Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (26 page)

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