Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

4

U.S. Military Bases in Other People’s Countries

The basing posture of the United States, particularly its overseas basing, is the skeleton of national security upon which flesh and muscle will be molded to enable us to protect our national interests and the interests of our allies, not just today, but for decades to come.

—COMMISSION ON REVIEW OF OVERSEAS MILITARY FACILITY STRUCTURE,

Report to the President and Congress, May 9, 2005

9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests “over there” should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America “over here.” In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet.

—The 9/11 Commission Report,

Authorized Edition (2004)

Wherever there’s evil, we want to go there and fight it.

—GENERAL CHARLES WALD, deputy commander

of the U.S.’s European Command, June 2003

If you dream that everyone might be your enemy, one day they may become just that.

—NICK COHEN,

Observer, April 7, 2002

Five times since 1988, the Pentagon has maddened numerous communities in the American body politic over an issue that vividly reveals the grip of militarism in our democracy—domestic base closings. When the high command publishes its lists of military installations that it no longer needs or wants, the announcement invariably sets off panic-stricken lamentations among politicians of both parties, local government leaders, television pundits, preachers, and the business and labor communities of the places where military facilities are to be shut down. All of them plead “save our base.” In imperial America, garrison closings are the political equivalents of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or category five hurricanes.¹

The military, financial, and strategic logic of closing redundant military facilities is inarguable, particularly when some of them date back to the Civil War and others are devoted to weapons systems such as Trident-missile-armed nuclear submarines that are useless in the post-Cold War world. At least in theory, there is a way that this local dependence on “military Keynesianism”—the artificial stimulation of economic demand through military expenditures—could be mitigated. The United States might begin to cut back its global imperium of military bases and relocate them in the home country.

After all, foreign military bases are designed for offense, whereas a domestically based military establishment would be intended for defense.² The fact that the Department of Defense regularly goes through the elaborate procedures to close domestic bases but continues to expand its network of overseas ones reveals how little interested the military is in actually protecting the country and how devoted to what it calls “full spectrum dominance” over the planet.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial “footprint” and the militarism that grows with it. It is not easy, however, to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records available to the public on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department’s annual inventories from 2002 to 2005 of real property it owns around the world, the Base Structure Report, there has been an immense churning in the numbers of installations. The total of America’s military bases in other people’s countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit of President Bush’s strategy of preemptive war, the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues to go up (see table 1).

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets—almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia.³ Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

TABLE 1 NUMBERS OF AMERICAN MILITARY BASES IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES BY SIZE AND MILITARY SERVICE

Using data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion—surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries— and an estimated $658.1 billion for all of them, foreign and domestic (a base’s “worth” is based on a Department of Defense estimate of what it would cost to replace it). During fiscal 2005, the military high command deployed to our overseas bases some 196,975 uniformed personnel as well as an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,425 locally hired foreigners. The worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, was 1,840,062 supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 local hires. Its overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it leased. The size of these holdings was recorded in the inventory as covering 687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres worldwide, making the Pentagon easily one of the world’s largest landlords.⁴

These numbers, although staggeringly big, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2005 Base Structure Report fails, for instance, to mention any garrisons in Kosovo (or Serbia, of which Kosovo is still officially a province)—even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained ever since by the KBR corporation (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root), a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston. The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May 2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian areas since 9/11. By way of excuse, a note in the preface says that “facilities provided by other nations at foreign locations” are not included, although this is not strictly true. The report does include twenty sites in Turkey, all owned by the Turkish government and used jointly with the Americans.⁵ The Pentagon continues to omit from its accounts most of the $5 billion worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no one—possibly not even the Pentagon— knows the exact number for sure.

In some cases, foreign countries themselves have tried to keep their U.S. bases secret, fearing embarrassment if their collusion with American imperialism were revealed. In other instances, the Pentagon seems to want to play down the building of facilities aimed at dominating energy sources, or, in a related situation, retaining a network of bases that would keep Iraq under our hegemony regardless of the wishes of any future Iraqi government. The U.S. government tries not to divulge any information about the bases we use to eavesdrop on global communications, or our nuclear deployments, which, as William Arkin, an authority on the subject, writes, “[have] violated its treaty obligations. The U.S. was lying to many of its closest allies, even in NATO, about its nuclear designs. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases, and dozens of ships and submarines existed in a special secret world of their own with no rational military or even ‘deterrence’ justification.”⁶

In Jordan, to take but one example, we have secretly deployed up to five thousand troops in bases on the Iraqi and Syrian borders. (Jordan has also cooperated with the CIA in torturing prisoners we deliver to them for “interrogation”) Nonetheless, Jordan continues to stress that it has no special arrangements with the United States, no bases, and no American military presence.⁷ The country is formally sovereign but actually a satellite of the United States and has been so for at least the past ten years. Similarly, before our withdrawal from Saudi Arabia in 2003, we habitually denied that we maintained a fleet of enormous and easily observed B-52 bombers in Jeddah because that was what the Saudi government demanded. So long as military bureaucrats can continue to enforce a culture of secrecy to protect themselves, no one will know the true size of our baseworld, least of all the elected representatives of the American people.

In 2005, deployments at home and abroad were in a state of considerable flux. This was said to be caused both by a long overdue change in the strategy for maintaining our global dominance and by the closing of surplus bases at home. In reality, many of the changes seemed to be determined largely by the Bush administration s urge to punish nations and domestic states that had not supported its efforts in Iraq and to reward those that had. Thus, within the United States, bases were being relocated to the South, to states with cultures, as the Christian Science Monitor put it, “more tied to martial traditions” than the Northeast, the northern Middle West, or the Pacific Coast. According to a North Carolina businessman gloating over his new customers, “The military is going where it is wanted and valued most “⁸

In part, the realignment revolved around the Pentagons decision to bring home by 2007 or 2008 two army divisions from Germany—the First Armored Division and the First Infantry Division—and one brigade (3,500 men) of the Second Infantry Division from South Korea (which, in 2005, was officially rehoused at Fort Carson, Colorado). So long as the Iraq insurgency continues, the forces involved are mostly overseas and the facilities at home are not ready for them (nor is there enough money budgeted to get them ready). Nonetheless, sooner or later, up to 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members will have to be accommodated within the United States. The attendant 2005 “base closings” in the United States are actually a base consolidation and enlargement program with tremendous infusions of money and customers going to a few selected hub areas. At the same time, what sounds like a retrenchment in the empire abroad is really proving to be an exponential growth in new types of bases—without dependents and the amenities they would require—in very remote areas where the U.S. military has never been before.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was obvious to anyone who thought about it that the huge concentrations of American military might in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea were no longer needed to meet possible military threats. There were not going to be future wars with the Soviet Union or any country connected to any of those places. In 1991, the first Bush administration should have begun decommissioning or redeploying redundant forces; and, in fact, the Clinton administration did close some bases in Germany, such as those protecting the Fulda Gap, once envisioned as the likeliest route for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But nothing was really done in those years to plan for the strategic repositioning of the American military outside the United States.

By the end of the 1990s, the neoconservatives were developing their grandiose theories to promote overt imperialism by the “lone superpower”—including preventive and preemptive unilateral military action, spreading democracy abroad at the point of a gun, obstructing the rise of any “near-peer” country or bloc of countries that might challenge U.S. military supremacy, and a vision of a “democratic” Middle East that would supply us with all the oil we wanted. A component of their grand design was a redeployment and streamlining of the military. The initial rationale was for a program of transformation that would turn the armed forces into a lighter, more agile, more high-tech military, which, it was imagined, would free up funds that could be invested in imperial policing. What came to be known as “defense transformation” first began to be publicly bandied about during the 2000 presidential election campaign.

Then 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq intervened. In August 2002, when the whole neocon program began to be put into action, it centered above all on a quick, easy war to incorporate Iraq into the empire. By this time, civilian leaders in the Pentagon had become dangerously overconfident because of what they perceived as America’s military brilliance and invincibility as demonstrated in its 2001 campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda—a strategy that involved reigniting the Afghan civil war through huge payoffs to Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance warlords and the massive use of American airpower to support their advance on Kabul.

In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unveiled his “1-4-2-1 defense strategy” to replace the Clinton era’s plan for having a military capable of fighting two wars—in the Middle East and Northeast Asia—simultaneously. Now, war planners were to prepare to defend the United States while building and assembling forces capable of “deterring aggression and coercion” in four “critical regions”: Europe, Northeast Asia (South Korea and Japan), East Asia (the Taiwan Strait), and the Middle East, be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and “win decisively” (in the sense of “regime change” and occupation) in one of those conflicts “at a time and place of our choosing.” As the military analyst William M. Arkin commented, “[With] American military forces .. . already stretched to the limit, the new strategy goes far beyond preparing for reactive contingencies and reads more like a plan for picking fights in new parts of the world.”⁹

A seemingly easy three-week victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the spring of 2003 only reconfirmed these plans. The U.S. military was now thought to be so magnificent that it could accomplish any task assigned to it. The collapse of the Baathist regime in Baghdad also emboldened Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to use “transformation” to penalize nations that had been, at best, lukewarm about America’s unilateralism—Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Turkey—and to reward those whose leaders had welcomed Operation Iraqi Freedom, including such old allies as Japan and Italy but also former communist countries such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. The result was the Department of Defense’s Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy, known informally as the “Global Posture Review.”¹⁰ President Bush first mentioned it in a statement on November 21, 2003, in which he pledged to “realign the global posture” of the United States. He reiterated the phrase and elaborated on it on August 16, 2004, in a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati.

Because Bush’s Cincinnati address was part of the 2004 presidential election campaign, his comments were not taken very seriously at the time. While he did say that the United States would reduce its troop strength in Europe and Asia by 60,000 to 70,000, he assured his listeners that this would take a decade to accomplish—well beyond his term in office—and made a series of promises that sounded more like a reenlistment pitch than a statement of strategy. “Over the coming decade, we’ll deploy a more agile and more flexible force, which means that more of our troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home. We’ll move some of our troops and capabilities to new locations, so they can surge quickly to deal with unexpected threats.... It will reduce the stress on our troops and our military families. . . . See, our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career. Our military spouses will have fewer job changes, greater stability, more time for their kids and to spend with their families at home.”¹¹

On September 23, 2004, however, Secretary Rumsfeld disclosed the first concrete details of the plan to the Senate Armed Services Committee.¹² With characteristic grandiosity, he described it as “the biggest re-structuring of America’s global forces since 1945.” Quoting then undersecretary Douglas Feith, he added, “During the Cold War we had a strong sense that we knew where the major risks and fights were going to be, so we could deploy people right there. We’re operating now [with] an entirely different concept. We need to be able to do [the] whole range of military operations, from combat to peacekeeping, anywhere in the world pretty quickly.”¹³

Though this may sound plausible enough, in basing terms it opens up a vast landscape of diplomatic and bureaucratic minefields that Rumsfeld’s militarists surely underestimated. In order to expand into new areas, the Departments of State and Defense must negotiate with the host countries such things as Status of Forces Agreements, or SOFAs, which are discussed in detail in the next chapter. In addition, they must conclude many other required protocols, such as access rights for our aircraft and ships into foreign territory and airspace, and Article 98 Agreements. The latter refer to article 98 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, which allows countries to exempt U.S. citizens on their territory from the ICC’s jurisdiction. Such immunity agreements were congressionally mandated by the American Service-Members’ Protection Act of 2002, even though the European Union holds that they are illegal. Still other necessary accords are acquisitions and cross-servicing agreements or ACSAs, which concern the supply and storage of jet fuel, ammunition, and so forth; terms of leases on real property; levels of bilateral political and economic aid to the United States (so-called host-nation support); training and exercise arrangements (Are night landings allowed? Live firing drills?); and environmental pollution liabilities. When the United States is not present in a country as its conqueror or military savior, as it was in Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II and in South Korea after the 1953 Korean War armistice, it is much more difficult to secure the kinds of agreements that allow the Pentagon to do anything it wants and that cause a host nation to pick up a large part of the costs of doing so. When not based on conquest, the structure of the American empire of bases comes to look exceedingly fragile.

In its Global Posture Review, the Pentagon now divides its military installations into three types. First are Main Operating Bases (MOBs), which have permanently stationed combat forces, extensive infrastructure (barracks, runways, hangars, port facilities, ammunition dumps), command and control headquarters, and accommodations for families (housing, schools, hospitals, and recreational conveniences). Examples include Ramstein Air Base in Germany (with a 2005 plant replacement value of $3.4 billion and 10,744 uniformed troops and Department of Defense civilians in residence); Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan (with a PRV of $4.7 billion and 9,693 personnel); Aviano Air Base in Italy (with a PRV of $807.5 million and 4,786 personnel); and the Yongsan Garrison, in Seoul, South Korea (with a PRV of $1.3 billion and 12,178 personnel), soon to be replaced by Camp Humphreys, located farther south in Korea and so out of missile range of North Korea (with a PRV of $954.3 million and 5,622 personnel).

These bases are often known colloquially as “little Americas,” but the culture they replicate is not that of mainstream America but rather places like South Dakota, Gulf Coast Mississippi, and Las Vegas. For example, even though more than one hundred thousand women live on our overseas bases, including women in the services, spouses, and relatives of military personnel, obtaining an abortion—a constitutionally protected right of American citizens—is prohibited in military hospitals. Since some fourteen thousand sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults are reported in the military each year, women who become pregnant overseas and want an abortion have no choice but to try the local services, which cannot be either easy or pleasant in parts of our empire these days. Sometimes they must fly home at their own expense.¹⁴

Another difference between the bases abroad and those at home is the presence of military-owned slot machines in officers’ clubs, bowling alleys, and activities centers at overseas facilities. The military takes in more than $120 million per year on a total slot machine cash flow of about $2 billion. According to Diana B. Henriques of the New York Times, “Slot machines have been a fixture of military life for decades. They were banned from domestic military bases in 1951, after a series of scandals. They were removed from Army and Air Force bases in 1972, after more than a dozen people were court martialed for skimming cash from slot machines in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War... . Today, there are approximately 4,150 modern video slot machines at military bases in nine countries.”¹⁵ For example, the enlisted club at Ramstein Air Base is loaded with them. The result has been a serious rise in compulsive gambling and family bankruptcies among our forces deployed abroad.

The second type of overseas bases are called Forward Operation Sites (FOSs). These are major military installations whose importance the Pentagon goes out of its way to play down. Knowing full well that many foreigners see American military facilities as permanent imperialist enclaves, Rumsfeld has said, “We’re trying to find the right phraseology. We know the word ‘base’ is not right for what we do.”¹⁶ Essentially FOSs are smaller MOBs, except that families are not allowed and the troops are supposed to be rotated in and out on six-month, not three-year, tours as at the larger installations.

Examples are the Sembawang port facility in Singapore for our visiting aircraft carriers (with a PRV of $115.9 million and 173 personnel) and Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, unlisted in the 2005 Base Structure Reportbut one of the U.S. Southern Command’s main operational centers for exercising hegemony over Latin America. Other examples are the British-owned Diego Garcia naval and air base in the Indian Ocean where B-2 bombers are stationed (with a PRV of $2.3 billion and 521 personnel); the thirty-seven-acre Manas Air Base near Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, with facilities for 3,000 troops and a 13,800-foot runway originally built for Soviet bombers; and the former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, known as Camp Lemonier, housing 1,800 mostly Special Forces troops. (In 1962, I visited Djibouti when it was still a Foreign Legion base. It was a hellhole then and, according to American GIs, still is. Today, it contains a “Sensitized Compartmentalized Information Facility”—a billion-dollar civil-military eavesdropping and intelligence center.)¹⁷ In the past, these kinds of bases have usually ended up as permanent enclaves of the United States regardless of what the Defense Department calls them.

The third type of overseas base is the smallest and most austere. The Pentagon has termed these Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs), failing to specify in what sense they are “cooperative” or to whose security they contribute. In Defense Department jargon these are the new “lily pads” that we are trying to establish all over the globe’s “arc of instability,” which is said to run from the Andean region of South America through North Africa and then sweep across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. In a May 2005 report, the Overseas Basing Commission defines this arc as containing “more than its fair share of ethnic strife, religious and ideological fanaticism, failed governments, and—above all— antipathy and hatred toward the West in general and the United States in particular.”¹⁸ Why this would make it an ideal place to expand our military presence, other than the fact that it is congruent with many of the oil-producing states of the world, is not made clear.

These “lily pad” facilities contain prepositioned weapons and munitions (running the risk of theft or appropriation for other purposes) to which U.S. access has already been negotiated, but they are to have little or no permanent U.S. presence, except in times of emergency. These are places to which our troops could jump like so many well-armed frogs from the homeland or our major bases elsewhere. Lily pad facilities now exist in Dakar, Senegal, for example, where the air force has negotiated contingency landing rights, logistics, and fuel-contracting arrangements. In 2003, it served as a staging area for our small-scale intervention in the Liberian civil war.

Other lily pads are located in Ghana, Gabon, Chad, Niger, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, Mauritania, Mali, and at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda as well as on the islands of Aruba and Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles near Venezuela.¹⁹ Lily pads are under construction in Pakistan (where we already have four larger bases), India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia; and in North Africa, in Morocco, Tunisia, and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some one hundred thousand civilians since 1992, when the military took over, backed by our country and France, to quash an election). Six are planned for Poland.²⁰

The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such antidemocratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, even though most of these are actually too large to be thought of as “lily pads.”²¹ Mark Sappen-field of the Christian Science Monitor has observed, “The goal... is to cement as many agreements as possible across the world, so that if one country changes course and denies the United States access, the Pentagon will have other options near at hand. But the new course will call on Pentagon leaders to be statesmen as well as military strategists.”²²

Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the unofficial Washington headquarters for the neocons, explain how the new structure of MOBs, FOSs, and CSLs is supposed to function. Invoking American Wild West imagery, they cheerfully assert, “Transformation involves a world’s worth of new missions for the U.S. military, which is fast becoming the global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century. Among the many components in this transformation is the radical overhaul of America’s overseas force structure, which seeks to create a worldwide network of frontier forts.. . . The preeminent mission of the U.S. military is no longer the containment of the Soviet Union, but the preemption of terrorism.. . . Like the cavalry of the old west, [the armed forces’] job is one part warrior and one part policeman—both of which are entirely within the tradition of the American military. . . . The realignment of our network of overseas bases into a system of frontier stockades is necessary to win a long-term struggle against an amorphous enemy across the arc of instability.”²³

Aware that Germans are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the way the U.S. military is damaging the environment around its bases and its refusal to clean up its messes, the AEI recommends building more “frontier stockades” in the poorer countries that Donald Rumsfeld so famously termed “the New Europe”—Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania, in particular—because of their “more permissive environmental regulations.” The Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys our troops Status of Forces Agreements, which usually exempt the United States from cleaning up or paying for the environmental damage it causes. Part of this attitude, however, simply reflects the desire of the Pentagon to put itself beyond any of the restraints that govern civilian life anywhere, an arrogance increasingly at play in the “homeland” as well. For example, the 2004 defense authorization bill exempts the military from abiding by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, even though both already contain possible exemptions for genuine national security needs.

The Pentagon s grand scheme has many critics, some of whom it did not anticipate because it has become so accustomed to having its own way with the budget and with Congress. In the Department of Defense’s report to Congress, Strengthening U.S. Global Defense Posture, Undersecretary Feith started a small homeland firestorm by explicitly writing, “Global defense posture changes will have direct implications for the forthcoming [2005] round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC): some personnel and assets will return to the United States; others will move to forward U.S. locations or to host nations. Both efforts—global posture changes and BRAC—are critical components of President Bush’s defense transformation agenda.” This was something he might well have left unsaid, since nothing more quickly catches the eye of politicians than closing domestic military bases and so putting their constituents out of work.

In a preemptive strike to protect bases in their respective states, the two mother hens of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee—Chairperson Kay Bailey Hutchison (Republican from Texas) and ranking minority member Dianne Feinstein (Democrat from California)—promptly demanded that the Pentagon close overseas bases first, bringing the troops stationed there home to domestic bases, which could then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein also included in the Military Construction Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission to investigate and report on overseas bases that were no longer needed.²⁴ Secretary Rumsfeld opposed this provision but it passed anyway and was signed into law by the president on November 22, 2003. The commission did its work quite thoroughly and revealed itself as rather more expert and realistic on overseas bases than the undersecretary of defense for policy. Its May 2005 report on the overseas basing structure is harshly critical of sloppy work at the Pentagon, particularly with regard to base construction and accounting for the funds it spends, something unusual in our “imperial presidential” system.

Most Americans do not know that some “host nations” for our military bases abroad pay large sums to the United States to support our presence in their countries. Somewhat like the Romans of old, who taxed their colonies mercilessly, the Americans have added a modern basing twist to military imperialism. They have convinced sovereign nations in which our bases are located that they have an obligation to help pay for them in order to deter our common enemies. This is called “burden sharing.” Japan spends by far the largest amount of any nation—$4.4 billion in 2002—and every year tries to get its share cut. Perhaps whenever Japan finally succeeds in lowering its “host nation support,” the Pentagon will start moving our troops and airmen out of the numerous unneeded locations there. Until then, however, Japan’s American outposts are too lucrative and comfortable for the Pentagon to contemplate relocating them. On a per capita basis, the small but rich emirates of the Persian Gulf are the biggest spenders on this form of protection money. Bahrain pays a total of $53.4 million, Kuwait $252.98 million, Qatar $81.3 million, and the United Arab Emirates $217.4 million.²⁵

The Overseas Basing Commission noted that Germany paid $1.6 billion in 2002 dollars for its U.S. bases, Spain $127.6 million, Turkey $116.8 million, and the Republic of Korea $842.8 million. Yet these are the key nations the Pentagon wants to punish for their lack of cooperation on Iraq. If the United States actually brings its troops home, the host-nation support will have to come from the U.S. taxpayer. The commission also notes laconically that the “extent to which host-nation funding would be available to support new basing requirements in any countries not currently hosting U.S. forces remains to be seen.”²⁶ In addition, it concluded that the Pentagon was wildly unrealistic in estimating the costs of reshuffling our empire. “The secretary of defense has stated that no extra funds will be asked for in the budget process to pay for the implementation of the Global Posture Review. . . . DoD [Department of Defense] has estimated the implementation of the Global Posture strategy to be between $9 billion and $12 billion with only about $4 billion currently budgeted from fiscal years 2006 through 2011.”²⁷ As a result of its tours of overseas bases and a careful recalculation of construction costs, the commission estimated that Rumsfeld’s repositioning plan would actually cost closer to $20 billion.²⁸

Other criticisms of the Global Posture Review center on the intangible relationships that form the bedrock of the American military empire and the distinct possibility that the Pentagon will irretrievably damage them. The international relations commentator William Pfaff predicted, “For every foreign intrusion into a country, particularly one so dramatic as establishing a military base, a nationalist reaction can be expected.... Expanding the base system encourages Washington’s tendency to apply irrelevant military remedies to terrorism, as well as to political problems.”²⁹

Exactly what Pfaff feared happened in Uzbekistan in the summer of 2005. In 2001, the Uzbek government had granted the United States use of the Karshi-Khanabad base, an old Soviet airfield close to the Afghan border in southeastern Uzbekistan (known to the Pentagon officially as “Camp Stronghold Freedom” and unofficially as “K-2”).³⁰ Uzbekistan was the first of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia to agree to help the United States after 9/11. Heavy use was then made of the facility to support Special Forces operations in Afghanistan and to fly intelligence and reconnaissance missions over that country. About 800 U.S. military personnel were deployed at K-2, which was a typical American “foreign operating site.” In 2004, the United States spent $4.6 billion on military equipment for Uzbekistan and more than $90 million on so-called International Military Education and Training for Uzbek forces. The other main American base in Central Asia, at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, was not as useful as Karshi-Khanabad for ongoing military operations because Kyrgyzstan does not have a common border with Afghanistan. The only alternative, building a base in adjoining Tajikistan, where the United States has permission for emergency landings and occasional refueling, is less attractive due to the lack of good roads into Afghanistan.³¹

Since the breakup of the USSR in 1991, however, Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, has presided over one of the harshest dictatorships in the world. The Bush administration made use of this reality for a while. The capital Tashkent became a regular delivery point for CIA renditions, thanks to the well-established reputation Karimov s regime has for torturing prisoners. In 2003, Britain recalled its ambassador Craig Murray after he publicly denounced Uzbekistan’s abysmal human rights record. Murray disclosed that the Uzbek government’s specialty for prisoners kidnapped by the CIA was boiling them alive. The ambassador’s deputy, sent to talk to the CIA’s Tashkent station chief about this, was told, “The CIA doesn’t see this as a problem.” The Pentagon took the view that “Uzbekistan has been a good partner in the war on terror.” In 2002, the State Department quietly removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat, despite Karimov’s repression of Islamic fundamentalists.³²

By 2005, this official American endorsement was being offset, in Karimov’s eyes, by the activities of some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) paid for by the U.S. government’s National Democratic Institute in Washington. He was alarmed and suspicious, probably accurately, that one wing of the Bush administration was secretly financing opposition movements in his country, hoping to bring to power an even more malleable government. Such efforts had already helped overthrow governments in Georgia in 2003 (the Rose Revolution), in the Ukraine in 2004 (the Orange Revolution), and in nearby Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 (the Tulip Revolution).³³ In particular, the protests that drove President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan into exile alarmed all of the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, since they were, if anything, more vulnerable to charges of ignoring human rights and being indifferent to popular aspirations for democracy than he was.

In Uzbekistan, demonstrators broke into the city jail of Andijan on May 12, 2005, and freed a group of local businessmen the government had charged with Islamic extremism. Fearing another bloodless revolution, this time in his own country, President Karimov promptly used his Unequipped and trained troops to massacre at least five hundred unarmed demonstrators and bystanders. Relations with Washington rapidly soured. On July 29, the Uzbek government delivered a written request to the U.S. embassy to withdraw from the Karshi-Khanabad base by January 25, 2006. In late September 2005, after discussions with President Karimov in Tashkent, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said that the United States would comply “without further discussion.” On November 21, 2005, the last U.S. airmen formally returned control to the Uzbek government and flew out of K-2.³⁴

What had happened in Tashkent set off reverberations throughout Central Asia, particularly in Bishkek, the capital of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, which is the home of our sole remaining air base in the area. In light of Uzbekistan’s expulsion of the Americans, Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev decided to impose a hundred-fold increase in the rent he charges the United States for the use of Manas Air Base (called by the air force “Chief Peter J. Ganci Air Base” after the highest-ranking officer of the New York Fire Department to perish in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers). The annual fee went from $2.7 million per year to $200 million. Bakiyev said that there would be “no room for haggling” and that he would evict the Americans if they did not come through. As of July 14, 2006, the U.S. government had agreed to pay as much as $150 million in total compensation over the next year for use of the base, but no agreement had been reached.³⁵ Given the number of uncoordinated U.S. military-politico activities around the world, many more requests for us to get out or pay up will likely be forthcoming.

More serious than the closing of any FOSs or CSLs would be our expulsion from one or more MOBs. That might spell the beginning of the unraveling of America’s military empire. Germany has long been one of the more hospitable nations toward the huge American military presence. However, because of the Bush administration’s irritation with former chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s public stance on Iraq, the United States began making plans to close thirteen army bases in Germany.³⁶ Current designs are to reduce air force personnel in Europe from 29,100 to 27,500, navy personnel from 13,800 to 11,000, and army personnel from 62,000 to 24,000.³⁷ This will have serious economic consequences for the city of Würzburg and its suburbs (home of the First Infantry Division, which is to return to the United States in mid-2006) and for Wiesbaden (home of the First Armored Division, which will depart the following year). If some Germans see these withdrawals, and the accompanying German job losses, as payback for Berlin’s opposition to the unilateral attack on Iraq, other Germans are pleased to see our troops leave. In 2005, Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of the Social Democratic Party and one of Germany’s most charismatic politicians, said, “We are not a sovereign country; as long as the U.S. can operate from here, we are a participant in the Iraq War.”³⁸

In contrast, the United States chose not to close any of its bases in Italy, in a period when then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was one of President Bush’s most loyal allies. In fact, the Global Posture Review calls for moving U.S. Naval Headquarters in Europe from London to Naples, rather than to Spain as originally planned, because the new socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero decided in 2004 to withdraw all 1,400 of his country’s troops from Iraq.³⁹

There have, in fact, been many more public and official protests in Italy about the American presence than in either Germany or Spain. These include demands by the regional president of Sardinia that the navy remove its 2,500 military personnel from La Maddalena island at the northern tip of Sardinia, a base since 1972. Despite being a well-known resort area and a national park, La Maddalena plays host to American nuclear submarines that are anything but a tourist attraction, particularly after one of them, the USS Hartford, ran aground there in October 2003. Apparently in an unsuccessful attempt to help Berlusconi get re-elected and as an acknowledgment that there was virtually no continuing post-Cold War need for nuclear submarines, on November 23, 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that the United States would close La Maddalena as part of its Global Posture Review.⁴⁰

Mainland Italians have been made nervous by reports published in the national daily Corriere delta Sera that Camp Darby, occupying a thousand hectares of pine woods on the Tuscan coast between Pisa and Livorno, is the “biggest American ammunition dump outside the United States.” It regularly stockpiles twenty thousand tons of artillery and aerial munitions, eight thousand tons of high explosives, and nearly four thousand antipersonnel cluster bombs. Built in 1951, Darby has begun seriously to deteriorate, and the army’s Corps of Engineers has had to clear some bunkers because of the threat that there might be an explosion. The Corriere della Sera’s report called it “a small miracle that nothing had gone wrong.”⁴¹ Here, however, there is no movement toward closure.

U.S. planners claim they want to move the bases in Germany to forward operating sites (FOSs) and cooperative security locations (CSLs) in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria because they are closer to potential areas of conflict. In December 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed an access agreement with Romania to set up U.S. military bases there.⁴² However, in its planning, the Pentagon does not seem to take into account just how many buildings, hangars, airfields, and warehouses we occupy in Germany and how expensive it would be to build even slightly comparable facilities in former communist countries such as Romania, one of Europe’s poorest places. Lieutenant Colonel Amy Ehmann, a military spokesperson in Hanau, Germany, pointed out to the press in 2003, “There’s no place to put these people” in Romania and Bulgaria. According to many press reports, the Bush administration had a special interest in Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania not for defense but as a secret CIA prison for the interrogation and torture of terrorism suspects.⁴³ This may come closer to the real uses to which bases in such poor countries of Eastern Europe may be put. One thing is certain: American commanders have no intention of living in a backwater like Constanta, Romania, and plan to hang on to their military headquarters in Stuttgart and Heidelberg, convenient as they are to so many nearby military golf courses and the armed forces ski center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps.

According to the Global Posture Review, the United States intends to retain three facilities in Germany no matter what: Ramstein Air Base, nearby Spangdahlem Air Base, and the huge Grafenwöhr training area and firing ranges near Nuremberg in Bavaria. The United States has grown used to thinking of these as virtually American territory. Ramstein Air Base, in particular, represents the largest community of Americans— over forty thousand—and the most immense military installation outside of the United States. Its military hospital is the biggest such facility overseas. The Ramstein complex is located in a rural and relatively underdeveloped part of southwestern Germany, adjacent to the small town of Kaiserslautern, known to linguistically challenged GIs as “K-town.”⁴⁴ The Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based research organization, contends that the United States still has 480 nuclear warheads in Europe, 130 of them deployed at Ramstein. Three of Germany’s center-left parties deeply oppose this.⁴⁵ The air base also houses important espionage facilities, including part of the global Echelon eavesdropping system, and the Twenty-sixth Intelligence Group, a unit of the Air Intelligence Agency affiliated with the National Security Agency.⁴⁶ In addition to all the usual schools, housing estates, and supermarkets, Ramstein maintains one of the finest eighteen-hole golf courses in Europe.

Today, Ramstein has also become a logistics base for the U.S. fleet of 180 C-17 Globemasters. It took over this function from Frankfurt’s Rhein-Main Air Base, which the United States was forced to give up in October 2005. Rhein-Main was the main staging area for the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, whereas Ramstein was not built until 1953. During 2004, some 624,000 American soldiers and their families passed through Rhein-Main, most of the troops en route to or from Iraq. The air base shared runways with Frankfurt International Airport, Europe’s second busiest. The German government finally bought out the U.S. interest in the property so that it could build a third passenger terminal in preparation for the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger jet, when it goes into service in 2006. Although Rhein-Main was long a symbol of postwar German-American friendship and cooperation, according to the New York Times, “Germans are generally dry-eyed about the decline in American visibility.”⁴⁷

The question is: How long will Germany accept the current base structure when the United States seems interested in having bases in Europe’s most powerful country only to serve narrow American interests? The same question could be asked of the Spanish government’s toleration of the air force’s Moron air base and our naval station at Rota, on the Atlantic coast halfway between Gibraltar and the border of Portugal. The Turkish government may not continue to feel comfortable about our joint use of the air base at Incirlik, and the South Korean government’s forbearance may in future years wane when it comes to the huge array of American bases in its country since the United States refuses to give it any say in when or how they will be used.

The Global Posture Review is a purely military analysis of where the United States might like to have military bases in light of possible future wars, including those we might start. It contains almost no political understanding of the foundations of the American empire or of the way Bush administration policies have threatened its cornerstone bases, not to speak of the global loathing these have generated.⁴⁸ The longevity of the U.S. empire depends less on hypertechnical military and strategic calculations than on whether its junior partners trust the good sense of the U.S. government, factors to which the Bush administration seems to be totally blind.

Peter Katzenstein, a political economist at Cornell University, has argued that the jewels in the crown of the American empire are Germany and Japan and the regions they dominate—Europe and Northeast Asia. Japan is the worlds second- or third-largest economy, depending on how one evaluates China, and Germany is the fifth. They bear much the same relationship to the American empire that the so-called white dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—had with the British Empire. “Germany’s and Japan’s unconditional surrender and occupation by the United States,” Katzenstein has written, “created two client states that eventually rose to become core regional powers.... It is not American dictates to the world that are its most important and enduring source of power. It is the American capacity to generate and tolerate diversity in a loose but shared sense of moral order.... Total defeat in war was the precondition for Japan’s and Germany’s belated conversion to the American way of informal liberal rule.”⁴⁹

After the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the unification of Germany, these mutually profitable relationships seemed destined to have a very long life. But the coming to power and influence in the United States of men and women with only a superficial knowledge of history and international affairs has greatly diminished “the consent and cooperation that remain indispensable to America’s imperium.”⁵⁰ It is no longer inconceivable that our satellites might one day kick us out— and get away with it, just as the East Europeans did with the Soviet Union in 1989.

The huge arrays of bases in Germany and Japan and their semipermanent quality are the forms of empire preferred by U.S. government planners. It is clear today that the Bush administration intended, upon Saddam Hussein’s certain defeat, to create military bases in Iraq similar to those we built or took over in Germany and Japan after World War II. The covert purpose of our 2003 invasion was empire building—to move the main focus of our military installations in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, gain control over Iraq’s oil resources, and make that country a permanent Pentagon outpost for the control of much of the rest of the “arc of instability.”

In response to the question, “What were the real reasons for our invasion of Iraq?” retired air force lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a former strategist inside the Near East Division of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggested: “One reason has to do with enhancing our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing.... So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter—to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important.”⁵¹ In the spring of 2005, Kwiatkowski further noted, Pentagon leaders regarded Iraqi bases as vital for protecting Israel and as potential launching pads for preventive wars in Syria and Iran, part of the administration’s strategic vision of reorganizing the entire region as part of an American sphere of influence. So it seems likely we intend to stay there whether the Iraqis want us or not.⁵²

Our publicly stated policy, as the Overseas Basing Commission puts it, has continued to be: “Decisions on temporary, permanent, or ‘enduring’ U.S. bases in Iraq have yet to be made. . . . U.S. presence in Iraq is a subject for discussions with the Iraqi government once it is formed.”⁵³ On February 17, 2005, for instance, Secretary Rumsfeld testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I can assure you that we have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” The actual policy being implemented on the ground, however, is to build a number of stable, hardened facilities (the military avoids the term “permanent”) that, according to Lieutenant General Walter E. Buchanan III, chief of air operations in the U.S.’s Central Command, “will remain available for U.S. use for at least another decade or two.”⁵⁴

One can infer from numerous unofficial comments by American military officials in Iraq that, even if a future Iraqi government should attempt to kick us out, the Pentagon nonetheless plans to retain at least four crucially located and heavily fortified bases. In February 2005, Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, who was an adviser on democratization to our chief envoy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, summed up the basing situation this way:” [W] e could declare . .. that we have no permanent designs on Iraq and we will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. This one statement would do an enormous amount to undermine the suspicion that we have permanent imperial intentions in Iraq. We aren’t going to do that. And the reason we’re not going to do that is because we are building permanent military bases in Iraq.”⁵⁵

These permanent bases are the successors to the formerly permanent bases we hoped to hang on to in Saudi Arabia. However, on August 26, 2003, in a small ceremony at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the United States ended its thirteen-year presence in the kingdom. By then it had relocated its Persian Gulf headquarters to Al-Udeid Air Base in the small neighboring emirate of Qatar and launched a $1.2 billion program to upgrade the sixteen major airfields we already occupied elsewhere in the Middle East. In an interview with the New York Times, Lieutenant General Buchanan claimed that there were only two “enduring” bases for American operations in the Middle East outside Iraq: al-Udeid in Qatar and al-Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates.⁵⁶ The problem with this statement is that it depends entirely on what the air force means by “enduring.” There are quite substantial bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman that Lieutenant General Buchanan overlooks. In any case, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers and the KBR Corporation of Houston were making major improvements to both of the bases Buchanan cited, largely financed by the host governments.

In Iraq, using funds appropriated for military operations, the U.S. military has hired KBR and other companies to build or rebuild around a dozen semipermanent, reinforced bases. According to Joshua Hammer, the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek, since the original contracts of potentially $7 billion awarded to KBR in 2003, “it has received another $8.5 billion for work associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom. By far the largest sum—at least $4.5 billion—has gone to construction and maintenance of U.S. bases.”⁵⁷ These funds were contained in an $82 billion supplementary war-spending bill approved by Congress in May 2005.⁵⁸

According to Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune, we began our occupation of Iraq in the spring of 2003 with some 120 “forward operating bases.”⁵⁹ Two years later we had returned 14 to the Iraqis and still occupied 106, plus four prisons holding more than eleven thousand prisoners and several logistics centers for servicing truck convoys from Kuwait. Bradley Graham of the Washington Post quoted an unnamed general as saying, “If we’re going to withdraw, we need a base plan.”⁶⁰ This planning process led to the crash program to build permanent structures made of mortar-resistant concrete at some fourteen of the bigger bases and to concentrate on four airfields away from urban areas that we intend to keep as long as possible.

Any visitor to Iraq, according to Newsweek’s Hammer, could not fail to note “[t]he omnipresence of the giant defense contractor KBR, ... the shipments of concrete and other construction materials, and the transformation of decrepit Iraqi military bases into fortified American enclaves.” In its report of May 2005, the Overseas Basing Commission “observed the immense amount of military construction to support U.S. operations that has taken place and is currently being planned within USCENTCOM.”⁶¹ Since the secretary of defense has not explicitly authorized this construction, although he undoubtedly knows about it, there is no straightforward list of these “enduring” bases in Iraq. The Department of Defense maintains a pervasive silence on the subject, and members of Congress of both parties routinely say it is not part of their “agenda.”⁶² The following compilation of facilities that the United States would like to keep has therefore been pieced together from various fragmentary accounts. By far the most important compilation is by the Global Security Organization of Alexandria, Virginia.⁶³

Three of the bases are in or around Baghdad itself. First is the Green Zone, the four-square-mile enclave in the middle of the city encircled by fifteen-foot concrete walls and rings of concertina wire. Its buildings include Saddam Hussein s former presidential palace, which is headquarters for the current Iraqi government, the U.S. embassy, and offices for numerous military and civilian functionaries.⁶⁴

The new U.S. embassy is as permanent a base as they come. Located in a 104-acre compound, it will be the biggest embassy in the world—ten times the size of a typical American embassy, six times larger than the U.N., as big as Vatican city, and costing $592 million to build. It will be defended by blast walls and ground-to-air missiles. A workforce of nine hundred mostly Asian workers who live on the site has been imported to do the actual construction. They work around the clock (at a time when most Iraqis are enduring blackouts of up to twenty-two hours a day, the embassy site is floodlit by night). This diplomatic “facility” will have its own apartment buildings (six of them) for a staff of perhaps 5,500 (many of them troops for guard duty), its own electricity, well-water, and waste-treatment facilities, plus the de rigueur “swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court, and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.” The London Times’s Daniel McGrory reports that Baghdad residents are properly cynical watching what they call, in mock-honor of Saddam Hussein’s famously self-glorifying building projects, “George W’s palace,” as it rises on the banks of the Tigris River while their lives crumble around them. It goes without saying that, like the former American embassy in Saigon, the Baghdad embassy will have one or more helipads on the roofs.⁶⁵

The other two bases in the Baghdad vicinity are Camp Victory North, adjacent to the international airport, and al-Rashid Military Camp, the capital’s former military airport. At Victory North, KBR has built an encampment for 14,000 troops housed in air-conditioned barracks with access to the largest post exchange in Iraq. (Other sources assert that the biggest PX is at Camp Taji north of Baghdad.) Camp Victory North includes Qasr al-Fao, one of Saddam Hussein’s ornate palaces, which sits in the middle of a man-made lake stocked with carp and catfish. The palace is now occupied by senior military commanders. At first, there was some concern about American generals occupying such ostentatious buildings associated with the Saddam era, but the high command decided it was too expensive to build replacement facilities.⁶⁶ So they continue to occupy at least fifteen former presidential palaces spread around the country. Camp Victory North, it should be noted, is twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, constructed by KBR in 1999 and until the Iraq war the largest overseas base built since the Vietnam War.⁶⁷

Some seventeen miles north of Baghdad is Taji Air Base, renamed Camp Cooke by the Americans after a First Armored Division sergeant killed in Baghdad in December 2003 and then in September 2004 changed back to Camp Taji.⁶⁸ Taji was a former Republican Guard “military city.” According to the description of the base by the Global Security Organization, “The quality of life at Camp Taji gets better every day. The Camp now has ... a Subway, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. They also have a newly built dining facility, which is three times larger [than the old one] and the food selection is unbelievable. There are several gyms and MWR facilities [Morale, Welfare, and Recreation] where soldiers can exercise, watch movies or sporting events, and play games. Soldiers live in air-conditioned and heated trailers, have hot showers, and can eat four meals a day in the new dining facility.”

Thirteen miles north of Camp Taji is the fifteen-square-mile Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, and its associated army facility, Camp Anaconda, so gigantic it requires nine internal bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors to get around inside the earthen berms and concertina wire. During 2004, Anaconda was headquarters of the Third Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division, whose job it was to police some 1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra to Taji. Despite extensive security precautions, the base has frequently come under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of July 2003, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded at the local field hospital. During 2005, the military spent $228.7 million to upgrade ramps, runway lights, and parking facilities for some 138 army helicopters at Balad. Military flights that once flew into Baghdad International Airport now use Balad to allow for the resumption of commercial flights at Baghdad. Its air traffic is second only in the world to London’s Heathrow.⁶⁹ Balad houses over 250 aircraft.

In the far north, next door to Mosul Airport, is Camp Marez, where on December 21, 2004, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a tent dining room, killing at least thirteen U.S. soldiers and four KBR employees. Al-Asad Air Base in the western province of Anbar is another major military airport and garrison that the United States is urgently rebuilding as one of its enduring sites. It is the second-largest air base in Iraq, with two main runways measuring fourteen thousand and thirteen thousand feet. Al-Asad is the most important base near the Syrian frontier. The Americans have one other major air base in Anbar province, al Taqaddum, near Ramadi, where Seabees have been upgrading runways and facilities. Then there is the huge complex in the south clustered around Tallil Air Base adjacent to the ancient ziggurat of Ur. Still another is Camp Renegade, a former Iraqi fighter base with facilities for at least two squadrons, located just outside the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, near the Kirkuk refinery and petrochemical plant.

Camp Qayyarah (“Q-West” to American soldiers), a former military air base about thirty miles south of Mosul, was occupied in 2003 by units of the 101st Airborne Division. It is considered a hardship post but is located in a strategically important area. Al Sahra airfield is a sprawling former Iraqi air force base just south of Tikrit. Its army base is named Camp Speicher after navy lieutenant commander Michael Speicher, who was shot down over Iraq on January 17, 1991, the opening night of the first Persian Gulf war. It contains the largest structure the U.S. military has built in Iraq so far, a $6.7 million divisional headquarters that will replace the current headquarters, located in a monumental pink marble palace built by Saddam Hussein in his hometown. The United States gave the palace back to the Iraqis in November 2005.⁷⁰

Undoubtedly there are also some bases in Basra, currently occupied by British forces, that the United States will try to retain. But if push comes to shove, according to information gathered by Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, the United States has chosen four Iraqi bases that it will try to hang on to come what may: Tallil Air Base in the south, al-Asad Air Base in the west, Balad Air Base in the center, and either Camp Qayyarah or an unnamed airfield near Irbil in the north.⁷¹ Whether the United States retains any of these facilities and for how long is an open question. For now, however, the Americans have built a much more powerful imperial presence in Iraq than they ever enjoyed in Saudi Arabia and many billions of dollars have been spent in the process.

Turning to other parts of the world where the United States is widely detested and there is suspicion of everything it does, Paraguay illustrates a somewhat different approach to how the U.S. military goes about penetrating an area. The U.S. Southern Command’s efforts there are aimed at keeping control over Latin America, where the United States is probably more unwelcome than at any time since the open imperialism of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Most citizens of Latin American countries know about our armed interventions to overthrow popularly supported governments in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), and Nicaragua (1984-90). Many know about Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy that specializes in training Latin American officers in state terrorism and repression. (It was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2000 to try to disguise its past.) Some are aware of the 1997 creation of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies within the National Defense University in Washington to indoctrinate Latin American civilian defense officials, as well as the Pentagon’s endless efforts to create close “military-to-military” relations by sending U.S. Special Forces to train and arm Latin American armies. Finally, there is the steadfast advocacy of radical free-market capitalism that, when implemented by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, have invariably left Latin American countries more indebted and poverty stricken than they were before.

As a result of these and other accumulated grievances, by late 2005 regimes openly cool to the United States had come to power in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Venezuela. On December 18, 2005, Bolivia followed suit by electing Evo Morales, leader of the country’s indigenous population and its first Indian president, who quickly nationalized Bolivia’s extensive gas resources and was planning to legalize the growing of coca. In Ecuador, which has in the last decade alone toppled three presidents before their terms expired, a deep hostility to American-sponsored neoliberal economic policies prevails. In Mexico, the government of Vicente Fox became the hundredth nation to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty, making it unlikely that the United States will ever try to station troops there.

Other than Colombia and Honduras, about the only place left where the American military is welcome is El Salvador, scene of numerous American-sponsored war crimes during the 1980s and the only Latin American country still to have a truly symbolic contingent of troops in Iraq. In order to push back against these anti-American trends, the Southern Command has fallen back on old tricks: it tries to merge its antidrug efforts with the war on terrorism (drug trafficking is now called “narco-terrorism”), discredits genuinely democratic outcomes by labeling them “radical populism,” and revives the old specter of “Castro Communism” in the form of a newly discovered villain, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.⁷²

The Southern Command is also trying in a highly stealthy manner to build Forward Operating Sites and Cooperative Security Locations in places that are so small and weak they do not have the resources even to think of resisting. As of mid-2005, the Southern Command’s older facilities in the Americas included the huge base and prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and an FOS at Soto Cano Air Base, near Palmerola, Honduras. Soto Cano houses 448 military personnel and 102 civilians and dependents. During the Reagan-era counterrevolutionary war of the Contras against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Honduras was the main support facility and, at the time, the largest CIA base on Earth. Soto Cano was acquired during that period.

Southern Command also includes four CSLs, two located on the islands of Aruba and Curacao, both Dutch colonies in the Caribbean near Venezuela.⁷³ Another, operated by the navy, is Comalapa, El Salvador; and the most important is Eloy Alfaro Air Base, on the Ecuadorian coast at Manta. Aruba and Curasao have about 450 military personnel between them and Comalapa about 100. The United States also possesses at least seventeen radar sites, mostly in Peru and Colombia, each typically staffed by about 35 people. There is also a Peruvian-owned base at Iquitos from which the CIA directs local military pilots to shoot down airplanes it believes are smuggling narcotics. In April 2001, planes from the base happened to shoot down a small airplane carrying an American missionary family. In Colombia, about 800 U.S. troops, Special Forces, and mercenaries are training and advising local troops trying to defeat a long-standing drug-financed guerrilla war against the Colombian establishment and incidentally protect an oil pipeline owned by the Occidental Petroleum Company.⁷⁴

The Manta base in Ecuador, which is the model for the CSL being built in Paraguay, is a perfect illustration of “mission creep.” In 1999, the Ecuadorian government agreed to let the United States refurbish an old airfield for counternarcotics surveillance flights. The American government promised that the base would be used only for daytime missions and would not permanently house U.S. military personnel.⁷⁵ The United States began in a classically deceptive manner by distributing used clothing and school supplies to local day-care centers “to help the poor children... and to reach out to the community.” According to the investigative journalist Michael Flynn, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and quoting local activists, many Ecuadorians saw through this. A typical comment was: “Remember how Columbus gave glass beads to the Indians.”⁷⁶ The United States has spent some $80 million upgrading the airfield and farmed out its maintenance to DynCorp, a well-known “private military company.”⁷⁷

Southcom soon expanded Manta s missions to include stopping, and in some cases sinking, ships that it suspects of carrying illegal immigrants to the United States, coordinating a failed 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and providing military protection for American petroleum interests in the Andean region. Shortly after they arrived, American officials signed a ten-year lease agreement for the base with President Jamil Mahuad. The president, however, failed to submit the agreement to Ecuador’s Congress for approval as required by its constitution, and in 2000 Mahuad was overthrown in a military coup. Nonetheless, Manta soon acquired a contingent of 475 U.S. military personnel and a constant stream of navy warships calling at its harbor.⁷⁸ The Pentagon has also not hesitated to build a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility on the base, the same kind of supersecret civil-military eavesdropping and intelligence post it has at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. It would appear that the United States has settled down in Manta unannounced on a more or less permanent basis.

Planners in the Pentagon believed that they needed at least one more CSL in the cone of South America to monitor developments in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. They want to be ready to intervene against the new Evo Morales government, now that it has nationalized the second-largest natural gas field on the continent, should propitious circumstances develop. Paraguay seemed ideal for these purposes. A small, extremely poor, landlocked country bordering on Bolivia, Paraguay’s chief economic activities are subsistence agriculture, the illicit production and export of cannabis, and small-scale trading operations that serve primarily the interests of its two large and powerful neighbors, Argentina and Brazil. Its population as of July 2005 was a mere 6.3 million.

One unusual feature of the country is that about 15,000 Lebanese immigrants live in the small, run-down town of Ciudad del Este where the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil converge. Many of these Lebanese arrived about twenty years ago and like their brethren in many other big Latin American cities such as Sao Paulo, Brazil, engage primarily in small retailing and textile manufacturing. Syrians and Lebanese began immigrating to Brazil more than 120 years ago, and an estimated 9 million or 5 percent of Brazil’s 186 million inhabitants have their ancestral roots in the Middle East. In fact, Brazil has more citizens of Lebanese origin than there are in Lebanon.⁷⁹ Across the Parana River from Ciudad del Este is the richer and better-policed Brazilian town of Foz do Iguacu, near the most spectacular waterfalls in the Western Hemisphere. This is where most of the successful Lebanese traders actually live. The two cities together have a population of around two hundred thousand.

This so-called triborder area has a reputation as an “unruly region,” in the words of the CIA’s unclassified World Factbook, a place where marijuana and cigarette smuggling into the Brazilian and Argentine markets has led to money laundering and arms and narcotics trafficking, much like any town on the U.S.-Mexican border.⁸⁰ No one gave the place any thought until President Bush launched his global war on terror, at which time the presence of Muslims provided a pretext for future penetration. All of a sudden a spate of feverish articles appeared in American magazines typically describing the triborder area “as one of the most lawless places in the world.”⁸¹ A leader of this campaign in Washington was then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. The veteran New Yorker journalist Jeffrey Goldberg declared, “This Muslim community has in its midst a hard core of terrorists,” and Jessica Stern of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill warned in Foreign Affairs that the triborder region is “a place where terrorists with widely disparate ideologies ... meet to swap tradecraft.”⁸²

The problem is that there is no evidence for the presence of terrorists, or even of fund-raising activities for extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, in the triborder area. The former U.S. ambassador to Brazil said as much and the commander of Southcom, General James Hill, agreed with her. As the head of the Brazilian Federal Police in Foz remarked, “We have a marijuana problem and cigarette smuggling, but we don’t have any concrete evidence that this is a terrorist region.”⁸³ The Brazilian ambassador to the United States wrote to Foreign Affairs complaining about “Jessica Stern’s groundless assertions.”⁸⁴ According to the State Department’s annual report on “Patterns of Terrorism,” between 1961 and 2003 only 1.2 percent of worldwide terrorist activity took place in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile combined.⁸⁵ Nonetheless, the Pentagon insisted that the Paraguayan government badly needed American help in fighting terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and corruption, and that, if Asuncion would accept an American military mission, we would also throw in some “medical assistance.” Thus the penetration of Paraguay began.

After some hard-sell negotiations and a little bribery, on May 26, 2005, the Pentagon got what it wanted. The Paraguay Senate approved an agreement with the United States allowing four hundred Special Forces troops to enter the country on July 1 and conduct some thirteen joint military exercises lasting until December 31, 2005. Washington offered a funding package of approximately $45,000 per exercise.⁸⁶ According to the Inter Press News Service journalist Alejandro Sciscioli, the Paraguay Senate approved the agreement “with no debate and without any information on it being published in the press.”⁸⁷

The U.S. embassy in Paraguay explained that the exercises in question would involve humanitarian and medical assistance to poor communities “as well as military training,” but the deputy speaker of the parliament, Alejandro Ugarte, let slip that only two of the thirteen exercises “are of a civilian nature.”⁸⁸ In September 2005, Reuters carried photos of members of an army medical team performing checkups on small children in the Paraguayan city of Pilar on the Paraná River.⁸⁹ Some Paraguayans commented that the sight of men in uniform frightened the children—this being a part of the world where uniforms have long been associated with dictatorial power and violence—and that such work would better be entrusted to a civilian organization such as Medecins Sans Frontieres.

In order to soften up Paraguay, the Bush administration put on the sort of display of hospitality usually reserved for leaders of its closest satellites. On September 26, 2003, Paraguay’s newly elected president, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, was received in the Oval Office, the first Paraguayan head of state to be so honored. In June 2005, Duarte’s vice president, Luis Castiglioni, on a visit to Washington met with vice president Dick Cheney, former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The Paraguayan journalist Alfredo Bocca Paz noted dryly, “That’s a big fuss to make over a vice president of Paraguay.”⁹⁰ In mid-August 2005, Rumsfeld flew to Asuncion for an on-the-spot inspection. While there he promised that he would send experts from the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies to work on a joint “planning seminar on systems for national security.”⁹¹ The FBI announced that it would open an office in Asunción in 2006.

When the first American troops arrived in Paraguay in the summer of 2005, they did not, in fact, go anywhere near the unruly triborder area, as one might have expected, but instead established their base at an old airport some 434 miles away in the Chaco region of northern Paraguay, not far from the Bolivian border. This was enough to convince many Paraguayans and most of their neighbors that the United States was building a new base in the heart of South America.

Back in 1982, the United States had helped General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 until 1989, to build a massive military airfield near the town of Mariscal Estigarribia, which now has a population of about two thousand, of whom three hundred are Paraguayan soldiers. The airfield has runways long and strong enough to take B-52 bombers and C-5 Galaxy transports, plus a fully equipped radar system, large hangars, and an air traffic control tower. It is actually bigger than the international airport in the capital, Asuncion. The only thing of note that ever happened at Estigarribia before the American troops arrived was Pope John Paul II’s landing there, in May 1988. In the summer of 2005, the Americans immediately set about refurbishing and further enlarging the base.

American troops are free to do almost anything they want in Paraguay. In the May 26, 2005, agreement, the Bush administration extracted a provision exempting its officials and military from the jurisdiction of both the local judicial system and the International Criminal Court. The Special Forces are not subject to customs duties and are free to transport weapons and medical supplies anywhere in Paraguayan territory.⁹² This is important for various reasons. Under the terms of Mercosur, the agreement among Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay creating a southern-cone trading bloc, all parties pledge to inform each other about international developments and to coordinate their foreign policies. Like virtually all other nations in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have rejected Bush administration demands for Article 98 Agreements protecting Americans from being turned over to the International Criminal Court. The United States has cut off all forms of aid to the three as a result. In 2004, despite the presence of the Manta base, Ecuador, too, forfeited $15.7 million in U.S. aid, much of it for military equipment, rather than go along with America’s pressure tactics.⁹³ By giving the United States carte blanche in its country, Paraguay is breaking ranks with its neighbors, which has led to speculation that the United States wants to destroy Mercosur.

The asymmetries in size and power between small nations like Paraguay and Ecuador and the United States inevitably make our relations with them imperialist in nature when we act in a high-handed way. Paraguay has no need for an American military base, nor for U.S training of its armed forces. Paraguay is not likely to go to war with its powerful neighbors, particularly given the nineteenth-century War of the Triple Alliance (1865-70) in which it was badly defeated and lost a large part of its territory. But the United States is always ready to use its overwhelming might to force small nations to bend to its will.

It is impossible to foresee in detail the future use to which the American empire of bases may be put, but there is at least a growing understanding of and sophistication about U.S. basing policies among peoples on the receiving end. The Argentine pacifist and antiwar activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel, winner of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize, commented on the developments in Paraguay, “Once the United States arrives, it takes a long time to leave.”