the German equivalent and at every red light there are jeeps with American soldiers. It seems like there are more jeeps than police cars, more American soldiers on the streets than German policemen. The war was over a quarter of a century ago. Surely the ratio of American G.I.’s to German cops should have skewed in favor of the Germans. We are long past the point of occupation and pacification. The phrase ‘Roman Legionnaires’ goes through my brain as another jeep passes us.”¹³

As late as September 1991, the 103rd ASG, containing the military communities of Frankfurt—its headquarters—plus Darmstadt and Wiesbaden, with 25,598 military personnel, occupied 4,783 acres spread around seventy different sites. The Twenty-sixth ASG had its administrative center in the old university city of Heidelberg, which was also the headquarters of the U.S. Army Europe, the Seventh Army, and the V Corps. The Heidelberg ASG included the cities of Heilbronn, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, and Worms, with a total of 36,014 military personnel, occupying 18,312 acres at seventy-eight separate sites. The current public affairs officer of the Twenty-sixth ASG notes that the “community” encompasses over twelve separate installations in and around the city of Heidelberg and adds laconically that the military “shopping center complex [is] within walking distance of Campbell and Patton Barracks.”¹⁴

The main offices of these military communities are usually in the middle of town because in 1945 the army simply moved its offices into the old German military barracks, often architecturally imposing edifices dating from the nineteenth century. The various family housing units of the military communities have been given colorful American names like Pattonville in the Stuttgart military community and Mark Twain Village Family Housing at Heidelberg. One of the most desirable military communities is Garmisch, located in the Bavarian Alps near Hitler’s old retreat, Berchtesgaden. It is home to many hotels, bachelors’ quarters, a shopping center, a golf course, and a skeet-shooting range, all named after famous American generals. It is, in fact, the Armed Forces Recreational Center for Europe—that is, an official ski resort for the military. Just so the brass can pretend to be working while visiting Garmisch, it also includes the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a think tank. The military has not found a need to downsize the 543rd ASG, which includes Garmisch.¹⁵

Garmisch is but the tip of the recreational iceberg when it comes to base life in Germany. In December 2002, the army committed $375,000 for improvements to the Rheinblick Golf Course in Wiesbaden, $9 million for a bowling and entertainment center in Baumholder, $16 million for a physical fitness center in Bamberg, and $290,000 for a “kids’ zone” restaurant and entertainment center at the Pulaski Barracks—and these projects were just for the 104th Area Support Group in Hanau. All the other ASGs had similar expansion plans. It is possible, however, that none of these projects will be built thanks to the Bush administration’s pique over Germany’s refusal to fall in line behind its war on Iraq.

Contrary to the general rule that, once opened, an overseas base is never closed, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1990 it was no longer possible even for the army to pretend that a huge military force was needed in Central Europe. The Pentagon therefore cut forces in Germany by about two-thirds, transferring them to new bases then being established in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. The most astonishing aspect of the German downsizing, however, is the number of bases the United States decided to retain —some 325, according to the September 2001 Base Status Report, occupied by 70,998 soldiers and airmen, 16,488 civilian Department of Defense employees, and 97,571 dependents. Since there is no credible use for these forces in Europe, they simply live there waiting for “out-of-area operations.” In the forty-one years from 1948 to 1989, we deployed army troops stationed in Germany outside their area of operations just eighteen times. During the four years after Operation Desert Storm, however, the Pentagon sent German-based soldiers on forty-nine out-of-area missions.¹⁶

Germany has become a European version of Okinawa, a staging area for imperial activities in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia. As in Okinawa, the areas around our bases are constantly exposed to environmental pollution, the noise of warplanes, a high incidence of sexual crimes, and disputes about who has legal jurisdiction over the large number of Americans living in the host society. The first serious signs that Germany was getting tired of its semicolonial status came in the general elections of September 2002, when Gerhard Schröder was reelected chancellor on an explicit plank of dissociating Germany from American plans for a war against Iraq. The increasing tension between the two countries over our global aspirations may result in large-scale transfers of military personnel from Germany to the ex-Communist East European countries and to newly created Iraqi and Central Asian bases. Many in the Bush administration, including NATO commander General James L. Jones, have called for a radical reduction of American bases of Germany.

WORLD WAR II AND JAPAN

Japan offers many similarities to Germany, except that no Soviet-American confrontation took place on Japanese territory and that a much higher level of protest against the stationing of foreign troops was apparent from the beginning. Because of the devastation of the war and the atomic bombings, Japan became an intensely pacifist country. In rewriting the Japanese constitution, the Allied occupation added an explicitly pacifist clause, article 9, whereby Japan renounced forever the use of force in international relations. The considerable idealism behind this provision appealed to many Japanese, and although the antiwar sentiment of the immediate postwar years has faded, a large portion of the electorate still accepts the idea that Japanese armed forces should be maintained only for defensive purposes.

With the onset of the Cold War in East Asia, however, the Pentagon decided that it needed large numbers of military bases in Japan, which was deemed a “secure rear area” in the struggle to contain Communism. This plan ran counter to prevailing sentiment in Japan and to the formal stipulations of the new constitution. Moreover, after regaining its independence in 1952, Japan had renounced forever the use of nuclear weapons and formally prohibited the United States from stockpiling them at its bases in the country. Early in the postwar period, therefore, Pentagon strategists concluded that they would have to find a place in Japan not bound by government policies. The result was the virtual annexation of Okinawa, the southernmost major island in the Japanese chain and the scene of exceedingly bloody fighting and kamikaze suicide attacks in 1945.

From 1945 to 1972, the United States held on to the island as a colony directly governed by the Pentagon. During this period, the 1.3 million Okinawans became stateless, unrecognized as citizens of either Japan or the United States, governed by an American lieutenant general. They could not travel to Japan or anywhere else without special documents issued by American military authorities. Okinawa was closed to the outside world, a secret enclave of military airfields, submarine pens, intelligence facilities, and CIA safe houses. Some Okinawans who protested these conditions were declared probable Communists and hundreds of them were transported to Bolivia, where they were dumped in the remote countryside of the Amazon headwaters to fend for themselves.¹⁷ During the height of the Cold War, Congress was not interested in what went on in Okinawa and exercised minimal oversight of army rule.

By the early 1970s, Okinawans were in open revolt against the use of the island as a bomber base for the Vietnam War, incensed by revelations that the military was storing nerve gas and nuclear weapons there without even warning the local population of the dangers involved. Reluctantly, the United States agreed to a pro forma “reversion” of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty so long as the Japanese government allowed us to keep our bases there. Reversion was a convenient way to perpetuate the status quo while transferring responsibility for the Okinawan people to Japan.

Over the years, the Japanese government has done everything it could to keep the American military confined to Okinawa. Some 75 percent of our bases in Japan are located on the island even though it constitutes less than 1 percent of the total Japanese land area and is the poorest of all Japanese prefectures. The island’s relationship to Japan is very similar to that of Puerto Rico to the United States. The government in Tokyo likes this arrangement because it knows that the public will tolerate American troops on Japanese soil only if they are kept out of sight. Ever since Japan forcibly annexed the Ryukyu kingdom (of which Okinawa is the largest island) in the late nineteenth century, its people have discriminated against the culturally distinct Okinawans.¹⁸ The semicolonial conditions there have not changed. In 2002, the Japanese government agreed to build for American use yet another air base on the island, one that will destroy a sensitive coral reef and endangered species that depend on it.

In imposing military colonialism on the Okinawans, our senior leaders were always aware that they were violating the United Nations Charter, our own proclaimed objectives in fighting World War II, and virtually all the political ideals and values the United States has espoused as a nation. The lack of due process of law in the military’s seizure of land from Okinawan farmers to build huge base complexes helped compromise our attempt to promote democracy in postwar Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. Numerous high-ranking American officials have acknowledged that in keeping Okinawa for twenty years after the 1952 peace treaty with Japan and giving it up only under intense pressure, they were making a mockery of the pledge in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 that the United States sought “no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” in World War II.¹⁹ Former ambassador to Japan and Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson admitted that giving Okinawa to the military in the late 1940s was simply the price of getting the Pentagon to go along with the peace treaty, which restored Japanese sovereignty over the four main islands but kept Okinawa under American military rule.²⁰

Okinawa is not the only place in Japan with American bases; it just has more of them. The old Japanese naval base at Yokosuka, south of Yokohama, is the home port of the navy’s Seventh Fleet, and a full carrier task force is permanently stationed there. When the aircraft carrier enters port, the navy flies its aircraft off to Atsugi Naval Air Station in nearby, heavily populated Kanagawa Prefecture, where protests by residents about the noise of takeoffs and landings have become a permanent feature of local politics. The navy operates another major harbor for aircraft carriers and submarines at Sasebo, near Nagasaki, on the southern island of Kyushu. The air force, in addition to its huge facility at Kadena in Okinawa and Yokota Air Force Base in Tokyo, headquarters of U.S. Forces Japan, also operates Misawa Air Force Base, located in the most northerly prefecture of the main island of Honshu. It is home to a fighter wing of F-16s, the “Ripsaw Range” for target practice, and numerous espionage listening posts run by the navy.

The Marine Corps operates the majority of bases on Okinawa. The Third Marine Division, whose headquarters are there, is the only marine division based outside the United States. The Marine Corps also operates the big Iwakuni Air Station on southern Honshu, where for many years we illegally stored nuclear weapons on the USS San Joaquin County, moored a short distance offshore. The ship remained at the base without ever getting under way for at least six years during the 1960s, an important fact since in a secret agreement with Japan, the United States in 1960 had promised not to store nuclear weapons at its bases but adopted the position that nuclear weapons on naval vessels were merely in transit and had not actually been introduced into the country. The Japanese government went along with this ruse until June 1981, when former American ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer revealed the existence of the secret agreement in an interview in the Washington Post. An uproar ensued, during which the Pentagon neither affirmed nor denied the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere in Japan and the Japanese simply said that they trusted the United States to abide by the agreement.²¹ Certainly no one raised the possibility of calling in U.N. weapons inspectors.

According to the Pentagon’s September 2001 Base Status Report, the United States has seventy-three bases in Japan. (A careful and well-documented analysis by Japanese antibase activists gives the number as ninety-one.)²² These bases house some 40,217 uniformed service personnel, plus 6,431 civilian employees of the Department of Defense and 42,653 dependents. They also employ 29,205 Japanese and Okinawans to mow the lawns, repair the plumbing, wait on tables in officers’ clubs, operate motor pools—and translate Japanese-language books and magazines as well as communications intercepts for U.S. intelligence agencies. The Japanese government pays us some $4 billion per annum to help defray the costs of these services, making Japan perhaps the only country that pays another country to carry out espionage against itself. The troops on these bases have no military functions. They have been held in reserve for deployment elsewhere in Asia—in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the Philippines, East Timor, and other places—as the need (or opportunity) arises. The United States does not have to consult the Japanese government about their use.

In 1950, when the Korean War began, Japan was still under our military occupation and served as the main staging area and privileged sanctuary for our forces. This pattern was repeated during the Vietnam War, when Okinawa was still an American colony and could be used as a bomber base and supply center, despite considerable opposition. But today it seems unlikely that the United States could use any of its bases directly in a war that did not involve Japan—especially if the Bush administration went to war with North Korea over its nuclear program or with China over Taiwan—and not provoke violent resistance.

South Korea’s extensive network of American bases, established in the years of the Korean War and detailed in chapter 3, are a cross between those in Cold War Germany and present-day Japan, being located in a sovereign country, not a neocolonial enclave like Okinawa, but more hated than those in Germany. Despite an artificially maintained military standoff with North Korea, the large numbers of troops based all over South Korea have had nothing to do since the armistice of 1953. They spend their days mostly dozing in their tanks and their evenings in the arms of prostitutes. Between 1961 and 1993, the United States backed or installed a series of military dictators in South Korea, and even today representatives of the military, commanders and staff officers of the Eighth Army, by their very presence, make South Korean efforts toward a peaceful reconciliation with the North more difficult. South Korea is the only place where at the height of the Cold War the United States twice sent ambassadors who were former high-ranking officials of the CIA.

POST - VIETNAM FALLOUT

America’s defeat in Vietnam highlighted our tendency to build bases in and give military support to countries where militarists, fascists, or right-wing dictators prevailed, sometimes after these had first been installed by our military or CIA. There is virtually no case in Asia, Europe, or Latin America where in making a decision to establish bases we gave any consideration to whether or not a government was democratic. The new bases set up in 2001 in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan illustrate that this general rule still holds since both countries have atrocious human rights records. The military, of course, argues that it has to deal with regimes as it finds them and that the presence of a base does not necessarily constitute an endorsement. But, as a matter of fact, in Asia alone the United States was directly responsible for helping to bring to power and sustain brutally repressive military governments in Indonesia, South Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia, and the Philippines. At one time or another, we had extensive military bases in each of them except Cambodia and Indonesia.

When in 1975 North Vietnamese forces finally conquered South Vietnam’s regime despite its lavish American backing, other countries felt emboldened to deal with their own potentially lethal combinations of American-backed indigenous rightists and military bases on their soil. The death of Francisco Franco in Spain on November 20, 1975, brought an end to the last of the fascist dictatorships that had dominated Europe during the 1930s. He had been the right-wing victor in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, an ally of the Nazis, and the notorious Caudillo de España (as is still inscribed above his tomb at the Valle de los Caidos near Madrid). The United States liked him because he was, of course, anti-Communist.

Franco had leased us for indefinite use Torrejón Air Base near Madrid, Zaragoza Air Base with its 13,000-foot runways for B-52s, Morón Air Base near Seville, and Rota Naval Base just west of the Strait of Gibraltar. The democratic government that succeeded him set out at once to renegotiate all these agreements. In the ensuing discussions, we ultimately retained some but not all of these sites, primarily because Spain was also seeking belated integration into Europe, including membership in NATO, and this would have been threatened had they simply thrown the Americans out wholesale. But ever since the death of Franco, the Spanish bases have been hostage to Madrid’s latent anti-Americanism because of the long-term support we once gave the dictator. Only Morón and Rota are still open at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In the case of Spain there is some plausibility to the argument that the United States had to deal with the leader it found there, even if he happened to be a fascist. But the story was different in Greece. We helped bring the militarists to power there, and the legacy of our complicity still poisons Greek attitudes toward the United States. There is probably no democratic public anywhere on earth with more deeply entrenched anti-American views than the Greeks.²³ The roots of these attitudes go back to the birth of the Cold War itself, to the Greek civil war of 1946-49 and the U.S. decision embodied in the Truman Doctrine to intervene on the neofascist side because the wartime Greek partisan forces had been Communist-dominated. In 1949, the neofascists won and created a brutal right-wing government protected by the Greek secret police, composed of officers trained in the United States by the wartime Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA.

During the 1950s, George Papandreou, the future prime minister, was fond of saying that Greece was an American puppet state and its officials “exercised almost dictatorial control,... requiring the signature of the chief of the U.S. Economic Mission to appear alongside that of the Greek Minister of Coordination on any important documents.”²⁴ Under these conditions, we faced no difficulties in building naval bases and airfields at Souda Bay and Iraklion on the island of Crete, Hellenikon Air Base near Athens, and Nea Makri Communications Station at Marathon Bay, northeast of Athens.

In February 1964, George Papandreou was elected prime minister by a huge majority. He tried to remain on friendly terms with the Americans, but President Lyndon Johnson’s White House was pressuring him to sacrifice Greek interests on the disputed island of Cyprus in favor of Turkey, where the United States was also building military bases. Both Greece and Turkey had been members of NATO since 1952, but by the mid-1960s the United States seemed more interested in cultivating Turkey. When the Greek ambassador told President Johnson that his proposed solution to the Cyprus dispute was unacceptable to the Greek parliament, Johnson reportedly responded, “Fuck your parliament and your constitution. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament, and constitutions, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last very long.”²⁵ And they did not.

The CIA, under its Athens station chief, John Maury, immediately began plotting with Greek military officers they had trained and cultivated for over twenty years. In order to create a sense of crisis, the Greek intelligence service, the KYP, carried out an extensive program of terrorist attacks and bombings that it blamed on the left. Constantin Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film, Z, accurately depicts those days. On April 21, 1967, just before the beginning of an election campaign that would have returned Papandreou as prime minister, the military acted. Claiming they were protecting the country from a Communist coup, a five-man junta, four of whom had close connections with either the CIA or the U.S. military in Greece, established one of the most repressive regimes sponsored by either side during the Cold War.

The “Greek colonels,” as they came to be known, opened up the country to American missile launch sites and espionage bases, and they donated some $549,000 to the 1968 Nixon-Agnew election campaign.²⁶ The U.S. Senate suspected that this was CIA money coming home from Greece to influence domestic politics, but Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser, urgently requested that any congressional investigation be canceled. Since 1995, the State Department has had ready for publication a book of documents concerning U.S.-Greek relations for the years 1964-68 in its legally mandated historical series Foreign Relations of the United States, but the CIA has prevented its release.²⁷

The leader of the junta, Colonel George Papadopoulos, was an avowed fascist and admirer of Adolf Hitler. He had been trained in the United States during World War II and had been on the CIA payroll for fifteen years preceding the coup. His regime was noted for its brutality. During the colonel’s first month in power some 8,000 professionals, students, and others disliked by the junta were seized and tortured. Many were executed. In 1969, the eighteen member countries of the European Commission on Human Rights threatened to expel Greece—it walked out before the commission could act—but even this had no effect on American policies.

On July 15, 1974, after seven years of misrule, the Greek junta, in league with militarist colleagues on the island of Cyprus, attempted a coup d’état against Cypriot president Makarios, who was simultaneously primate and archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church and a person who had promoted peaceful coexistence between the Greek and Turkish communities on the island. On July 20, Turkey responded by invading the island and dividing it into a Turkish-dominated north and a Greek-dominated south. The only country ever to recognize the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus is Turkey. In Athens, largely because the Turkish assault was an embarrassing defeat for Greece, the junta collapsed.²⁸ It was replaced by a civilian government under a conservative politician, Constantine Karamanlis, which withdrew Greek troops from NATO’s military wing but continued to cooperate diplomatically with the United States—until the elections of 1981.

Andreas Papandreou, the son of George Papandreou, had been in exile in Sweden and Canada during the reign of the colonel. In August 1974, after the fall of the junta, he returned to Athens and created a new political party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). Reflecting the events of the previous decade as well as the Communist victory in Vietnam, its platform was explicitly anti-American: get the bases out of Greece and get Greece out of NATO. In 1981, PASOK won a landslide victory and Andreas Papandreou became prime minister. The party repeated this success in the elections of June 1985. Papandreou never fully delivered on all his promises, but when it came to the bases, he did: there are only two small detachments of U.S. Air Force and Navy technical personnel left in Greece, both on Greek military bases.

THE PHILIPPINE BASES

The Spanish-American War created the Philippine bases, and the outcome of the Vietnam War started a process that in 1992 brought them to an end. America’s almost century-long record in the Philippines is one of colonialism, neocolonialism, and sponsorship of a hated dictator, which ultimately led to a successful anti-American revolution. The Philippine case is comparable to what happened in Greece except that the bases had been in existence for a much longer time and we took the Filipinos even more for granted than we did the Greeks. In 1946, at the same time that our government gave the Philippines their “independence,” it took measures to ensure that the islands remained indefinitely under our control. The Philippines were severely damaged during World War II and desperately in need of economic assistance; the new Philippine government had little choice but to accept the strings attached to the grant of independence. The resulting neocolonial system proved even more unfavorable to the Philippines than colonialism itself, crippling their capacity for democratic development for forty years—until the revolution of February 1986 drove Ferdinand Marcos from power and led to the closing of all U.S. military bases.

Three American initiatives in 1946 and 1947 rendered Philippine independence virtually meaningless. These were the Bell Act of 1946; the Military Bases Agreement of March 14, 1947; and the Military Assistance Pact of March 21, 1947. The Bell Act forced the Filipinos to modify their 1935 constitution, which stipulated that all corporations in the Philippines be 60 percent owned by Filipinos. It demanded “parity,” meaning that Americans would have the same rights and privileges as Filipinos to possess and exploit Philippine companies. It established “free trade” between the two countries for ten years, thereby eliminating the Philippines’ capacity to control American imports. It also allowed Americans to own and operate public utilities in the country. The effect was to tie the Philippines, in the words of journalist William J. Pomeroy, “to the old colonial trade pattern of being a supplier of raw agricultural products and mineral ores to the United States in exchange for U.S. manufactured goods.”²⁹ The Bell Act effectively prevented industrialization in the islands despite abundant supplies of coal, iron ore, alloy metals, hydroelectric power, and a large labor force. To this day, the Philippines resemble Okinawa far more than they do Taiwan, which has become one of the richest and most industrialized nations in East Asia. Taiwan is an example of what Okinawa and the Philippines might have become had the United States not played a neocolonial role.

The United States made all payments to the Philippines for war damages dependent on the Filipinos’ acceptance of the Bell Act. A majority of the Philippine Congress deeply opposed a constitutional amendment granting parity, but the Americans and their local supporters worked behind the scenes to get eight representatives and three senators expelled for alleged fraud and terrorism, thereby achieving—by subtraction—the minimum number of votes needed to pass it.

Three days after amending the constitution, the Philippine government signed a military bases agreement giving the United States ninety-nine-year leases to twenty-three sites, sixteen active and seven held in reserve. The agreement authorized the United States to use these bases as it saw fit. Since Filipino public land laws specify that government leases cannot be longer than twenty-five years, the terms of the bases agreement immediately set off a popular protest movement. Successive American administrations stalled for nineteen years, until in 1966, the Johnson administration traded a new twenty-five-year lease agreement for Manila’s willingness to send a military contingent to Vietnam. The two most important installations were Clark Air Force Base, second in size only to Vandenberg in California, and Subic Bay, the Seventh Fleet’s main operational and repair facility in the western Pacific. Clark Field sprawled over ten thousand acres, larger than Singapore, and was enclosed by a twenty-two-mile security fence. The right to go through its garbage gave rise to two new villages, named appropriately after two Philippine presidents, Macapagal and Marcos. On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo volcano, located ten miles away, erupted for the first time in six hundred years, covering the air field in ash and rendering it a total loss. Leases to the deep-water bay and drydock facilities at Subic Bay were thus the main points of contention in the final 1991 Philippine-American base negotiations.

A week after the original 1947 base agreement was signed, the Philippine government entered into still another treaty, the Military Assistance Pact, which established a Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) in Manila. This organization, composed of American military officers, was authorized “to assist and advise the Republic of the Philippines on military and naval matters,” including supplying the Philippine army with weapons and ammunition, and so essentially reestablished a military overlordship like that of the colonial era. On August 30, 1951, the United States and the Philippines signed a Mutual Defense Treaty (although there was nothing “mutual” about it), and on September 8, 1954, the United States, the Philippines, and other nations signed a treaty establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Both treaties turned effective control of the Philippine armed forces over to the United States via the JUSMAG, which with the CIA’s help handpicked a former army captain and ruling party congressman, Ramón Magsaysay, as a compliant secretary of national defense. In 1953, he became the third president of the Republic of the Philippines. With the United States now in control of the Philippine economy and military, and our own military properties secure, we were able to dictate huge military budgets that the Philippines could ill afford and to involve their armed forces in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. The Philippine bases became critical staging areas for the American war in Vietnam, and the United States also used its installations on Luzon to carry out CIA plots against Indonesia in 1958 and 1965.

In November 1965, Ferdinand Marcos, a Manila trial lawyer, was elected president. At first, he seemed a dynamic leader devoted to public works and intent on moving the rigged Philippine economy toward greater development. In November 1969, he won a second four-year term, the first president to be reelected in the Philippines’ short democratic history. But Marcos was interested primarily in lining his own pockets—his biographers all point out that he is in The Guinness Book of Records as the greatest thief of all time—and in the late 1960s the quality of Philippine life began to deteriorate in a serious way. Inspired by the Vietnamese liberation fighters and Chinese propaganda about “people’s war,” guerrilla insurgencies broke out throughout the main islands. Some were led by the New People’s Army (NPA), the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines. On the southern island of Mindanao, Muslim secessionists organized under the banner of the Moro National Liberation Front. In August 1969, Marcos launched major military campaigns against both the NPA and the Moros.

By 1972 the situation had so worsened that Marcos faked an assassination attempt against his defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, in order to have an excuse to declare martial law. He then arrested and detained opposition politicians (including his likely successor, Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino), reporters, students, and labor leaders. He closed newspapers and outlawed demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. Assuming dictatorial powers, Marcos suspended the constitution, which permitted presidents only two terms, and in 1973, he introduced a new constitution that allowed him to stay in office indefinitely and to rule by decree. He made his wife, Imelda, governor of Manila and minister of “human settlements and ecology.”

None of this occurred in a vacuum. As Alva Bowen, a career U.S. naval officer and researcher for the Congressional Reference Service, has acknowledged, “By 1975 the United States had been kicked out of Vietnam, and all the countries of Southeast Asia were taking another look at their security arrangements. The Philippines was one of the first to ask for a review of the security treaties. In 1975, just a few months after the U.S. departure from Saigon, President Gerald Ford visited the Philippines and came to an agreement with President Ferdinand Marcos that the 1947 accord on the U.S. use of the Philippine military bases would be revised, this time with a clear recognition of Philippine sovereignty.”³⁰

The Ford-Marcos agreement represented a slight improvement but the old problems still festered. Conditions around Clark Field and Subic Bay inflamed Filipino nationalism. The bases had given rise to a huge drug and sex industry employing thousands of poor Filipino women. Angeles City, home of Clark Field, was in the 1980s the most drug-afflicted city in the Philippines. Meanwhile, under martial law Marcos vastly expanded and politicized his own military establishment, appointing cronies who were personally loyal to him and giving the army unrestricted powers to arrest civilians. “Disappearances” and murders of anyone taking an interest in politics became common. Marcos also nationalized many manufacturing and business enterprises and gave them to his relatives. They proceeded to siphon off profits for their personal enrichment while the United States looked on with a blind eye.

In 1983, after three years in exile, the opposition politician Benigno Aquino returned to the Philippines to try to rally opposition to the Marcos regime. Minutes after landing at Manila airport on August 21, he was shot dead and his assassin, in turn, was shot and killed on the spot. Marcos claimed a Communist had been responsible for the murder, but a subsequent official commission of inquiry found that it was the work of a military conspiracy. Marcos rejected this finding and released the conspirators. Aquino’s widow, Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, became the leader of the opposition, as hundreds of thousands of people attended her husband’s funeral procession in Manila. It was the largest demonstration in the history of the Philippines and the beginning of a movement that would be dubbed “People Power.” Filipino People Power was never as explicitly anti-American as the Iranian version against the Shah or the Papandreou campaign against the Greek junta, but the presence of our bases and Washington’s blatant support for Marcos certainly helped mobilize the public.

In late 1985, in an attempt to acquire greater legitimacy and ensure continued American support, Marcos announced that a presidential election would be held in February 1986. Corazon Aquino declared her candidacy. After the balloting, the Catholic Church, in the person of Cardinal Jaime Sin, denounced Marcos for widespread voter fraud and intimidation and challenged his claim to victory. The Reagan administration agonized over its friend’s difficulties and vacillated about recognizing the validity of Corazon Aquino’s election. In the meantime, in the face of continuous street demonstrations against Marcos, the Philippine armed forces abandoned him, either supporting the Aquino forces or refusing to act when ordered to fire on unarmed protesters.³¹

On February 25, 1986, after over twenty years in power, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled Malacañang Palace for Clark Air Force Base and then exile in the United States. When he arrived in Hawaii, Marcos was reportedly carrying suitcases containing jewels, gold bars, and certificates for billions of dollars’ worth of gold bullion. Aquino’s successor government estimated that Marcos had stashed away at least $3 billion in Swiss bank accounts, but some analysts put the figure as high as $35 billion. None of this money was ever recovered. Marcos died in Honolulu on September 28, 1989.

On February 2, 1987, the Filipino public overwhelmingly ratified a new national constitution. Its article 2, entitled “Declaration of Principles and State Policies,” started a process that led to the termination of the bases agreement with the United States. Sections 2 and 3 read as follows: “The Philippines renounces war as an instrument of national policy, adopts the generally accepted principles of international law as part of the law of the land and adheres to the policy of peace, equality, justice, freedom, cooperation, and amity with all nations. Civilian authority is, at all times, supreme over the military. The armed forces of the Philippines is the protector of the people and the State. Its goal is to secure the sovereignty of the State and the integrity of the national territory.” All Filipinos believed the United States kept atomic weapons ready for use at Subic and Clark. Section 8 of the state policies was the death knell for the bases: “The Philippines, consistent with the national interest, adopts and pursues a policy of freedom from nuclear weapons in its territory.” On June 6, 1988, by a vote of nineteen yes, three no, and one abstention, the Philippine Senate passed the Freedom from Nuclear Weapons Act, implementing the constitutional mandate. The government of the Philippines now had something serious to talk about when the leases on the bases expired in 1991.

Totally misreading the post-Marcos political climate, the American negotiators badly bungled their attempt to extend the base leases. According to Roland G. Simbulan of the University of the Philippines, an adviser to the Philippine Senate, the United States “tried to bully its way through. Former Health Secretary Alfredo Bengzon, who served as vice chairman of the Philippine negotiating panel, later confirmed in a published article the ‘narrow and arrogant mindset of the U.S. negotiators, led by [Richard] Armitage during the negotiations. They tried to force a prolonged treaty of extension,’ Bengzon said.”³² Armitage, President George H. W. Bush’s special representative for the Philippine military bases agreement, was a former CIA official. (He would later become deputy secretary of state in the Bush Junior administration.)

The Americans believed that the Filipinos were too poor to evict them and that conservatives in the Philippine Senate would support them. However, after Mount Pinatubo destroyed Clark air base, the United States cut its offer of assistance to the Philippines from about $700 million to $203 million; and on September 16, 1991, irritated by America’s tight-fistedness and its refusal to undertake a cleanup of the pollution at Clark Field, the Philippine Senate, by a vote of twelve to eleven, rejected the proposed renewal of the 1947 bases agreement.³³ Although the event was barely noted in the United States, all its military forces were completely withdrawn by November 24, 1992.

Since its expulsion, the United States has tried various stratagems to reintroduce its forces into the Philippines, always offering much-needed hard currency as an inducement. Early in 2002, we sent about a thousand Special Forces and supporting troops to help Filipinos fight the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim “terrorist gang” on the southern island of Basilan with a record of kidnapping and extortion but not of political terrorism.³⁴ The main U.S. goal in the Philippines has been to negotiate a “Mutual Logistics Support Agreement” that would allow us access to Philippine bases for refueling, reprovisioning, and repairing ships without a case-by-case debate. On August 3,2002, in Manila, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that “the United States is not interested in returning to the Philippines with bases or a permanent presence,” but it is unlikely that there was a single person in East Asia who believed him.³⁵ On February 20,2003, the Pentagon announced that it was sending a new contingent of nearly 2,000 troops to the Philippines in an operation against “terrorists” that “has no fixed deadline.”³⁶

FROM WAR TO IMPERIALISM

As the American empire grows, we go to war significantly more frequently than we did before and during the Cold War. Wars, in turn, promote the growth of the military and are a great advertising medium for the power and effectiveness of our weapons—and the companies that make them, which can then more easily peddle them to others. According to the journalist William Greider, “The U.S. volume [of arms sales] represents 44 percent of the global market, more than double America’s market share in 1990 when the Soviet Union was the leading exporter of arms.”³⁷ As the military-industrial complex gets ever fatter, with more overcapacity, it must be “fed” ever more often. The creation of new bases requires more new bases to protect the ones already established, producing ever-tighter cycles of militarism, wars, arms sales, and base expansions.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we began to wage at an accelerating rate wars whose publicly stated purposes were increasingly deceptive or unpersuasive. We were also ever more willing to go to war outside the framework of international law and in the face of worldwide popular opposition. These were de facto imperialist wars, defended by propaganda claims of humanitarian intervention, women’s liberation, the threat posed by unconventional weapons, or whatever current buzzword happened to occur to White House and Pentagon spokespersons. In each war we acquired major new military bases that in terms of location or scale were disproportionate to the military tasks required and that we retained and consolidated after the war. After the attacks of September 11,2001, we waged two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and acquired fourteen new bases, in Eastern Europe, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. It was said that these wars were a response to the terrorist attacks and would lessen our vulnerability to terrorism in the future. But it seems more likely that the new bases and other American targets of vulnerability will be subject to continued or increased terrorist strikes.

Following our usual practice, we established our bases in weak states, most of which have undemocratic and repressive governments. Immediately after our victory in the second Iraq war, we began to scale back our deployments in Germany, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, where we had become much more unpopular as a result of the war. Instead, we shifted our forces and garrisons to thinly populated, less demanding monarchies or autocracies/dictatorships, places like Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.³⁸

A new picture of our empire has begun to emerge. We retain our centuries-old lock on Latin America and our close collaboration with the single-party government of Japan, although we are deeply disliked in Okinawa and South Korea, where the situation is increasingly volatile. Our lack of legitimacy in the war with Iraq has undercut our position in what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld disparagingly called “the old Europe,” so we are trying to compensate by finding allies and building bases in the much poorer, still struggling ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe. In the oil-rich area of southern Eurasia we are building outposts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, in an attempt to bring the whole region under American hegemony. Iran alone, thus far, has been impervious to our efforts. We did not do any of these things to fight terrorism, liberate Iraq, trigger a domino effect for the democratization of the Middle East, or the other excuses proffered by our leaders. We did them, as I will show, because of oil, Israel, and domestic politics—and to fulfill our self-perceived destiny as a New Rome. The next chapter takes up American imperialism on the current battleground of global power, the Persian Gulf, a region where we have a long history.

PERSIAN GULF