The Sorrows of Empire (7 page)

Once the military has acquired a base, it is extremely reluctant to give
it up. Instead, new uses are found for it. The American presence on Okinawa, for example, was first justified by the need to mount an invasion of the main Japanese islands (made unnecessary by the atomic bombs and Japan’s surrender), then as a secure enclave for fighting the war in Korea, next as a forward base for deploying force against China, then as a B-52 bomber base and staging area for the Vietnam War, a training area for jungle warfare, and most recently a home base for troops and aircraft that might be used elsewhere in Asia or the Middle East. As Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, a historian and retired U.S. Army colonel, writes, “Foreign real estate has the same attraction for American defense planners that Nimitzclass aircraft carriers do for admirals and B-2 stealth bombers and heavy Abrams tanks do for generals.... They can never have enough.”
²⁶
In short, the imperialism of the superpowers during the Cold War centered on the deployment of military forces in other people’s countries. It took the specific form of the establishment of foreign military bases and the fostering of docile satellites in each superpower’s sphere of influence.

America’s foreign military enclaves, though structurally, legally, and conceptually different from colonies, are themselves something like micro-colonies in that they are completely beyond the jurisdiction of the occupied nation. The United States virtually always negotiates a “status of forces agreement” (SOFA) with the ostensibly independent “host” nation, a modern legacy of the nineteenth-century imperialist practice in China of “extraterritoriality”—the “right” of a foreigner charged with a crime to be turned over for trial to his own diplomatic representatives in accordance with his national law, not to a Chinese court in accordance with Chinese law. Extracted from the Chinese at gun point, the practice arose because foreigners claimed that Chinese law was barbaric and “white men” should not be forced to submit to it. Chinese law was indeed concerned more with the social consequences of crime than with establishing the individual guilt or innocence of criminals, particularly those who were uninvited guests in China. Following the Anglo-Chinese Opium War of 1839-42, the United States was the first nation to demand “extrality” for its citizens. All the other European nations then demanded the same rights as the Americans. Except for the Germans, who lost their Chinese colonies
in World War I, Americans and Europeans lived an “extraterritorial” life until the Japanese ended it in 1941 and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang stopped it in 1943 in “free China.”

Rachel Cornwell and Andrew Wells, two authorities on status of forces agreements, conclude, “Most SOFAs are written so that national courts cannot exercise legal jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel who commit crimes against local people, except in special cases where the U.S. military authorities agree to transfer jurisdiction.”
²⁷
Since service members are also exempt from normal passport and immigration controls, the military often has the option of simply flying an accused rapist or murderer out of the country before local authorities can bring him to trial, a contrivance to which commanding officers of Pacific bases have often resorted. At the time of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, the United States had publicly acknowledged SOFAs with ninety-three countries, though some SOFAs are so embarrassing to the host nation that they are kept secret, particularly in the Islamic world.
²⁸
Thus their true number is not publicly known.

U.S. overseas military bases are under the control not of some colonial office or ministry of foreign affairs but of the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a plethora of other official, if sometimes secret, organs of state. These agencies build, staff, and supervise the bases—fenced and defended sites on foreign soil, often constructed to mimic life at home. Since not all overseas members of the military have families or want their families to accompany them, except in Muslim countries these bases normally attract impressive arrays of bars and brothels, and the criminal elements that operate them, near their main gates. The presence of these bases unavoidably usurps, distorts, or subverts whatever institutions of democratic government may exist within the host society.

Stationing several thousand eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old American youths in cultures that are foreign to them and about which they are utterly ignorant is a recipe for the endless series of “incidents” that plague nations that have accepted bases. American ambassadors quickly learn the protocol for visiting the host foreign office to apologize for the behavior of our troops. Even in closely allied countries where English is spoken,
local residents get very tired of sexual assaults and drunken driving by foreigners. During World War II, the British satirized our troops as “overpaid, over-sexed, and over here.” Nothing has changed.

Before setting out on a tour of these bases and a look at how they grew and spread, we need briefly to consider contemporary militarist thought in the United States and its origins. The bases support the military and are its sphere of influence, but it is the military itself and its growth during and following the Cold War that have caused the definitive transformation of these bases from staging areas for various armed conflicts into permanent garrisons for policing an empire.

At the time that Caesar was camped in Ravenna and thinking of advancing south across the Rubicon in direct violation of the Roman senate’s orders, something occurred that seemed to force his hand. According to the historian and biographer Suetonius, shepherds and soldiers were lured to the riverbank by the sound of pipers. Among them were some trumpeters. One of them, for reasons that are obscure, sounded the advance. The troops took this as their cue to move aggressively to the other side of the river. Caesar is said to have remarked, “Let us go where the omens of the gods and the crimes of our enemies summon us. The die is now cast.” Similarly, it would seem, post-Cold War American militarists have cast the die and the American people have blindly marched across their own Rubicon to become an empire with global pretensions.
²⁹

Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.

P
RESIDENT
G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON
,
Farewell Address, September 17, 1796

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

P
RESIDENT
D
WIGHT
D. E
ISENHOWER,
Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

In the United States, the first militarist tendencies appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Before and during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the press was manipulated to whip up a popular war fever, while atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces in the Philippines were hidden from public view. As a consequence of the war the United States acquired its first colonial possessions and created its first military general staff. American “jingoism” of that period—popular sentiment of boastful, aggressive chauvinism—took its cue from similar tendencies in imperial England. Even the term
jingoism
derived from the
refrain of a patriotic British music-hall song of 1878, taken up by those who supported sending a British fleet into Turkish waters to counter the advances of Russia.

On the night of February 15, 1898, in Havana harbor, part of the Spanish colony of Cuba, a mysterious explosion destroyed and sank the American battleship USS
Maine.
The blast killed 262 of its 374 crew members. The
Maine
had arrived in Havana three weeks earlier as part of a “friendly” mission to rescue Americans caught up in an ongoing Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. Its unspoken missions, however, were to practice “gunboat diplomacy” against Spain on behalf of the Cuban rebels and to enforce the Monroe Doctrine by warning other European powers like Germany not to take advantage of the unstable situation.

Two official navy investigations concluded that an external blast, probably caused by a mine, had ignited one of the battleship’s powder magazines, though Spain maintained that it had nothing to do with the sinking of the
Maine.
Later analysts, including Admiral Hyman Rickover, have suggested that spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker may have been the cause of what was likely an accidental explosion.
¹
Though the navy raised and subsequently scuttled the
Maine
in 1911, what happened to it in 1898 remains a puzzle to this day.

But there was no puzzle about the reaction to the news back in the United States. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt instantly declared the sinking to be “an act of dirty [Spanish] treachery.” The French ambassador to Washington advised his government that a “sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation.”
²
William Randolph Hearst’s
New York Journal
published drawings illustrating how Spanish saboteurs had attached a mine to the
Maine
and detonated it from the shore. Hearst then sent the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to report on the Cuban revolt against Spanish oppression. “There is no war,” Remington wrote to his boss. “Request to be recalled.” In a famous reply, Hearst cabled, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”
³
And so they both did. Thanks to Hearst’s journalism and that of Joseph Pulitzer in his
New York World,
the country erupted in righteous anger and patriotic fervor. On April 25,1898, Congress declared war on Spain.

On May 1, Admiral George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron, forced to leave the British colony of Hong Kong because of the declaration of war, attacked the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay and won an easy victory. With Filipino nationalist help, the Americans occupied Manila and began to think about what to do with the rest of the Philippine Islands. President William McKinley declared that the Philippines “came to us as a gift from the gods,” even though he acknowledged that he did not know precisely where they were.
⁴

During the summer of 1898, Theodore Roosevelt left the government and set out for Cuba with his own personal regiment. Made up of cowboys, Native Americans, and polo-playing members of the Harvard class of 1880, Roosevelt’s Rocky Mountain Riders (known to the press as the Rough Riders) would be decimated by malaria and dysentery on the island, but their skirmishes with the Spaniards at San Juan Hill, east of Santiago, would also get their leader nominated for a congressional Medal of Honor and propel him into the highest elected political office.

Peace was restored by the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, a treaty that launched the United States into a hitherto unimaginable role as an explicitly imperialist power in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The treaty gave Cuba its independence, but the Platt Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress in 1901 actually made the island a satellite of the United States, while establishing an American naval base at Guantánamo Bay on Cuba’s south coast. Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut had attached an amendment to the Army Appropriations Bill, specifying the conditions under which the United States would intervene in Cuban domestic affairs. His amendment demanded that Cuba not sign any treaties that could impair its sovereignty or contract any debts that could not be repaid by normal revenues. In addition, Cuba was forced to grant the United States special privileges to intervene at any time to preserve Cuban independence or to support a government “adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” The marines would land to exercise these self-proclaimed rights in 1906,1912,1917, and 1920.

In 1901, the United States forced Cuba to incorporate the Platt Amendment into its own constitution, where it remained until 1934—including an article that allowed the United States a base at Guantánamo
until both sides should “agree” to its return, a stipulation the American government insisted upon on the grounds that the base was crucial to the defense of the Panama Canal. The Platt Amendment was a tremendous humiliation to all Cubans, but its acceptance was the only way they could avoid a permanent military occupation.

Even though the Canal Zone is no longer an American possession, Guantánamo Bay remains a military colony, now used as a detention camp for people seized in the U.S.-Afghan war of 2001-02 and the Iraq war of 2003. (Because Guantánamo is outside the United States, these prisoners are said to be beyond the protection of American laws, and because the Bush administration has dubbed them “unlawful combatants,” a term found nowhere in international law, it is argued that they are also not subject to the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. On October 9, 2002, the U.S. government dismissed the commandant at Guantánamo, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, for being “too soft” on the inmates.)
⁵
The United States did not directly annex Cuba in 1898, only because of its pretensions to being an anti-imperialist nation, its desire to avoid assuming Cuba’s $400 million debt as well as Cuba’s large Afro-American population, and Florida’s fears that, as a part of the country, the island might compete in agriculture and tourism.