Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (33 page)

And the displacement of locals for military bases continues. In South Korea, the U.S. military has been expanding Camp Humphreys, which already occupies two square miles, to seize 2,851 additional acres from Daechuri village and other areas near the city of Pyongtaek. At the behest of the United States, the South Korean Government used powers of eminent domain to take farmers’ land for the base. When the farmers resisted, the South Korean Government sent police and soldiers to enforce the evictions. From March to May 2006, riot police invaded Daechuri with bulldozers and backhoes, beating protestors, destroying a local school, and tearing up farmers’ rice fields and irrigation systems. When many still refused to leave, the government surrounded the village with police, soldiers, and barbed wire. On April 7, 2007, the last villagers finally were forced to go, carrying a symbolic Peace Boat as they walked out of town. “I can’t stop shedding tears,” one older resident said. “My heart is totally broken.”
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In the minds of many U.S. officials, whether consciously or not, removals were (and are) justified by what they saw as the limited impact of removing a small number of people, especially when weighed against
the supposed gains to be realized from a base. Henry Kissinger once said of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”
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Stu Barber’s Strategic Island Concept was predicated on the same assumption. In fact, after the expulsion, Stu claimed he hadn’t known the Chagossians “had a history of several generations there,” but even if he had, he still would have recommended the creation of the base.
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From the perspective of Chagossians and others, there was of course nothing limited about the effects of displacement.

While the Chagossians and other base displacement victims were certainly removed in part because they were small, isolated populations, another island comparison suggests the decisive role played by a people’s socially defined race and ethnicity. In Iwo Jima and Japan’s other Bonin-Volcano islands, there were before World War II roughly 7,000 inhabitants. The islanders were the descendants of nineteenth-century settlers who came both from Japan and in smaller numbers from the United States and Europe. In 1944, after the start of U.S. attacks on the islands, Japanese officials evacuated all the islanders to Japan’s main islands. After the U.S. capture of the Bonin-Volcanos and the end of the war, U.S. officials prohibited the return of the local people, to allow unhindered military use of the islands. In 1946, U.S. officials “modified” the decision: They would “permit the return of those residents of Caucasian
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extraction who had been forcibly removed to Japan during the war and who had petitioned the United States to return.” Approximately 130 men were eventually repatriated with their families, becoming “the sole permanent residents of the islands.”
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The Navy helped establish selfgovernment, a cooperative trading company to market agricultural products in Guam, and a Bonin-Volcano Trust Fund for financial support.
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MILITARY POWER, EMPIRE, AND THE CONTROL OF OIL: DIEGO GARCIA TO IRAQ

To understand why officials wanted a base on Diego Garcia in the first place and what this says about the nature of the United States as an empire, about current trajectories in U.S. foreign and military policy, and
about empire more broadly, we must now return to the history of the Cold War and to longer-term imperial trends. Remember that in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. officials faced a swirling mixture of fears about decolonization, base access, rising Soviet and Chinese power, and appearing “soft” on “defense” before domestic political audiences. At the same time, they retained an understanding of the profound military superiority of the United States over its rivals and a powerful interest in maintaining U.S. economic and political domination in the Indian Ocean region, increasingly in the Persian Gulf, and around the world. In this context, the Strategic Island Concept provided an answer to both their anxieties and their interests: Strategically located remote island bases would protect the nation’s “future freedom of military action” and its dominant position in the world.
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The history of Diego Garcia shows that much of the national security bureaucracy quickly adopted the Navy’s concept as an important strategic framework. Although the costs of the Vietnam War reined in the most far-reaching plans and left Diego Garcia as the only major base created under the Strategic Island Concept, the strategy became an important argument for the retention and expansion of major preexisting island bases, including those in Guam, Micronesia, the Bonin-Volcano islands, British Ascension, the Portuguese Azores, and Okinawa (in the early 1970s Stu hoped to create another BIOT-like territory with the British in Micronesia).

Coupled with the first-ever buildup of U.S. naval forces in the Indian Ocean, moreover, Diego Garcia increasingly enabled the insertion of military power into a large and increasingly unstable portion of the world (made unstable in many ways by other U.S. actions). Fearing an unknowable and threatening future in the non-Western world and increasingly in the Persian Gulf and southwest Asia, officials in the 1950s and 1960s crafted a plan for Diego Garcia to control the future through military force. As was often the case in the Cold War, the easiest “solution” was the military solution.
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One reason the military solution was often the easiest has to do with gender: It is not surprising and yet still remarkable that, as far as my research has shown, every official involved in any significant way in the development of Diego Garcia was a man.
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As in previous generations and elsewhere in the world, these gods of foreign policy were unquestionably male gods. And among these men, as we have seen, qualities of toughness, strength, efficiency, rationality, and hardness were most admired. These were “male” qualities best demonstrated by “tough” policies involving the use of military force and a fearless attitude in confronting the Soviet Union. Paraphrasing Adam Hochschild, when you came from a generation raised
on war, violence, and toughness, and when war (cold and hot), violence, and toughness remained the unquestioned order of the day, wielding violence efficiently was regarded as a manly virtue.
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Any signs of weakness, doubt, or concerns for human suffering were denigrated as weak, womanly, female. This generation of foreign policy leaders demonstrated its maleness through exterior displays of force, through a war in Vietnam, and through policies like that on Diego Garcia based on the seizure and cleansing of territory and the deployment of military power, rather than, as Halberstam points out, through more interior forms of strength that might have entailed “a good deal of domestic political risk.”
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Still, the solution provided by Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept was hardly about toughness and military force alone. The intent was always political, military, and economic: Diego Garcia allowed what strategists euphemistically call “intervention” and the threat of intervention in the affairs of other nations, while also, like eighteenth-century French and British bases, helping to protect U.S. economic interests in the region. As we have seen, protecting U.S., European, and Japanese access to Middle Eastern oil was initially just one of several motivations behind the military buildup. Within a few years of the base becoming operational, however, oil was at the core of Diego Garcia’s mission.

After the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the base played a central role in the first large-scale thrust of U.S. military strength into the Middle East. To respond to any future threats to the oil supply, Presidents Carter and Reagan developed a “Rapid Deployment Force” at bases in the region, including a rapidly enlarging Diego Garcia.
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In the years that followed, the Rapid Deployment Force transformed into the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which came to lead three wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we saw in the introduction, Diego Garcia was a launchpad for bombers and prepositioned weaponry critical to each of these wars. In this evolution of the island’s role, the base was one of the first major steps by the United States to deploy its military power to defend U.S. and global oil supplies. Indeed, Diego Garcia has been central to a more than half-century-long period during which, as Chalmers Johnson says, “the United States has been inexorably acquiring permanent military enclaves whose sole purpose appears to be the domination of one of the most strategically important areas of the world.”
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The history of Diego Garcia thus suggests an important revision to how we think about the United States as an empire. Contrary to the idea stressed by some that the U.S. Empire has become an empire of economics, Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept represent a reliance on
traditional imperial tools of overseas bases and military power to maintain U.S. dominance. Clearly Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept were not the only reactions to declining U.S. power during the Cold War—there were economic, political, and other military reactions as well. But they provided part of a solution to perceived threats while simultaneously answering the challenges posed by decolonization to the exercise of power through overseas bases.

That is, Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept were part of the invention of a new form of empire in the postwar era, relying heavily on overseas bases and increasingly on discreet, isolated bases—often island bases—to exert power. Responding to decolonization, Diego Garcia helped initiate an ongoing shift of bases from locations near population centers to locations insulated from potentially antagonistic locals. Today one sees the realization of this model and this new kind of empire in the military’s “lily pad” basing strategy: Under the strategy, the military is creating bases that are isolated from population centers, have limited troop deployments, and instead rely largely on prepositioned weaponry for future (un)anticipated conflicts. As Mark Gillem writes, “avoidance” is the new aim. “To project its power,” the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world.
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In the words of some of the strategy’s strongest proponents, the goal is “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts” with the U.S. military serving as “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”
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With as many bases as possible, the military hopes always to be able to turn from one nation to another if it is denied base access in a time of war.

While the reliance on smaller bases may sound preferable to the huge bases that have caused so much harm and anger in places like South Korea and Okinawa, the construction of lily pads in an increasingly long list of nations including Ghana, Gabon, Chad, Niger, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Aruba, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland represents the growing militarization (and likely destabilization) of even larger swaths of the globe and a dramatic expansion of an imperial vision to dominate the world militarily.
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And, as the once “austere” base on Diego Garcia shows, installations that might start out as lily pads can quickly grow into massive behemoths.

To be clear, the U.S. Empire has been characterized to a significant degree by economic forms of Open Door imperialism. However, the history of Diego Garcia shows that the U.S. Empire has relied in important ways on the continued use of military force and on increasingly discreet overseas bases in particular to maintain its dominance. This is not to deny the significance
of economics to the U.S. Empire, only to shift the focus toward the relatively underexplored military dimensions. Diego Garcia suggests a more balanced perspective on U.S. Empire, highlighting how overseas bases, along with other military and political tools, have worked in tandem with and undergirded economic forms of power.

RUNNING THE WORLD

In the face of Chagossians’ struggle to return (and to work on, not remove, the base), the intransigence of the U.S. and U.K. governments is striking for a facility that was a product of the Cold War. Interestingly as well, Diego Garcia only saw its first significant use as a base with the Cold War’s end.
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Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the base has indeed become a pivot point of U.S. strategy for the control of areas from the Persian Gulf to east Asia. Prior to the 2003 Iraq war and September 11, 2001, the U.S. military was in the process of turning Diego into one of four major “forward operating locations” for “expeditionary” Air Force operations. Along with Guam, the island was selected as a recipient of an eastward shift of materiel and weaponry from Cold War European bases. For many in the military (especially the Air Force) the dream is to be able to strike any location on the planet from Diego, Guam, and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. As I quoted military analyst John Pike at the outset, the military’s aim is “to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us” from every other base in the hemisphere.

These trends suggest that Diego Garcia reveals something fundamental about U.S. Empire, beyond the Cold War era alone: While previous empires generally sought to dominate as much of the globe as possible through the direct control of territory, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the U.S. Empire has increasingly accomplished the same not only through economic and political tools but also through a global network of extraterritorial U.S. military installations that allow the control of territory vastly disproportionate to the land actually occupied.