Wests Hypocrisy: 737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire
Posted on Monday, February 19 @ 17:16:13 EST by qjaved
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Anonymous writes " The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's new
book, "NEMESIS:
The Last Days of the American Republic
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" (Metropolitan Books).
By Chalmers Johnson
19/02/2007 "ICH"
-- - 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; and by following the
changing politics of global basing, one can learn much
about our ever more all-encompassing imperial
"footprint" and the militarism that grows with it.
It is not easy, however, to assess the size or exact
value of our empire of bases. Official records available
to the public on these subjects are misleading, although
instructive. According to the Defense Department's
annual inventories from 2002 to 2005 of real property it
owns around the world, the Base Structure Report, there
has been an immense churning in the numbers of
installations.
The total of America's military bases in other people's
countries in 2005, according to official sources, was
737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the
pursuit of President Bush's strategy of preemptive war,
the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues
to go up.
Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and
medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe
in 2005 -- mostly air and naval bases for our bombers
and fleets -- almost exactly equals Britain's thirty-six
naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in
1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required
thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from
Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps
the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for
an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is
somewhere between thirty-five and forty.
Using data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon
bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were
worth at least $127 billion -- surely far too low a
figure but still larger than the gross domestic products
of most countries -- and an estimated $658.1 billion for
all of them, foreign and domestic (a base's "worth" is
based on a Department of Defense estimate of what it
would cost to replace it). During fiscal 2005, the
military high command deployed to our overseas bases
some 196,975 uniformed personnel as well as an equal
number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian
officials, and employed an additional 81,425 locally
hired foreigners.
The worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005,
including those based domestically, was 1,840,062
supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department
civil service employees and 203,328 local hires. Its
overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained
32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other
buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it
leased. The size of these holdings was recorded in the
inventory as covering 687,347 acres overseas and
29,819,492 acres worldwide, making the Pentagon easily
one of the world's largest landlords.
Read full story at ICH.
NOTE FOLLOWING:
The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May 2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian areas since 9/11.
In some cases, foreign countries themselves have tried to keep their U.S. bases secret, fearing embarrassment if their collusion with American imperialism were revealed. In other instances, the Pentagon seems to want to play down the building of facilities aimed at dominating energy sources, or, in a related situation, retaining a network of bases that would keep Iraq under our hegemony regardless of the wishes of any future Iraqi government.
In Jordan, to take but one example, we have secretly deployed up to five thousand troops in bases on the Iraqi and Syrian borders. (Jordan has also cooperated with the CIA in torturing prisoners we deliver to them for "interrogation.") Nonetheless, Jordan continues to stress that it has no special arrangements with the United States, no bases, and no American military presence.
The country is formally sovereign but actually a satellite of the United States and has been so for at least the past ten years. Similarly, before our withdrawal from Saudi Arabia in 2003, we habitually denied that we maintained a fleet of enormous and easily observed B-52 bombers in Jeddah because that was what the Saudi government demanded. So long as military bureaucrats can continue to enforce a culture of secrecy to protect themselves, no one will know the true size of our baseworld, least of all the elected representatives of the American people."
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