The Sorrows of Empire (30 page)

In Uzbekistan, the twin of Manas is located at an old Soviet air base at Khanabad, near the city of Karshi, about a hundred miles north of the Afghan border. By May 2002, a thousand American soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division and a squadron of F-15E fighter jets were deployed there. Russian sources claim that Uzbekistan has leased the base to the United States for twenty-five years. The Pentagon denies this but refuses to say how long the lease actually is. The president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, declined to publish this agreement because it reportedly pledged him to “intensify the democratic transformation of society.”
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The Pentagon has given Vice President Cheney’s old company, the Kellogg Brown & Root subdivision of Halliburton, an open-ended contract to provide logistics for the Khanabad base—everything from cooking the meals to fueling the aircraft, the same services Halliburton supplies so profitably to Camp Bondsteel and many other military facilities around the world.

Elsewhere in the Central Asian republics, the Bush administration has said it will build at least one base in Tajikistan but has not yet specified where. It already has overflight agreements with Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and is sending Kazakh officers to America for training. Kazakhstan has given permission for the airfield in its former capital city, Almaty, to be used in case of emergency, and the United States is negotiating for basing rights on the Caspian shore of Kazakhstan. The only Central Asian republic that has denied the United States bases or overflight rights is
Turkmenistan, which adopted a policy of neutrality toward the struggle in Afghanistan.

The assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who was sworn in on May 31, 2001, is a career diplomat, Elizabeth Jones. She speaks Russian, German, and Arabic and was, from 1995 to 1998, ambassador to Kazakhstan. She used to drive around the Kazakh capital with a yellow bumper strip on her car that read, “Happiness Is Multiple Pipelines.” In December 2001, at a press conference in Almaty, she promised, “When the Afghan conflict is over, we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region.”
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As I hope to show, there is ample reason why we should believe her.

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

C
OLONEL
J
AMES
A. D
ONOVAN
, USMC (
RET
.),
Militarism, U.S.A.
(1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shift from the continental to the maritime strand at the end of the nineteenth century was, according to Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis of 1893, caused by the closing of the frontier. Serious scholarship has long ago revealed the ideological intent of Turner’s thesis, but his was certainly one of the more sophisticated defenses of America’s turn to overseas expansion. Even so, prominent American historians like Yale University’s Samuel Flagg Bemis have argued that the imperialism that began in 1898 was “a great aberration in American history,” one that in his view would ultimately be corrected by twentieth-century liberal political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
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The Monroe Doctrine assumed ever-new opportunistic forms. In December 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt enunciated the Roosevelt Corollary to it, calling for intervention throughout the Americas to suppress political movements that might interfere with the payment of Latin American debts. Because the United States was a “civilized nation,” Roosevelt wrote, it had a duty to exercise “an international police power” to stop “chronic wrongdoing” wherever it occurred among America’s neighbors to the south. Theodore Roosevelt’s successor as president, William Howard Taft, the former governor of the Philippines, proclaimed something he called “dollar diplomacy”—another euphemism for imperialism—and invoked Roosevelt’s Corollary to promote and protect American business interests overseas, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America.
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Between 1898 and 1934, the United States sent marines to Cuba four times, Honduras seven times, the Dominican Republic four times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico three times, Colombia four times, and Nicaragua five times (where they built bases and maintained an uninterrupted presence for twenty-one years except for a short period in 1925).
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As the political scientist David Abernethy observes, “The country that had proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine to protect the independence of Spanish-speaking countries on the New World mainland now found itself in the anomalous position of replacing Spain as a colonial ruler and repressing national independence movements.”
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The Roosevelt Corollary was supplanted only in 1934, by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy.