Tomgram:
Nick Turse, The Pentagon as Global Landlord
Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:44
 

 
To send this to a friend, or to read more dispatches,
go to http://www.tomdispatch.com 

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon as Global Landlord

As the editor of Chalmers Johnson's Blowback Trilogy for the American Empire Project, I was struck by an oddity when the second volume, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, was published in 2004 to splendid reviews in this country. Johnson's focus in the book -- its heart and soul, you might say -- was what he called our "empire of bases," the over-700 military bases, giant to micro, that the Pentagon then listed as ours. The book vividly laid out the Pentagon's global basing structure, its "footprint" (to use the term the Defense Department favors), in startling detail.

It was a way of getting at the nature of imperial power for a country that largely avoided colonies, but nonetheless managed to garrison the globe. As a topic, all those bases would have seemed unavoidable in any serious review, no less one praising the book. Yet, somehow, review after review managed not to mention, no less substantively discuss, this crucial aspect of Johnson's thesis. Only recently, all these years later, has a mainstream review appeared in this country that focused on his work on those bases. Jonathan Freedland, reviewing the third volume in Johnson's trilogy, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, in the New York Review of Books, took up the subject eloquently -- and (wouldn't you know it?), he isn't an American. He works for the British Guardian.

Isn't it strange that we Americans can garrison the planet and yet, in this country, bases are only a topic of discussion when some local U.S. community suddenly hears that it might lose its special base and an uproar ensues. Typically, we have made it through years of war since 2001, during which untold billions of dollars have gone into constructing massive bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet these bases (as well as the planning behind them) have, until recently, gone almost totally unmentioned in all the argument, debate, and uproar over what to do about Iraq.

In reality -- explain it as you will -- Americans have little grasp of the enormity of the Pentagon, despite real military budgets that, by some calculations, exceed three-quarters of a trillion dollars yearly. (And don't forget that, since 2002, we've been piling on with a second Defense Department, the hapless bureaucratic morass that goes by the name of the Department of Homeland Security.) Nick Turse, Tomdispatch associate editor whose book, The Complex -- about all the newest twists on the old Military-Industrial you-know-what -- will be out in the spring of 2008, quite literally sizes the Pentagon up for us. Tom

Planet Pentagon
How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies
By Nick Turse

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal, championed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq in exchange for bipartisan Congressional support for the long-term (read: more or less permanent) garrisoning of that country. The troops are to be tucked away on "large bases far from Iraq's major cities." This plan sounded suspiciously similar to one revealed by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on April 19, 2003, just as U.S. troops were preparing to enter Baghdad. Headlined "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq," it laid out a U.S. plan for:

a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to…. perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174818/nick_turse_the_pentagon_as_global_landlord




Failed States
The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

by Noam Chomsky

Evil Empire
Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?

By Chalmers Johnson

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution," and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.
http://www.americanempireproject.com/


Main Page - Saturday, 07/14/07

Message Board by American Patriot Friends Network [APFN]

APFN MESSAGEBOARD ARCHIVES

messageboard.gif (4314 bytes)