Pax Americana
Glenn Reynolds likes to joke that wherever there is a U.S. military base of long standing, by the logic of Bush's critics, there must be an ongoing quagmire, and a foolish decision must have been made at the beginning not to send in enough troops. Germany? Japan? Britain?
Heh, heh.
How many U.S. bases are there? Where? How big? How many people involved, and at what cost?
"It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591.5 billion to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more.
"These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.
"For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, which has been an American military colony for the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in the center of that modest-sized island's second largest city. (Manhattan's Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people's countries, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure, although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years."
- Chalmers Johnson, reproduced on TomDispatch.com (Tom Englehardt), link via Hit and Run.
And to think: the Anti-Federalists, at the time of the U.S. founding, were worried about the possible existence of any, that's right, any "standing army" whatsoever.
Chalmers has written (even before 9/11) that the scale and nature of the American Empire is likely to invite certain kinds of attacks. (Oh, oh: here come root causes again--or at least, causes that are somewhere beneath the most visible blooms). Englehardt focusses on how over-stretched the U.S. military is now. Requiring people to stay, when they had been scheduled to retire? Can you say "draft"?
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