Page 1 of 2 Ten steps to liquidate US bases
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.)
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