Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (27 page)

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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.