Dismantling the Empire

Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained world serviced by its own airline—the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides 71 Learjets, 13 Gulfstream IIIs, and 17 Cessna Citation luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the armed forces’ ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, called a C-32A in the Air Force.

OUR “FOOTPRINT” ON THE WORLD

Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we’ve allowed into our vocabulary, none quite equals “footprint” to describe the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers and senior members of the Senate’s Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has become part of the new justification for a major enlargement of our empire—and an announced repositioning of our bases and forces abroad—in the wake of our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project was Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his colleagues were supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush’s preventive war strategy against “rogue states,” “bad guys,” and “evildoers.” They identified something they called the arc of instability, which was said to run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweep across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This was, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World—and perhaps no less crucially it covered the world’s key oil reserves. Hoehn contended, “When you overlay our footprint onto that, we don’t look particularly well positioned to deal with the problems we’re now going to confront.”

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions. The only way this is discussed in our press is via reportage on highly arcane plans for changes in basing policy and the positioning of troops abroad—and these plans, as reported in the media, cannot be taken at face value.

Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, claimed that in order to put “preventive war” into action, we require a “global presence,” by which he meant gaining hegemony over any place that is not already under our thumb. According to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the idea is to create “a global cavalry” that can ride in from “frontier stockades” and shoot up the “bad guys” as soon as we get some intelligence on them.

“LILY PADS” IN AUSTRALIA, ROMANIA, MALI, ALGERIA . . .

In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has been proposing—this is usually called “repositioning”—many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are already under construction—at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil Air Base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian border, and at Bashur airfield in the Kurdish region of the north. (This does not count the previously mentioned Anaconda, which is currently being called an “operating base,” though it may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait—1,600 of Kuwait’s 6,900 square miles—that we used to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.