Dismantling the Empire_ America's Last Best Hope - Chalmers Johnson [53]
UPDATE 2010
According to the Defense Department’s Base Structure Report for fiscal year 2009, the Pentagon owned or rented 716 overseas bases and another 4,863 in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $124.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases and an estimated $720 billion to replace all of them.
Like earlier Base Structure Reports, the 2009 edition failed to mention any garrisons in the Iraq and Afghan war zones, as well as any bases or facilities used in countries such as Jordan and Qatar. By the summer of 2009, for example, there were still nearly three hundred U.S. bases and outposts in Iraq, with the number set to drop to fifty or fewer by August 31, 2010—President Obama’s deadline for removing combat troops from the country. However, that target date and a stated intention to remove all U.S. forces by the end of 2011 were seemingly abrogated months later by his secretary of defense Robert Gates, who admitted, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continues a train, equip and advise role beyond the end of 2011.” As a result, don’t count on U.S. bases necessarily disappearing from Iraq by 2012.
Elsewhere, bases continued to expand despite local opposition. In Afghanistan, a surge in base building meant that by early 2010, U.S. and coalition allies occupied nearly four hundred bases—from mega- to micro-sized—in the country, with more in the pipeline. In September 2009, the last U.S. troops left Ecuador’s Manta air base. Just months before, however, details emerged in the press of an agreement between the United States and Colombia to give Washington access to seven military bases in that country.
Despite protests by ordinary Italians as well as the mayor of Vicenza, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has pushed ahead with the expansion of the U.S. base being built in that town, which is scheduled to be completed in 2011.
Only in Japan did real roadblocks to U.S. base expansion emerge. In 2009, the Japanese government announced that it was reconsidering a 2006 agreement with the Bush administration to relocate U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa to a proposed airfield at Camp Schwab along the island’s rural northeastern coast. Subsequently, relations between the two allies soured. Early in 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of the joint U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty allowing the large-scale U.S. presence in the country, Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, announced plans to press for a more open and equal relationship between the two nations, while his country also considered updating the agreement to make the United States responsible for the environmental cleanup of sites used by the U.S. military.
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BASELESS EXPENDITURES
July 2, 2009
The U.S. Empire of Bases—at $102 billion a year, already the world’s costliest military enterprise—just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27, 2009, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican City–sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.
Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9, Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled