U.S. Foreign Military Bases & Military Colonialism:
Personal and Analytical Perspectives

                                                            Joseph Gerson        

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR REPRODUCTION BEYOND EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR PEACE & HUMAN RIGHTS CONFERENCE

To be published in Catherine Lutz, ed. 2006. Undermining the Bases of Empire: Social Movements against US Overseas Military Installations  [forthcoming]                

            In May, 2005, with more than 100,000 U.S. troops still at war in Iraq as they sought to enforce the U.S. military occupation of that oil-rich nation, and with confrontations growing over North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the Washington Post carried a disturbing report about U.S. preparations for its next war.  In response to Secretary of Defense (read War) Donald Rumsfeld’s top secret “Interim Global Strike Alert Order,” the Pentagon’s Strategic Command had, it was reported, developed a “full-spectrum global strike…capability to deliver rapid, extended range precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives.”  In plain English, this meant that even as U.S. forces were bogged down in Iraq, the Pentagon claimed to have established the ability to launch offensive military attacks – “conventional” or nuclear - “in any dark corner of the world” including North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela “at any moment’s notice.” [1]

            “American ‘imperial power” former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski once wrote, derives “in large measure from superior organization, from the ability to mobilize vase economic and technological resources promptly for military purposes.”[2]  Like the wars the U.S. has fought to create and then to maintain its global and regional hegemonies, from World War II and the Bushes’ Iraq wars, to Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Kosovo, the Pentagon’s 21^st century “global strike” doctrine depends on the organization of terrorizing military violence in the form of an historically unprecedented U.S. global infrastructure of foreign military bases.  There are more than 700 these fortresses – many of them secret – in more than 40 countries, which are reinforced by so-called “access agreements” that make airports, harbors, training facilities, and other military resources available to U.S. military forces. Without these bases, the U.S. could not have been an “Asian power.”   The Monroe Doctrine that declares all of Latin America and the Caribbean to be within the U.S. “sphere of interest” could not have been enforced with repeated invasions and other acts of subversion over almost two centuries.  And, without its world-wide network of military bases and installations U.S. Cold War and Post-Cold War hegemony could not have been established or maintained in Middle East -- “the jugular vein”[3] of global capitalism. 

            Similarly, if U.S. military forces had not guaranteed the survival of the Saudi monarchy, and if the U.S. had not maintained strategically vital bases near Mecca and Medina, cities revered by Moslems, the world might never have heard of Osama Bin Laden.  September 11 might still be remembered as the day Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown and died in General Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup d’etat.

U.S. bases occupy vast tracks of land and enormous harbors – some in remote rural areas and in or near major cities, including national capitals –  in countries as diverse as Japan, Britain, Germany, Ecuador and Oman, where U.S. foreign legions, its naval and air forces are based and trained. In Rumania, Kyrgyzstan, and other nations, they include smaller “lily pad” or “bare bones” bases that serve as jumping off points for U.S. military interventions.  And, smaller installations playing essential roles in C3I (command, control and communications – including for nuclear war) and in the U.S. campaign to monopolize the militarization of space can be found in Korea, Australia, Sweden, Djibouti and in many other countries.

            Unknown to most U.S. Americans, the U.S. has been building this imperial infrastructure for or more than a century.  It began with the United States’ conquests of Cuba and Puerto Rico to consolidate U.S. control of the Caribbean and of Central America, and the Philippines and Guam to gain access to the fabled China market during the Spanish American War of 1898.  The network was expanded in the course of World War II and the Cold War, and it is being post-modernized (“reconfigured” and “diversified”) to enforce what Vice-President Dick Cheney calls “the arrangement for the 21^st century.”  The goal is to colonize time as well as space in order to guarantee U.S. military, economic, and political dominance for the century to come.[4] 

This new military colonialism claims its tolls of human lives and hopes, the environment, sovereignty and national independence even without shots being fired, missiles launched, or countries invaded.  More than two hundred years ago our Declaration of Independence, decried the “abuses and usurpations” caused by the “Standing Armies” that King George III “kept among us, in times of peace”.  Today the “abuses and usurpations” are far more intrusive and destructive than those that fueled the U.S. war of independence.  They include more than rape, murder, sexual harassment, robbery, other common crimes, seizure of people’s lands, destruction of property, and the cultural imperialism that have accompanied foreign armies since time immemorial.  They now include terrorizing jet blasts of frequent low altitude and night-landing exercises, helicopter and warplanes crashing into homes and schools, the poisoning of environments and communities with military toxics, and they transform “host” communities targets for genocidal nuclear as well as for “conventional” attacks.

As Cynthia Enloe has helped us to understand, U.S. military bases and their “host” communities are complex and dynamic social systems that extend beyond their chain link fences, barbed wire, and ornate main gates. Inside there is housing for the troops and their dependents. There are schools, shops, bowling alleys, and movie theaters as well as firing ranges, runways, and ammunition depots.  To greater and lesser degrees bases engage the people of “host” communities, serving as sources of employment, goods, culture and more.

But “abuses and usurpations” are essential to these complex social relations. Take Kin Town in Okinawa as an example.  Kin Town abuts the Marine Base at Camp Hansen in Okinawa.  Its small commercial district is marked by seedy restaurants and businesses that serve G.I.s .  Before the dollar’s decline, prostitution was rife, and before the nonviolent Okinawan uprising in 1995 and ’96 the forced the U.S. to commit itself to reducing the size of its “footprint” on Okinawa, the explosions of live fire artillery exercises regularly reverberated across this otherwise quiet community.  Sometimes shells landed in people’s homes. Other times they landed on people’s farm land and along the community’s roads. 

Sixty years after the U.S. first occupied Okinawa, and a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War something remarkable, but largely unnoticed, occurred in Kin. On the day that baseball practice resumed in schools across Japan, I found myself in a schoolyard, waiting to meet an authority on the impacts of the nearby bases on the community. Seemingly as much in harmony with nature’s rhythms as the growth of sugar cane or animals caring for their young, children and teenagers were taking their turns fielding ground balls and flies hit to them by their coaches and taking their first swings in batting practice.  But, as these youngsters worked a developing their athletic skills and strength, the hillsides echoed with sounds.  U.S. Marines were developing their skills of killing people, and the children and coaches continued baseball practice as if nothing unusual or dangerous is happening.

Marine gunfire has become a part of Kin Town’s natural environment and daily life.

Military colonialism, hard and soft, were present in other nearly invisible ways.  A century ago European powers consolidated their colonial power over and continued privileged presence in East Asian nations through “unequal treaties.”  In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries Britain, France, Russia, Germany and the United States dictated these treaties to Japan, Korea, China and Indochina.  With Japan’s brutal invasions of these colonies and with the destruction of the colonialism’s remaining foundations in the course of the Second World War and the Chinese revolution, these unequal treaties were consigned to the history’s compost pile.  But, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the unequal treaties returned in a new guise:  military alliances and Status of Forces Agreements imposed by the U.S. on Japan and on many of these same countries which have provided the “legal” foundations for the continued presence of U.S. “standing armies” across much of the Asia-Pacific region and much of the rest of the world for the past six decades – three generations!

The “soft” side of military colonialism expresses itself in food, cultural tastes and markets.   Inexpensive and plentiful food on and around U.S. bases in Okinawa – especially during the 25-year formal military occupation (1945-72) has permeated Okinawan culture, changing tastes – especially for the young – and has created markets for companies like McDonalds, Burger King, and Mattel Toys, and these foreign forces and exact their costs.  Until recently Okinawans, who “host” three-quarters of U.S. troops based in Japan on the 0.6% of the nation’s territory,  enjoyed the longest life expectancies of any Japanese.  Their more leisurely culture was obviously a factor, but the primary cause was Okinawans unique diet.  In addition to jazz, G.I.s brought their hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken, and French fries that have conquered market share from fish, bitter Okinawan cucumbers, and purple sweet potatoes.  Today in Naha, Okinawa’s capital, people spend 46% percent more on hamburgers than people do in other Japanese prefectural capitals.  They spend 60% more on bacon, and 300% more on processed meats, while spending 49% less on salad and 71% less on sushi.  Okinawan men are paying the greatest price.  While Okinawan women remain the longest lived in Japan, Okinawan men’s longevity has fallen to 26^th among Japan’s 47 prefectures.[5]  Military colonialism brings structural violence.  

            Military colonialism is hardly limited to Okinawa.  Hawaii was conquered and annexed under cover of the Spanish-American war for the strategic role it could play in U.S. domination of Asian-Pacific nations, resources, and markets. Despite its reputation as a tourist Mecca, one quarter of Oahu, the main island, is occupied with U.S. military bases (much of it Native Hawaiian sacred lands) and at this writing the Army is working to obtain still more land to train its new Stryker brigades.  The sites they have in mind?   The slopes of the sacred mountains traditionally used by native Hawaiian as their calendar and the holy site to which pregnant women journeyed to give birth to the island’s nobility.  Elsewhere Uzbeks complain that “security” near the newly created U.S. bases in their country is more repressive than it was under Soviet rule.  In Scandinavia, young activists have been discovering new illegal intelligence bases in Norway and a spy base in Sweden that violates Stockholm’s long honored neutrality.[6] And Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become a U.S. military prison colony renowned for torture.

Learning about the scale and impacts of U.S. foreign military bases is no easy task.  The Pentagon doesn’t go out of its way to inform the U.S. or “host” nation publics about the number, missions, or impacts of its web foreign fortresses that are unrivaled by those created by Genghis Khan, Julius Cesar, Alexander the Great, or Queen Victoria. Over-stretched progressive institutions and movements are consumed  as they labor to anticipate, prevent, or overcome the evils of empire, from assaults on the New Deal and Great Society safety nets, to the onslaughts of globalizing corporate capitalism, and the next U.S. invasion. (U.S. wars have become so common in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries that we can study their patterns and exceptions to those patterns.)

I had the good fortune of being introduced to the history and roles of U.S. military bases while studying the history of U.S. diplomacy as an undergraduate being prepared for the U.S. Foreign Service.  Professor Jules Davids, who we later learned had been  the primary ghost writer of President Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage, explained that in the 1890s men like Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Alfred Mahan, and Henry Cabot Lodge had perceived the possibility of the U.S. replacing Britain as the world’s dominant power and then built the blue water navy needed to do it.  (These are the men who leading figures of the G.W. Bush Administration, Rumsfeld, Cheney cited as their models and sources of inspiration as they assumed power.)  Professor Davids described how the navies and merchant steam ships of that era were fueled by coal and required coaling stations placed in strategic locations if they were to traverse large bodies of water like the Pacific Ocean.  He went on to explain how the founders of the United States’ overseas empire laid the foundations for conquering markets in China and Latin America and for challenging its colonial competitors with their conquests in the Spanish-American war at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives – especially in the Philippines where nationalist resistance was particularly strong.  He reminded us that it was under the cover of the Spanish American War that McKinley finally moved to annex Hawaii, after it had been on the military’s wish list since Generals Schofield and Alexander, disguised as tourists, first scouted the island monarchy and its gem – Pearl Harbor in 1873[7]. 

 Although I had worked with exiled and other Filipinos working to free their country of both the Marcos dictatorship and U.S. bases, the scale and impacts of U.S. bases did not penetrate my consciousness until the early 1980s, when I participated in a major nuclear disarmament conference in Hiroshima. There, in addition to being exposed and devastated by what U.S. nuclear weapons had done to fellow human beings and to two cities, I was amazed to learn that the U.S. still had (and has) more than 100 military bases and installations across that island nation.

I was shaken by Okinawan and other Japanese descriptions of what it means to live in communities routinely terrorized by low altitude & night landing exercises, by crimes committed by GIs that regularly went unpunished, and about how people's land had been seized to make way for U.S. bases and how these bases blocked economic and social development.  I was upset by reports of the pervasiveness of prostitution and of seemingly endless sexual harassment and violence near U.S. bases. People shared their agonizing memories of deadly military accidents: planes falling into schools, drunken military drivers who caused deadly accidents (years later it would be my painful responsibility to meet the surviving memories of a family who mother and two daughters had been killed by a drunken Marine on a Sunday morning as they walked along the sidewalk outside the main gate of a U.S. base in Okinawa), and the destruction of people's homes and property during military exercises.

            People also spoke of their shame of being complicit in wars and aggressions, especially the savaging of Vietnam. Their communities having served as bases for U.S. bombers and warships, and much of Okinawa having been used as  jungle warfare training base.   As people scarred by war and massive aerial bombardments, they could identify with the pain, suffering, and losses of other innocent Asians terrorized by the tsunami of U.S. bombs and military might.  I also learned about the political context: the unequal U.S.-Japan Military Alliance that was secretly imposed by the U.S. on the Japanese people as the price for ending the formal military occupation in 1952, and the resulting loss of national sovereignty.  Left unsaid was how the U.S. bases in Japan – some of which are still located in the nation’s capital – are designed to contain Japanese militarism which the U.S. has re-legitimated and revitalized over the decades as part of Washington’s global Cold War and Post-Cold War strategies.

That conference also included representatives of the Guam Landowners Association. Their presentation featured two maps they had brought with them. One showed the locations of the island's best fishing grounds, its best agricultural land, and its best drinking water. The other showed the locations of the U.S. military bases, installations, and military exercises. The two maps were identical.

Filipinos had also come to the conference, not only to share what they knew and learn about U.S. nuclear weapons based and transiting through their country, but to urge leading peace activists from around the world to find ways to act in solidarity with their struggle to end U.S. military colonialism and the deadly Marcos dictatorship.

European peace activists at the conference who had come from Britain, Germany and Russia were terrified by the Reagan Administration’s plans to deploy nuclear armed tomahawk cruise and Pershing II missiles in bases across Europe. The Pershing IIs were designed to destroy the Kremlin and “decapitate” Soviet leadership from its military within eight minutes of the missiles being launched. This, in turn, was leading Moscow to adopt the policy of “launch on warning” in which machines would automatically launch Soviet (now Russian) missiles in a retaliatory attack within minutes of detecting incoming missiles.  Launch on warning still prevails, making Europe and all of humanity vulnerable to human miscalculations and technological glitches, including misreading of the origins of Scandinavian missiles launching weather satellites and an inability to distinguish between flocks of geese and missiles. Global efforts from women’s encampments outside U.S. bases in Britain, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement in the United States, and enlightened diplomacy by Soviet President Michael Gorbachev prevented the deployment of the Pershing IIs, but the struggle against U.S. nuclear weapons and bases in Europe still continues.

Since then, it has been my humbling, sometimes painful and often inspiring privilege to meet and to learn from people who have been victimized by and who are resisting U.S. military bases in many countries from Iceland to Guam, and from Korea to Ecuador. Each case is different. Each base brings: calamitous “abuses and usurpations.” And each brings resistance.

Touch a person’s pain and it is yours.  Etched in my memory is the face of an Okinawan woman who described how, when she was a child, her entire generation of girls – now middle aged women – were terrorized by the brutal G.I. rape and killing of a young girl.  Other faces are there too: the agony of a young Korean describing life within and surrounding the Maehyang-ri bombing range and how people living there continued to suffer frequent practice bombings in what was for them the never-ending Korean war. There is the memory of another intense young Korean at another conference in Japan who insisted that I look at a C.D. his organization had made about the killings Shin Hyo-soon and Shim Mi-sun, two young school girls who were killed by a U.S. tank as they walked to a party – a military crime, like so many others, for which no one in the U.S. military was ever held accountable.[8]

There are also more hopeful life-affirming memories: , the image of older Okinawan farmers – each wearing a headband declaring that “Life is Sacred” - conducting a sit-in outside the courthouse in Naha, demanding the return of their land,  and good Icelandic friend’s smiling face as he described how demonstrators there once placed horse's head on a pole as a way of invoking the old Norse Gods to rid their island of the abominable airbase at Keflavik . They had been joking, but they were also as serious and committed as people can be.

Bases bring insecurity; the loss of self-determination, human rights, and sovereignty. They degrade the culture, values, health and environment of host nations – and of the United States.

Missions of Bases :

The raison d’etre for the United States integrated system military bases and installations is to serve as a global infrastructure for imperial domination. At any given moment approximately 400,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed at or supported by these bases: 100,000 in Europe, 100,000 in East Asia, 140,000 in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, and the remainder in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia and at sea.  Britain, France and Russia still retain a handful of foreign bases, but their significance and impacts pale in comparison to those of the United States. Pentagon spokesmen defending Rumsfeld’s plans to “reconfigure” the deployment and the roles of U.S. bases, have been consistently clear that, “the purpose of military units is to fight and win the nation’s wars, and they should be stationed in locations than enable the United States to use them most efficiently and with minimal political restrictions.” Rumsfeld has pressed the point that “It’s time to adjust those locations from static defense to a more agile and more capable and more 21^st century posture.”[9]  Consistent with President Bush’s public statements and the National Security Strategy published in October 2002, the Administration does not plan to limit its offensive and imperial war fighting to Iraq. In the tradition of Mahan, Cabot Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt, the Bush Administration is building on Clinton-era  “Full Spectrum Dominance” of other nations and peoples at any time and at any level of power to impose “the arrangement for the 21^st century”, not to ensure national defense.

The Bush Administration’s “National Security Strategy” tells us that reason the U.S. still maintains its network of more than 725 foreign military bases and installations in more than 40 countries[10] is “To contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face,”  The United States’ National Strategy Statement goes a bit further, explaining that the U.S. “will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. forces.”[11]   Condoleeza Rice put it more succinctly when, on returning from Asia after traveling with President Bush she said “The centerpiece of the President's strategy” she said, “is our strong forward presence…”[12] 

U.S. military bases exist to:

• To reinforce the status quo: for example U.S. bases in Middle East (including secret bases in Israel[13]) and Central Asia are designed to ensure continued U.S. privileged access to, and control of, those regions' oil. U.S. forces in Europe and Japan serve to maintain the hierarchy of power and privilege created as a result of the Second World War.

• They encircle enemies. This was the case with the Soviet Union and China during Cold War and it continues with China, which is seen as the emerging rival power that is most likely to become a “strategic competitor” for regional and possibly global dominance over the long term. U.S. bases in Korea, Japan, Guam, Australia and in Central Asia, augmented by access agreements with the Philippines and Singapore, and the emerging U.S. alliance with India are all designed to contain China.  Another dimension of encirclement is so-called “missile defenses” – which the Chinese describe as the shield being built to complement Washington’s first-strike nuclear swords. In addition to their deployments at sea and space, missile defense weapons and support systems are being deployed in Greenland, Eastern Europe, Israel, Korea, and Japan. Encirclement is also role played by U.S. bases in Europe and the Mediterranean, the Middle East.

• U.S. bases serve interventionist aircraft carriers, destroyers, nuclear armed submarines and other U.S. warships. This includes bases in Spain, Italy, Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, Japan, and “access” agreements in Israel, the Philippines, Singapore, and other countries.

• Bases in Germany and Britain have long served as training centers for U.S. forces, as was long the case in Vieques for bombardiers.  Jungle war fighting, live fire,  low altitude, and other training continues across Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan.

• Bases can function as jumping off points for U.S. foreign military interventions.  With NATO’s new  “out of area operations” doctrine, the U.S. has reinforced its ability to use bases across Europe for launching attacks and wars against North African, Middle East and Central Asian nations.  Bases in  Okinawa, elsewhere in Japan were essential to the U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf.  This is also a function of the U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Ecuador, and Honduras.

• Bases facilitate C3I, command, control, communications and intelligence for both “conventional” and nuclear war.  This includes the use of space for spying and actual warfare, as we saw in the wars Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq . U.S. bases in Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, Australia, Japan, Qatar, Australia, among others serve these functions.

• As can be seen with U.S. bases in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, U.S. bases are increasingly being used to secure and protect oil and gas pipelines, ensuring fuel for the U.S. economy and its war machines while attempting to control the energy supplies of allied and competitor nations.

• U.S. bases serve to control or influence the governments and political dynamics of host nations. Japan, Korea (where U.S. military forces were deeply involved in successive military coups,) Germany, Saudi Arabia , and today's Iraq begin the list.

• As in the cases of Tajikistan and Iceland small bases and installations can serve as a way to “show the U.S. flag”, demonstrating the U.S. commitment to be taken seriously as a power in a particular country or region.

• While it is too early to call them military bases, as U.S. military power has moved to dominate land, seas and air, it is now moving into space.  The Pentagon’s “Vision 2020” boasts that the U.S. Strategic Command is now working to control the earth from space. Today “Rover” is on the moon. Tomorrow we may well see a base there for war fighting on earth, to control the moon-earth “space well”, and as a base for the colonization of the solar system.

The Current Context:

In what the White House has described as “the most comprehensive restructuring of U.S. military bases overseas since the end of the Korean War”,[14] Secretary Rumsfeld is working to reconfigure and to revitalize U.S. forward military deployments and its global military infrastructure.  The party line is that the redesign is being undertaken to address the challenges of the Post-Cold War and post 9-11 world in which terrorists, nuclear and near-nuclear powers threaten the U.S. “homeland.”  This is true in part, but the restructuring is better understood as an pillar of the Administration's megalomaniacal ambitions that require threatening and fighting of offensive wars. The campaign is one of the more ambitious tactics to expand and to consolidate the U.S. global empire into and through the power vacuums left in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire.

While the unilateralism of the Bush-Cheney administrations is widely regarded as a radical departure from more complex and nuanced U.S. foreign and military policies, there is more continuity than change.  During World War II, U.S. strategic planners envisioned “the Grand Area”, a single global market economy that would be dominated by the Untied States.  That dream was frustrated by the rise of Soviet power and the Cold war.  With their collapse, the way has been opened to establish that global empire in the form of “the arrangement for the 21^st century.”

Following the initial uncertainty that accompanied the collapse of the Berlin Wall – a time when most military alliances had lost their raisons d’etre and of hopes that military budgets could be transformed into “peace dividends” was widespread – the first Bush Administration responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with the Desert Storm war.  The President and his minions mobilized popular and global support by stressing the illegality of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the oil-rich sheikdom, but they were also clear that Washington’s goal was to create “a new world order” in which “What we say goes.”  The first rationale embraced and reinforced the United Nations’ Charter, but the second envisioned Washington’s whims and the Pentagon’s power replacing international law as the foundation of international relations. 

Even this was not entirely new.  “Desert Storm” was in large measure a reaffirmation of what Noam Chomsky has called “Political Axiom #1”: that the U.S. will never permit its enemies, nor its allies, to gain independent access to Middle East oil. --the “jugular vein” of global capitalism since World War I, when Winston Churchill called it “The Prize.”[15]  

In addition to being designed to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, the war was also designed in part to serve as a demonstration war.  The conflagration in which one of the Arab world’s most advanced nations was, as the United Nations later reported, bombed back into the “pre-industrial age” with hundreds of thousands of people ultimately dying from its after effects,[16] was also designed to serve as a warning to other so-called rogue nations, and even to China that this would be their fate if they challenged U.S. hegemony. 

Preparations for the war also served as the occasion to discipline U.S. allies and to restructure the world (dis)order. With “Desert Storm,” NATO was turned toward “out of area” operations, with bases in Britain and Germany used as staging areas and jumping off points. Even placid Shannon Airport in Dublin was gratuitously forced to accommodate U.S. warplanes to remind the Irish that they live in what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls a “vassal state.”[17] The U.S. successfully traumatized Japanese political culture by insisting that $13 billion and the use of U.S. bases from Okinawa to Hokkaido for the war were not sufficient.  In the future, as we have seen with the Bush-Cheney Administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Japan would be expected to” show its flag” deploying its troops to war zones in violation of its war-renouncing constitution.

Preparations for the war also visited physical and emotional hardships on the people of Vieques in Puerto Rico.  After having serving as a target for U.S. and allied naval and aerial bombardment since the Second World War and years of sometimes dangerous nonviolent resistance, the Navy had previously announced that it would be closing the base. But, within weeks of the September 11 attacks, the it was announced that the navy  would almost immediately resume bombing exercise there “after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”[18]   Once again Navy bombers traumatized communities and savaged the environment with new rounds of practice bombing runs.  Across the planet, Diego Garcia – all of whose Chagos people were forced to leave their island paradise between 1967 and1973 when Britain turned it over to the United States – was shown to be fundamentally important to U.S. Middle East hegemony, as well as to U.S. ambitions in Southern and Central Asia.  Its vast stores of pre-positioned weapons were moved to the war zone, and its runways served as a base for daily B-52 bombing attacks. 

Similarly, in North Africa and the Middle East, the war was used to exercise formal and informal alliances, to re-legitimate the presence and use of U.S. military bases in Egypt and the Persian Gulf, and to build new military bases in strategically important Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Qatar and Kuwait. With the nuclear threats made by President Bush, Vice President Quayle, Secretary of War Cheney, and British Prime Minister Major during the “Desert Shield” phase of the war, and, with the encirclement of Iraq with as many as 700 nuclear weapons to back up those threats, the First Bush Administration attempted to re-legitimate its nuclear arsenal and the practice of nuclear blackmail -- at least in elite U.S. circles --for the Post-Cold War period.[19]  Essential pillars of those threats and the threats made in the run up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq were the military bases across in Britain, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Japan, and other nations where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored, where U.S. nuclear-capable ships are based or make port calls, and which host nuclear war fighting C3I functions.

Compared to the Bush Administrations, the Clinton 90’s are often thought of as a relatively peaceful era for the United States, if not Rwanda, the Congo, or Haiti.  In truth, however, the Clinton Administration’s “Bridge to the 21^st Century” reinforced the transition from one Bush Administration to the other.  In Europe, Assistant Secretary of State, Strobe Talbot and the U.S. military did their best to re-divide and to contain the continent. They pressed for the inclusion of nearly all of Eastern Europe into an enlarged NATO to augment U.S. interventionary power targeted against the Middle East and successor states of the Soviet Union and to counter growing French and Germany ambitions.  The U.S. led NATO in fighting “Kosovo” war against Serbia in violation of the United Nations Charter, and it emerged from the war with a new and massive military base, Camp Bondsteel, the first of what the Pentagon hoped would become a new system of U.S. Eastern European military bases.

Bush Administration came to power with the commitment to impose what Vice President Cheney called, “the arrangement for the 21^st century” to ensure that “the United States will continue to be the dominant political, economic, and military power in the world.” The so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” – the near-complete integration of information technologies into U.S. war fighting doctrines and its air, land, sea and space based systems, was envisioned as an essential pillar of “the arrangement.” 

Even before the September 11 attacks and the publication of the unilateralist, first-strike, “National Strategy Statement” a year later, the Administration was preparing popular opinion for the new (dis)order.  In an interview with The New Yorker, Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was clear that the vision for “the arrangement for the 21^st century” was actually “a whole new world.”  By more fully engaging the “Revolution in Military Affairs,” the U.S. would “have the military ability to act at any time, anywhere, in defense of what it sees as its global interests.”  As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Andrew Hoehm would later observe that “Transformation is more than just new capabilities, inherent in transformation is a physical change of the global military posture.”[20] And, the “new world” would transcend traditional, and what the administration saw as outmoded, concepts of national sovereignty. [21]

Rumsfeld’s Restructuring

Pre-inaugural reports in 2000, prepared under the direction of (later to be) Assistant Secretary of State Armitage and (currently) Ambassador Khalilzad, recommended “diversification” of U.S. military bases: reconfiguring the bases’ Cold War global architecture to meet the demands of 21^st century war fighting and intimidation.  As the plans that are now being implemented to withdraw two Army divisions are to be withdrawn from Germany, and 12,000 troops from South Korea demonstrate, they were serious about their aim of, “afford[ing] maximum flexibility in sending forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other potential battlegrounds.”[22]  Over the next decade, in what has been described as a “rolling process” some bases will be closed. Some will be merged.  But, the consistent goal of the reconfiguration will to maximize U.S. war fighting capabilities by increasing the agility, flexibility, and speed of U.S. fighting forces.[23]  With “diversification” of U.S. forces in East Asia and the Pacific – redeployed many of them further south –China would be more completely encircled.  The likely number of U.S. casualties in a second Korean war could be reduced.  And U.S. military power in the Middle East and the increasingly important oil-rich recesses of Central Asia could be augmented.

Congressional Democrats, unfortunately, have been unable or unwilling to provide an alternate vision.  During the 2004 presidential campaign, when initial plans for the restructuring were first being leaked to the press, the Democratic Party’s contender, John Kerry could only echo concerns of some in the defense establishment.  The reconfiguration had not been sufficiently thought through.  It would upset allies, “give[e] up valuable real estate”, and “bring troops home where they would be further from potential war zones.”[24] 

In Europe, with Spain having precipitously withdrawn from President Bush’s diminishing coalition in Iraq, and having opted for “Europe” over the United States, Madrid was to be punished.   Italy, not Spain, would likely become new home of the Navy’s European headquarters which to be moved from Britain, and closer to the Middle East’s oil reserves. With the Fuldt Gap no longer the geo-political center of the struggle for world power, the lion’s share of the U.S. bases to be closed and troops withdrawn would be from Germany.  Although the United States’ major air base at Ramstein would remain, other U.S. interventionist forces will be transferred from Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, and to Turkey if the new regime in Istanbul permitted.

The movement of U.S. forces eastward from Germany reflects more than simply moving U.S. forces closer to potential battlefields. Rumsfeld and Cheney also want to ensure that “Old Europe” will not be able to inhibit Washington’s use of murderous force then next time it opts for unilateral or “Anglo-Saxon” invasion or attack.  As one “senior military official” explained, there is “a purposeful effort to possibly leave places where they may not want us or they are snubbing us”, and “The Eastern Block countries have reached out to us…They are looking for a partnership.”[25]

To the south, under cover of preparations for the Iraq war, the Pentagon removed one of the precipitating causes of the 9-11 attacks: the majority of U.S. troops and bases in Saudi Arabia, which many Moslems experienced as sullying Islam's holiest land. These troops, bases and functions were transferred to Qatar, Kuwait,  Djibouti and Bahrain. The Bush-Cheney plans for Iraq were not limited to its vast oil reserves serving the U.S. “national interest” by fueling the U.S. economy and serving a means to leverage accommodations from Saudi Arabia and OPEC.  With bases like Camp Victory in Baghdad, which hosts two strategically important headquarters and more than 14,000 troops and thirteen other “enduring” U.S. military bases, Washington’s military planners see Iraq as a bastion of U.S. military power in the Middle East, with the added ability to project U.S. force into Central Asia, for decades to come. [26]

In the Asia-Pacific, the news is that now “all of the Pentagon road maps lead to Guam,” which is to “become one of two or three major hubs of U.S. activity in the world.”[27]  Japan, which has been the keystone of U.S. Asia-Pacific power since 1945, is being given an augmented role which is being negotiated between the U.S. and Japan and within the Japanese elite.  As part of the decade old effort to pacify popular opinion in Okinawa, the Pentagon’s plan calls for either moving Futenma Air Base, which has long tormented Ginowan City which surrounds it, to a more remote site on the island or integrating it into the vast Kadena Air Base.  It also calls for rotating or moving some of the 15,000 Marines based in Okinawa to Japan’s main islands.  Meanwhile, a number of command functions, a second aircraft carrier, and other forces are to be transferred from the United States’ west coast and from Guam and to Japan, bringing them closer to China and North Korea.[28]  South Korea being pressed to assume greater “burden sharing”, not only on the Korean Peninsula, but globally as we see with Seoul’s grudging deployment of 3,000 South Korean soldiers to help enforce the U.S. occupation of Iraq.   As part of the “diversification” U.S. troops are being redeployed from the Demilitarized Zone along the 38^th  – perhaps the most militarized piece of real estate in the world – to positions south of  less vulnerable bases south of Seoul and in the short term to Iraq. 

Elsewhere in the region, U.S. bases in Australia are being augmented.  The “Visiting Forces” and access agreements with the Philippines, and Singapore, are being expanded, and Indian Ocean Tsunami relief operations 2005 helped to open the way for U.S. forces to return to Thailand and for greater cooperation with the Indonesian military.[29]  The Philippine press reports, U.S. military officials are privately exploring the possibility of reestablishing its bases in the former colony.[30]

The Bush Administration's invasion of Afghanistan initially promised to the way in for U.S. bases in Central Asia where, as General Wald of the European Command put it, "In the Caspian Sea you have a large mineral [i.e. petroleum] reserve...We want to assure the long term viability of those resources."  Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush Administration used its intimidating "for us or against us" doctrine, to force dictatorships in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to surrender sovereignty and to open the way for what the Pentagon hoped would become permanent U.S.military bases.  Bases were established and enlarged in Afghanistan, Uzebkistan, and Kyrgyzstan - with access and over-flight agreements with Kazakhstan, and Tajikstan Turkmenistan - were designed not only to keep the (repressive) peace within the region, but to augment the encirclement of both China and Iran.

At this writing, the permanence of these bases is less than guaranteed.

In Uzbekistan, the bases came with the pledge to the country's dictator, Islam Karimov, that Washington would "protect 's security" through a "qualified new relationship...[that] includes the need to consult on an urgent basis...in the event of a direct threat to the security or territorial of the Republic of Uzbekistan."    Consultations

may have taken place immediately following the massacre of hundreds of people who engaged in a popular demonstration in the city of Andijon in the spring of 2005.  But, as news of the massacre and of the U.S. aid that had previously been provided to the four Uzbek ministries responsible for the killings, questions were raised in Congress, opening a breach between Washington and Tashkent. With Beijing and Moscow offering Karimov uncritical support and pressing both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to oust the U.S. bases, their future was placed in doubt.

And, in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is working to establish nine permanent bases, President Karzai remains the "Mayor of Kabul" unable to travel the country freely,  and provincial representatives have balked at making long term military commitments to the United States.

Africa, which the Pentagon expects to become the source of up to 25% of the U.S. oil supply by 2015, is also the focus of a major U.S. military build up.  With bases in Algeria and Djibouti and access agreements in Morocco and Egypt, the new focus is south of the Sahara where a “family” of military bases is to be created.  This “family” is to include major installations for brigades of up to 5,000 troops “that could be robustly used.” The family will also include “lightly equipped bases available in crises to special forces or Marines.” “Host” nations for the new family are to include Cameroon, Guinea (which has also been targeted as a major source of oil), Mali, and Sao Tome and Principe, with Senegal and Uganda providing refueling installations for the Air Force.[31]

And, Washington hasn't forgotten what used to be its own “backyard,” Latin America. Although the Puerto Rican people's fifty year struggle to close the base at Vieques has prevailed, new military bases are now sprouting across Andean nations and the U.S. is increasingly militarizing the Caribbean.

The “restructuring” of the United States’ unprecedented infrastructure of global military power is being built on several conceptual pillars, foremost among them agility, flexibility and speed.  In addition to training U.S. forces and developing new weapons that are “fast, small, dispersed” and which can be easily “decentralized”[32] the Pentagon is working to “reconfigure” the locations and functions of its bases, installations, and access agreements to serve its new priorities.

Vice-President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and their associates want total “freedom of action.”  If, Germany, or another “vassal” state are reluctant to permit U.S. military bases and installations in a given war, Rumsfeld's Pentagon wants be sure that bases in other countries will be immediately available.  The plan for South Korea is illustrative of the multiple purposes it wants a greater number of bases to be able to play.  While the primary roles of U.S. forces in the Republic of Korea will continue to be 1) helping to ensure that North Korea is not tempted to take reckless military actions, and 2) being prepared for possible “regime change” war in the North, U.S. forces in will have other agendas. Their presence and the ability to threaten their complete withdrawal will be used to influence South Korean foreign and domestic policies.  Despite objections being raised by President Roh Mu-hyun[33], U.S. troops deployed in South Korea are there to be used during confrontations and possible conflicts with China and elsewhere in East Asia.  And, as in the case of their being dispatched to invade and occupy Iraq, U.S. South Korean based forces are to be available for interventions as far afield as the Persian Gulf.

At considerable expense, bases in Japan, Ecuador, Guinea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rumania, and elsewhere are being similarly prepared for multi-tasking.

Speed is as important to Rumsfeld’s Pentagon as flexibility.  With more troops and major bases being positioned closer to anticipated war zones, with new technologies, and with new “lily pad” bases as jumping off points for military interventions and aggression, the Pentagon is preparing to strike before the target of its attack can prepare its defenses or a long term strategy of resistance. The perhaps unwarranted hope is that “shock and awe” will work in future wars.

Building on both the inherited infrastructure and new bases and installations, U.S. forward deployed forces are to be organized along a three-tiered integrated structure: 1) major hub bases like those in Britain, Italy, Japan, Okinawa, Guam; Qatar and Bahrain 2) smaller centers or “Forward Operating bases” like those in Spain, South Korea, Diego Garcia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Australia; and 3) “Lily pads”, heavily stocked with pre-positioned weapons and munitions,  will serve as jumping off points in countries ranging from Lithuania to Tajikistan, and Djibouti to the Andean nations in South America. And, to increase flexibility and augment its bare bones “lily pads,” the Navy is exploring the development of essentially unmanned and strategically located floating platforms where munitions can be pre-positioned, and “sea basing” creating “a fleet of large maritime ships capable of launching and sustaining a combat force – either Army or Marine – thousands of miles from shore.[34]

Ending “Abuses and Usurpations”

How will we end the plagues of imperial wars made possible by Washington’s global infrastructure of foreign military bases and the “abuses and usurpations” that inevitably accompany our foreign legions?  How do people in the United States who believe that freedom and security are essential human rights make common cause and act in solidarity with people in other nations who are struggling to liberate their nations from U.S. military colonialism? 

There are no easy answers, but we do well to remember the words of the abolitionist leader Fredrick Douglas, who taught that power yields nothing without a struggle.  And struggle takes place at many levels of human activity: politically, intellectually culturally, economically, and spiritually in addition to what are usually the pyrrhic victories of armed resistance.

The Roman, Spanish, and most British legions came home with the decline and fall of their empires.  While, like the inspiring victory of the people of Vieques in Puerto Rico, we may succeed in time by focusing on the withdrawal of particular bases, but the 100 year to win the withdrawal of Subic and Clark bases and the struggles of the Okinawan and Japanese movements may provide a better model: integrating anti-bases campaigns into broader struggles for democracy and national self-determination.

It should be borne in mind that the United States is increasingly an isolated and pariah nation that depends on European, Asian, and oil-rich Middle Eastern nations to maintain its empire.  Both the national debt which is subsidized by Japanese, Chinese and other nations’ massive purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds, and the United States’ seemingly irreversible balance of payments are placing hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign hands.  Wealth is power, and in time states and political forces seeking to contain or off-set U.S. power will decide that it is time to literally cash in their chips. At some point, as the former head of the Dutch Foreign Ministry told me shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq, some of these nations may conclude that they have had enough.  By selling off their bonds or selectively disinvesting in U.S.-based multi-national corporations, , Asian or Middle Eastern nations could at the very least send a powerful signal to the U.S. establishment.  They might have the power to bring down the U.S. house of cards, much as states, private institutions and individuals did in the 1970s and 80s to help end South African apartheid.  Of course, there would be consequences all around, but change does happen, and it can be painful as well as liberating.

In building the political forces within the United States and internationally to win withdrawal of U.S. bases, we should not under estimate the importance of intellectual and analytical work that can be done by scholars, journalists, and by community based activists.  We should not underestimate the importance of this exceptional conference.  Few in U.S. academic circles outside of the war colleges, and certainly not the wider public, have an inkling of the scale, roles, and impacts of U.S. foreign military bases or the need to repatriate them. The foundation of any political movement is knowledge and information that touches people’s moral imaginations, that contributes to our understandings of the world and how it operates, and which support or lead to action. Hopefully, like the largely invisible and demanding intellectual work that prepared the way for the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s, the Vietnam-era peace and feminist movements, and the Nuclear Freeze and Central America solidarity movements of the 1980s, scholarly and analytical work being done today will open the for U.S. Americans to assume our roles in bringing our troops, bases, and war machines home and restoring our respect for other peoples and nations.

Recent years, especially since the United States’ militarized responses to the September 11 attack, have witnessed a growing wave of anti-bases education and organizing around the world.  Most impressive is the global anti-bases network that began in East Asia under the tutelage of Focus on Global South, an international NGO based in Bangkok which is devoted to “development, policy research, analysis and action.”  Beginning with a small meeting in Seoul in 1999, anti-bases activists from the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Korea and the United States began sharing information and exploring possible collaborations. Subsequent meetings were held in Jakarta and Seoul, and the “No Bases” network was launched at an anti-bases conference that brought together people from thirty-four countries held within the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India in 2004. The network’s e-mail network currently serves hundreds of people and organizations across the world. A web page with detailed information about bases and resistance campaigns is being developed.  And the network is slowly exploring ways in which member groups and others can act in solidarity with one another and collaborate.

The Asia-Pacific region continues to be the center of the most steadfast nonviolent resistance to the U.S. bases.  The candlelight vigils protesting the killings of Shin Hyo-soon and Shim Mi Sun and  the refusal of U.S. authorities to hold anyone accountable transformed Korea’s political landscape played a major role in the election of Roh Mu-hyun. A new and more independent generation, which looks critically at the continued U.S. military presence in Korea, has assumed power. 

In Okinawa, decades of popular opposition are forcing the Pentagon to draw down the numbers of troops based there.  The initial report of the Pentagon’s Overseas Basing Commission[35] indicates, the courageous resistance of the people small remote town of Nago in northern Okinawa to the construction of a new air base on reef just beyond Haneko Beach appears to have been largely successful.  Rather than pursue the construction of the new base, the Commission is urging that the base be built elsewhere or that the functions of the dangerous Futemna base be integrated to the massive Kadena air base.  While the struggle of the people of Nago was supported by people from across Okinawa, including base opponents in Ginowan City which surrounds the Futenma base, to get a sense of the movement it helps to know that the resistance in Nago was led by grandmothers and grandfathers in their eighties, and that the symbol of their resistance was a friendly Dugong, which represented the manatees whose feeding grounds are the waters surrounding the threatened off shore reef.

Despite the Visiting Forces Agreement, the MLSA, and the political axis created to bind Presidents Bush and Macapagal-Arroyo, the Philippine movement has severely limited the return and operations of U.S. forces.  Further east, Native Hawaiians, for whom land and respect for Creation are essential to their identity and ways of life, are literally living their struggle to prevent base expansions and to win back their sacred lands. Like the people of Vieques, they have been occupying live fire sites, living in the open, and challenging the Pentagon in the courts and in the court of public opinion.

Equally courageous are the banished and long forgotten people of Diego Garcia who are struggling to return home and to end their years of suffering and marginalization as foreign outcasts, “some few Tarzans.”[36]  With activists allies in New Zealand and the help of leading journalists, human rights organizations, and jurists in Britain they have risen from oblivion and are pressing their just demands on the consciences and political systems of the Anglo-American Powers That Be.  In the Americas, resistance to U.S. bases in growing in Ecuador, and even before Lula assumed power in Brazil, Latin America’s rising power refused Washington’s demands to transform its space center into a U.S. base. And, across the Atlantic, activists in Europe, activists committing civil disobedience at U.S. and NATO nuclear weapons bases have forced their governments and political parties to begin demanding that the U.S. withdraw the nuclear weapons that  are still based in Belgium, England, Germany, Holland, Italy and Turkey.[37]  And, in the northern reaches of Scandinavia, a lively network of young Scandinavians, is scouting out and protesting the presence of secret bases in Norway and Sweden. 

Reality is, of course, dynamic.  Catastrophes as well as the routine operations of militarized systems will continue to provide major openings for us as they have in the past. Hegel’s moment of history will make itself felt when we least expect it. Recall the global outrage that followed the killing of twenty-two Italians when joy riding US pilots sliced the ski tow line at an alpine resort.  Remember the world-wide identity with the Okinawan people in the wake of  the kidnapping and rape of a twelve year old school girl by three Marines and the solidarity that flowed toward the popular nonviolent Okinawan uprising.  The following year business as usual presented another opportunity when the G-8 met in Okinawa.  They were greeted by a five mile long human chain of around Kadena Air Base and by a full page advertisement in the prefecture’s newspaper, which called for the withdrawal of U.S. bases and was signed by hundreds of U.S. Americans. 

“Life” John Lennon told us “is what happens when you are planning to do other things.”  It was the unexpected synthesis of the mainland competition for the growing Latino vote and of decades of courageous organizing and action that forced the closing of that deadly and still badly polluted base. And, it was Dictator Marcos’ murder of  Benigno Aquino that sparked the EDSA revolution and fueled the resistance that resulted in the withdrawal of the U.S. bases from the Philippines.

Basic human decency dictates that those of U.S. in the United States be persistent and use our imaginations in exploring ways that we can act in solidarity with movements working to liberate their communities and countries from the “abuses and usurpations” of U.S. bases.  Even small acts of human solidarity, the sending of a letter or statement, assisting with research, or traveling to communicate concern and remorse, can help to buoy movements and have wide reverberations.  As Roland Simbulan, Walden Bello, and Cookie Djokno and other leaders of the movement that won the withdrawal of U.S. bases from the Philippines,  the tiny network of U.S. activists that called themselves “Friends of the Filipino People” played a vital role in successful Philippine struggle.  Timely advertisements and statements of remorse and solidarity have contributed to the Okinawan movement.  Exposure and speaking tours, videos and publications have helped to raise issues and build movement within the U.S.  And we should never underestimate the importance of material assistance.  Scientific research in Massachusetts and California about the human and environmental consequences of military toxics has been valuable to base opponents around the world.  And even small financial contributions can help to pay for the leaflets, sound systems, and travel that are essential to popular movements anywhere in the world. And a dollar will pay for a lot more leaflets printed in Ecuador or Sao Tome than in New York or New Mexico!

Finally, there is the importance of vision.  Even the Bible tells us that “A people without vision will perish.”  A Quaker statement published early in the Cold War speaks as eloquently today as it did then: “Military power in today’s world is incompatible with freedom. Incompatible with providing security, and ineffective in dealing with evil.”[38]

*Dr. Joseph Gerson is the Director of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England. He is deeply involved in the U.S. peace and anti-war movement and participated in the founding conferences of United for Peace and Justice, The Asia Peace Assembly, and the European Network for Peace and Human Rights. His books include: The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases , With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination , and The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention . For more information, write JGerson@afsc.org, see www.afsc.org/pes.htm, or phone 617-661-6130.