US Army Special Forces are seen doing training exercises at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, not unlike the kind of exercises done at military bases the world over. (photo: USAOC News Service/Flickr/Creative Commons)
The
Obama Administration Is Continuing a Failed Strategy of Building Military Bases
Around the World
By David Vine, In These
Times
16 January 16
The United
States seems intent on continuing its imperialistic policies in the Middle East
(and worldwide).
Amid
the distractions of the holiday season, the New York Times revealed that
the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon proposal to create a “new”
and “enduring” system of military bases around the Middle East. Though this is
being presented as a response to the rise of the Islamic State and other
militant groups, there's remarkably little that’s new about the Pentagon plan.
For more than 36 years, the U.S. military has been building an unprecedented
constellation of bases that stretches from Southern Europe and the Middle East
to Africa and Southwest Asia.
The record of
these bases is disastrous. They have cost tens of billions of dollars and
provided support for a long list of undemocratic host regimes, including Saudi
Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Djibouti. They have enabled a series of U.S. wars and military interventions,
including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which have helped make the
Greater Middle East a cauldron of sectarian-tinged power struggles, failed
states, and humanitarian catastrophe. And the bases have fueled radicalism,
anti-Americanism, and the growth of the very terrorist organizations now
targeted by the supposedly new strategy.
If
there is much of anything new about the plan, it’s the public acknowledgement
of what some (including TomDispatch) have long suspected:
despite years of denials about the existence of any “permanent bases” in the
Greater Middle East or desire for the same, the military intends to maintain a
collection of bases in the region for decades, if not generations, to come.
Thirty-Six
Years of Base Building
According
to the Times, the
Pentagon wants to build up a string of bases, the largest of which would
permanently host 500 to 5,000 U.S. personnel. The system would include four
“hubs”—existing bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, and Spain—and smaller
“spokes” in locations like Niger and Cameroon. These bases would, in turn,
feature Special Operations forces ready to move into action quickly for what
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has called “unilateral crisis response” anywhere
in the Greater Middle East or Africa. According to unnamed Pentagon officials
quoted by theTimes, this proposed expansion would cost a mere pittance,
just “several million dollars a year.”
Far
from new, however, this strategy predates both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
In fact, it goes back to
1980 and the Carter Doctrine. That
was the moment when President Jimmy Carter first asserted that the United
States would secure Middle Eastern oil and natural gas by “any means necessary,
including military force.” Designed to prevent Soviet intervention in the
Persian Gulf, the Pentagon build-up under
Presidents Carter and Ronald Reagan included the creation of installations in
Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
During the first Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon deployed hundreds of thousands
of troops to Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. After that war, despite
the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military didn't go home.
Thousands of U.S. troops and a significantly expanded base infrastructure
remained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Bahrain became home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The
Pentagon built large air installations in Qatar and expanded operations in the
United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman.
Following
the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon
spent tens of billions of dollars building and expanding yet more bases. At the
height of those U.S.-led wars, there were more than 1,000 installations,
large and small, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Despite the closing of most U.S.
bases in the two countries, the Pentagon still has access to at least nine major bases in
Afghanistan through 2024. After leaving Iraq in 2011, the military returned in
2014 to reoccupy at least six installations. Across the Persian Gulf today,
there are still U.S. bases in every country save Iran and Yemen. Even in Saudi
Arabia, where widespread anger at the U.S. presence led to an official
withdrawal in 2003, there are still small U.S. military contingents and
a secret drone base.
There are secret bases in Israel,
four installations in Egypt, and
at least one in Jordan near
the Iraqi border.Turkey hosts
17 bases, according to the Pentagon. In the wider region, the military has
operated drones from at least five bases in
Pakistan in recent years and there are nine new installations in Bulgaria and Romania,
along with a Clinton administration-era base still operating in Kosovo.
In
Africa, Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier, just
miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula, has expanded dramatically
since U.S. forces moved in after 2001.
There are now upwards of 4,000 troops on the 600-acre base. Elsewhere, the
military has quietly built a collection of small bases and sites for
drones, surveillance flights, and Special Operations forces from Ethiopia and
Kenya to Burkina Faso and Senegal. Large bases in Spain and Italy support
what are now thousands of U.S. troops regularly deploying to Africa.
A
Disastrous Record
After
36 years, the results of this vast base build-up have been, to put it mildly,
counterproductive. As Saudi Arabia illustrates, U.S. bases have often helped
generate the radical militancy that they are now being designed to defeat. The
presence of U.S. bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, in fact, a major
recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for
the 9/11 attacks.
Across
the Middle East, there’s a correlation between
a U.S. basing presence and al-Qaeda’s recruitment success. According to former
West Point professor Bradley Bowman, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East
have been a “major catalyst for
anti-Americanism and radicalization” since a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines
in Lebanon in 1983. In Africa, a
growing U.S. base and troop presence has “backfired,” serving as a boon for
insurgents, according to research published by the Army’s Military Review and
the Oxford Research Group. A
recent U.N. report suggests
that the U.S. air campaign against IS has led foreign militants to join the
movement on “an unprecedented scale.”
Part
of the anti-American anger that such bases stoke comes from the support they
offer to repressive, undemocratic hosts. For example, the Obama administration
offered only tepid criticism of
the Bahraini government, crucial for U.S. naval basing, in 2011 when its
leaders violently cracked down on
pro-democracy protesters with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Elsewhere, U.S. bases offer legitimacy to
hosts the Economist Democracy Index considers
“authoritarian regimes,” effectively helping to block the spread of democracy
in countries including Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti,
Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Low-Balling
The
Pentagon’s basing strategy has not only been counterproductive in encouraging
people to take up arms against the United States and its allies, it has also
been extraordinarily expensive. Military bases across the Greater Middle East cost the
United States tens of billions of dollars every year, as part of an
estimated $150 billion in
annual spending to maintain bases and troops abroad. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti
alone has an annual rent of $70 million and at least $1.4 billion in
ongoing expansion costs. With the Pentagon now proposing an enlarged basing
structure of hubs and spokes from Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, cost estimates
reported in the New York Times in the “low millions” are
laughable, if not intentionally misleading. (One hopes the Government
Accountability Office is already investigating the true costs.)
The
only plausible explanation for such low-ball figures is that officials are
taking for granted—and thus excluding from their estimates—the continuation of
present wartime funding levels for those bases. In reality, further entrenching
the Pentagon’s base infrastructure in the region will commit U.S. taxpayers to
billions more in annual construction, maintenance, and personnel costs
(while civilian infrastructure in
the U.S. continues to be underfunded and neglected).
The
idea that the military needs any additional money to bring, as the Times put
it, “an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system” should shock
American taxpayers. After all, the Pentagon has already spent so many billions
on them. If military planners haven't linked these bases into a coherent system
by now, what exactly have they been doing?
In
fact, the Pentagon is undoubtedly resorting to an all-too-familiar funding
strategy—using low-ball cost estimates to secure more cash from Congress on a
commit-now, pay-the-true-costs-later basis. Experience shows that
once the military gets such new budget lines, costs and bases tend to expand,
often quite dramatically. Especially in places like Africa that have had a
relatively small U.S. presence until now, the Pentagon plan is a template for
unchecked growth. As Nick Turse has shown at TomDispatch,
the military has already built up “more than 60 outposts and access points…. in
at least 34 countries” across the continent while insisting for years that it
had only one base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. With Congress finally
passing the 2016 federal budget, including billions in increased military spending, the
Pentagon’s base plan looks like an opening gambit in a bid to get even more
money in fiscal year 2017.
Perpetuating
Failure
Above
all, the base structure the Pentagon has built since 1980 has enabled military
interventions and wars of choice in 13 countries in
the Greater Middle East. In the absence of a superpower competitor, these bases
made each military action—worst of all the disastrous invasion of Iraq—all too
easy to contemplate, launch, and carry out. Today, it seems beyond irony that
the target of the Pentagon’s “new” base strategy is the Islamic State, whose
very existence and growth we owe to the Iraq War and the chaos it created. If
the White House and Congress approve the Pentagon’s plan and the military
succeeds in further entrenching and expanding its bases in the region, we need
only ask: What violence will this next round of base expansion bring?
Thirty-six
years into the U.S. base build-up in the Greater Middle East, military force
has failed as a strategy for controlling the region, no less defeating
terrorist organizations. Sadly, this infrastructure of war has been in place
for so long and is now so taken for granted that most Americans seldom think
about it. Members of Congress rarely question the
usefulness of the bases or the billions they have appropriated to build and
maintain them. Journalists, too, almost never report on the subject—except when
news outlets publish material strategically leaked by
the Pentagon, as appears to be the case with the “new” base plan highlighted by
the New York Times.
Expanding
the base infrastructure in the Greater Middle East will only perpetuate a
militarized foreign policy premised on assumptions about the efficacy of war
that should have been discredited long ago. Investing in “enduring” bases
rather than diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts to reduce conflict
across the region is likely to do little more than ensure enduring war.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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