[News] Ten steps to liquidate US bases

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Ten steps to liquidate US bases

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html
By Chalmers Johnson

However ambitious United States President Barack Obama's domestic 
plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any 
reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla 
in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism 
and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, 
potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The 
failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and 
the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly 
inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United 
States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, 
perpetual war and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to 
that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military 
bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more 
than 40 countries and overseas US territories. We deploy over 190,000 
troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, 
Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected 
to US military forces living and working there - 49,364 members of 
our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 
civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>island of 
Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the 
United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, 
a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. 
They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an 
analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States 
spends approximately US$250 billion each year maintaining its global 
military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony - 
that is, control or dominance over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately 
trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer 
afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of 
the past - including the Axis powers of World War II and the former 
Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British 
decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively 
voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as 
were Japan and 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>Germany, or 
by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We 
should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently 
backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in 
Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else 
watch it liquidate us.

1. We can no longer afford our post-war expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Obama, in a speech 
announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that 
"[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet". A few 
weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense 
University in 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>Washington 
DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation 
will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest 
armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement 
address to the cadets of the US Naval Academy on May 22, Obama 
stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and 
keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the 
capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to 
invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political 
scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States 
to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled 
economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the 
history of imperialism. The University of 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>Chicago's 
Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The 
Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:
America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the 
Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative 
current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have 
cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly 
spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we 
will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony.

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military 
empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an 
insightful analogy:
Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy 
protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered 
reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds 
are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person 
filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts 
because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 
facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the 
significant investment required to sustain them ... He could not 
qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for 
the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate 
on which he placed his bases.

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its 
own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate 
economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our 
Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could 
clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia 
in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same 
with Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 
overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a 
striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official 
visit to 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>China since 
becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of 
students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the 
United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the 
students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 
2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at 
least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion 
budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably 
expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several 
generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W 
Bush's imperial adventures - if they ever can or will. It represents 
about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value 
of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target 
demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a 
deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in 
wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation 
of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next 
year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final 
budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures 
will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to 
maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We are going to lose the war in Afghanistan
and it will help bankrupt us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have 
recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to 
pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed 
disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's 
modern history to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 
1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the 
Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the 
North-West Frontier Territories - the area along either side of the 
artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand 
Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign 
secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective 
control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it 
in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, pg 425): 
"Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after 
resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when 
no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax 
Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million 
Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and 
profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or 
Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas 
(FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which - 
just as British imperial officials did - has divided the territory 
into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields 
much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, 
the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun 
tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan 
hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story 
(City Lights, 2009, pg 317):
If 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>Washington's 
bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. 
The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after 
World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and 
the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, 
they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming 
firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the 
world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people 
and the Islamic world even further against the United States.

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used 
poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year 
sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd 
George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, 
gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" 
(Fitzgerald and Gould, pg 65). His view prevailed.

The US continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our 
killing of non-combatants is a result of "collateral damage", or 
human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy 
from computers at military bases in the 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak01.html#>Arizona and 
Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The 
Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are 
alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the 
commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, 
including those carried out by the Central Intelligence Agecny, 
except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to 
illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days 
after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a 
drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 
people, the single deadliest US attack on Pakistani soil so far.

There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the 
mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the 
time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual 
adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop 
star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long 
been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both 
countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should 
support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of 
what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for 
example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's 
focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:
Pakistan's 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>army and its 
Inter-Services Intelligence branch ... from 1973 on, has played the 
key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet 
fighters during the 1980s] ... and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's 
army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>democratic 
institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders 
them to fight American and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] 
soldiers protecting the Afghan 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>government. 
(pg 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by 
devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the 
needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an 
Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping 
Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training 
and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places 
like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing 
Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of 
Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the 
Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train 
"freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's 
consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the 
Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major 
enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, US Army (retired), an adviser to the 
Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless 
project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 
million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States 
in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: 
Israel and India."

Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and 
particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast 
becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's 
continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that 
if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a 
few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the 
Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of 
the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the red army withdrew from 
Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, 
General Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: disaster, he 
insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending 
there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 
soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are 
wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never 
understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We need to end the secret shame
of the empire of bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and 
other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the 
US armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, 
kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:
New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9% increase in the 
number of sexual assaults - 2,923 - and a 25 percent increase in such 
assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the 
past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American 
uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a 
combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against 
rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in 
overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and 
often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual 
violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of 
control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since our 
soldiers, 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>marines and 
airmen permanently occupied it some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations 
since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape and 
attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two marines and a 
sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our 
bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our 
being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or 
our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw 
materials we covet.

The <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>military 
itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or 
to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to 
our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's 
record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," 
writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, 
the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to 
enact so-called Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) that will prevent 
host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit 
crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to 
spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by 
local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, 
a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a 
sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the 
big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported 
him to both Japanese and US authorities. Instead of his being 
arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed 
and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the US 
discharged the suspect from the navy but allowed him to escape 
Japanese law by returning him to the US, where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher 
discovered that almost 50 years earlier, in October 1953, the 
Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as 
part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if 
the crime was not of "national importance to Japan". The US argued 
strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it 
would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent 
to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time, the US has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with 
Canada, Ireland, Italy and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the 
Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the 
norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results.

In Japan, of 3,184 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>US military 
personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not 
prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong 
resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, 
military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty 
crimes will remain in US custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, 
of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the 
country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of 
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in 
Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of 
unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts 
martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, 
author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in 
Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon 
report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military 
are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for 
the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the US military has created a worldwide sexual 
playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent 
from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of 
female 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>veterans in 
2006 created the Service Women's Action Network. Its agenda is to 
spread the word that "no woman should join the military".

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of 
our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where 
they do not understand their environments and have been taught to 
think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

Ten steps toward liquidating the empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. 
Here are 10 key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by 
our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt 
us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire 
of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them - the 
things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't 
or won't.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use 
of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected 
governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture 
that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A J Langguth, Hidden Terrors - 
Pantheon, 1979 - on how the US spread torture methods to Brazil and 
Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to 
the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, 
dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense and 
hucksters - along with their expensive medical facilities, housing 
requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses and so forth - that 
follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial 
complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of 
jobs, scientific research and defense. These alleged advantages have 
long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire 
would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the 
world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating 
Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups 
and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for 
immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the US 
Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin 
American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of 
Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004, pp 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should 
abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing 
programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed 
forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian 
contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the 
military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of 
Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the 
World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Nation Books, 2007). Ending 
empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and 
deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and 
combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our 
inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of 
attempting to achieve 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH04Ak02.html#>foreign 
policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their 
dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. 
The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet 
empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall 
is foreordained.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805075593/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Blowback 
(2000), 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805077979/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The 
Sorrows of Empire (2004) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805087281/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Nemesis: 
The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: 
Cold War Island (1999).

(Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson.)




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