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Issue Number 32, October 2009
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 32, October 2009
“THE BASES OF EMPIRE: The Global Struggle Against US
Military Posts”
edited by Catherine Lutz, Pluto Press, London, 2009
Reviewed by Jeremy Agar
The bases of empire are the American military posts that
sprinkle the planet like a disease. In her introduction
Catherine Lutz notes that the US has 909 military
facilities in 46 countries or territories. Those are
amazing figures. Had I been asked to guess it, I would
have come in at maybe a tenth of the first number. The
map Lutz provides shows a measled world, with the
thickest thicket being the dots that cover Afghanistan,
Iraq, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Britain and Italy.
These sites, which reflect the power politics of the past
hundred years, need no explanation and this book wisely
does not discuss them.
Lutz looks instead at the empire’s outposts,
typically islands. After World War 2, the US was left as
the world’s sole superpower. It seemed, in those
Cold War days, that the former Soviet Union rivalled it,
but Russia’s superpower status was based on its
having nukes but not much influence. Global reach,
economic and cultural as much as military, was American.
It was a unique historical moment, one that is only now,
perhaps, beginning to fade, when military planners looked
at their globe and considered how it might become a place
fit to host the American Century.
Some of the islands of empire are mere
conveniences, dumping grounds, particularly the small
ones in the big oceans. The Pacific, wide and empty,
offered bounty galore. The tropical seas were
either unpopulated or peopled by a few dispensable
locals. Prostrate Japan offered Iwo Jima and Okinawa,
whose people are regarded by mainland Japanese as a
lesser culture, and whose economy still lags the rest of
the country. Tensions with the occupying Americans
persist. Bikini Atoll’s population was removed to
free it up for testing atomic bombs. Apart from giving
its name to the skimpy two-piece bathing suits of the
Fifties, a joke of sorts, Bikini has had no voice.
The archetypal island of empire is Diego Garcia, part of
an atoll in the Indian Ocean. As with Bikini, its entire
population was removed so that the US Navy could anchor
its aircraft carriers in its lagoon and land its bombers
on its beaches without having to worry about whinging
natives (for a fuller discussion of Diego Garcia, see my
review of “The Bases of Empire” and
“Island Of Shame” by David Vine, in Peace
Researcher 38, July 2009, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-175c.htm).
Some of the islands of empire are within the US itself.
Puerto Rico, an island colony in the Caribbean and
constitutionally American, serves as a sort of landfill
site for the 48 continental states. To show that
they’re boss, the Navy routinely complains of
“civilian encroachment” caused by the existence
of neighbourhood Puerto Ricans looking for a place to
live. The Pentagon has always opposed initiatives to
clean the island’s air, soil, water and hazardous
waste, which has been fouled by decades of unrestricted
military pollution. Even in the mainland US urban sprawl
near its many bases has compromised the health of
civilians.
People’s Resistance Defeated Imperial
Swagger
The imperial swagger since 1945 was America’s second
Pacific foray. The first big push followed its 1898
defeat of a tiring Spain, which had been the dominant
imperial power in Central and South America - and in the
Philippines, which the US invaded. As the one Pacific
country that was integral to US policy in both eras, the
Philippines became its most important base. Because it
was a biggish country made up from lots of smallish
islands, the Philippines was a godsend to the Pentagon
boys. Its position, at an equal distance from Vietnam,
China, Japan and Indonesia, was ideal. The Philippines
were integral to the projection of American power
throughout the 20th Century, and probably no other
country has been as strategically vital for so long.
As a matter of course, because they could, the Americans
manipulated puppets in the outposts of empire. Their
(1965-86) man in Manila, Ferdinand Marcos, was rich and
corrupt, a stereotypical dictator. But, unlike Diego
Garcia or Bikini, the Philippines has a large, involved
population, and in 1986 popular protest ousted
Marcos. A chapter outlines the 20 years that have
followed. It’s an encouraging story of gathering
democracy. The Nuclear-Free Philippines Coalition
comprised 129 groups, from professional and labour
organisations, local governments, churches - a wide
cross-section. The nuclear issue, which grew out of
agitation over consumer issues, united anti-base and
pro-environment issues. Two years after Marcos’
departure President Aquino pulled the plug on a nuclear
power plant project he had championed.
A Government commission came out against nuclear weapons
and then, in 1991, the American base leases themselves.
Beyond the obvious reasons to dislike having nukes in
their country, the Filipinos had one advantage in the
battle for public opinion: it is standard procedure for
Washington to neither confirm nor deny the existence of
nuclear weapons, so no refutation or justification could
be mounted in defence of the weapons that everyone
assumed were there. In an example of the law of
unintended consequences, the Bushite wars also served to
advance Philippine sovereignty. A Filipina worker, Flor
Contemplacion, was executed in Singapore, an event which
galvanised opinion. Because so many Filipinos work
overseas, lots of people had lots of reasons to worry
about their many relatives stationed in Iraq. Eventually
President Arroyo brought back Filipino troops from Iraq,
spurred on by the kidnapping and threatened murder of a
Filipino truck driver working for the US occupiers.
US Military Back, In Mindanao
Arroyo might have calculated that she was running the
risk of presiding over a malaise which could have had the
potential of spreading opposition to her regime beyond
its more radical critics. A canny US - if subtle
approaches were allowed by the Bush White House - might
have let it be known that it was willing for the
Philippines to opt out of its Iraq coalition (which was
needed only as a political signal) as long as it could
maintain its military presence in the
Philippines. The Americans won’t want to
actually quit the archipelago, and they’re very much
still there. In the major island of Mindanao the
ostensible reason is - inevitably - to “fight
terrorism” and an outgoing US Ambassador even
referred to Mindanao as the “doormat of
international terrorists”. Dubya’s lot made
much of the fact that Mindanao has one of several
insurgencies from seces-sionists who happen to be
Muslim and thus commend themselves as major league
baddies. The island has others who might be deemed
terrorists, these terrorists being people who are brave
enough to demand a just society, but it needs to be known
that Mindanao is home to lots of minerals and a
rogue’s gallery of US transnationals like Dole, Del
Monte, and United Fruit (canned fruit like pineapple),
Firestone and Weyerhaeuser (forestry).
It’s not surprising that a US thinktank is eyeing
Mindanao as a promising site for “facilities that
would serve as an operations and logistics base for US
military power in Asia”. The US might have given up
its bases, but it’s still conducting its military
“exercises”. Many of the islands of empire
are small and simple places like Diego Garcia or Guam,
where no-one’s big enough to stop the bully from
kicking sand in people’s faces. That’s not the
case in the Philippines, where the issues are complex and
the society diverse. Resistance has been consistent and
sophisticated, combining hostility to the various forms
of military pollution with strong entwined themes of
environmental and social justice. A campaign
to clean up the bases led to the Gathering for Peace
in 2002. A unifying theme of “natural
security” is a nice way of expressing the emerging
solidarity.
The issues, and the way they mesh, might remind you of
New Zealand. Which raises a question: To a State
Department flunky would New Zealand be an
“island”? Probably it was - until the nuclear
row. That’s one good news item for us
locals. The bad news: in David Vine’s count of
the bases of empire, New Zealand and the Philippines both
count two, NZ’s being Harewood and Ross Island
(Antarctica).Presumably because they’re not staffed
by Americans, he’s not including the “New
Zealand” spybases at Waihopai and Tangimoana. This
suggests that the count of 909 bases of empire is too
low. #
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