All right y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're on the Liberty Radio Network.
Their site is lrn.fm.
We're also on chaosradioaustin.org, antiwar.com/radio.
If you're listening to LRN, you get the commercials version.
If you're listening to Chaos, you get to listen to a lot of Poison Idea.
All right, first guest already.
We got, I think, five guests on the show today, four or five guests, and we're getting right to it.
First is Nick Turse, and we talked to him a few times on the show.
He's the author of the book The Complex, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, and is the editor of a book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He's the associate editor of tomdispatch.com.
That's Tom Englehart's great site, and has written for the LA Times, The Nation, for Tom Dispatch, and again, the latest book is called The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, Nick.
How are you doing?
Good thanks, Matt.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us here, and it's going to be just a short interview, one segment here, so I'll let you go ahead and get to it.
The article at tomdispatch.com and in Tom Englehart's archive at antiwar.com is Off Base America.
Well, there's always two titles to these things.
21st century blowback as prospects dim in Iraq.
The Pentagon digs in deeper around the Middle East.
What does that mean, and how do you know it?
Well, I put this piece together, like a lot of the pieces that I write, by mining U.S. military documents.
I go through contract data, a lot of internal military publications that most people tend to ignore.
What I wanted to do was to take a look at what was going on in the Middle East right now.
We've been told that the Iraq war is over, even though there's 50,000 American troops there right now, more than we're supposed to have been in the country by September 2003.
We know that there's a big presence in Iraq, but there is also a timeline for supposedly getting out of Iraq by the end of next year.
There's been events in Iraq that suggest that the U.S. might not be able to hold onto the bases, which it's always had in mind, at least keeping one in Iraq.
I wanted to see just what the U.S. is doing in light of all this.
It turns out what they're doing is they're digging in elsewhere in the Middle East.
This is something I looked at last year, and I wanted to see if it was still going on.
Surprise, surprise, it is.
Well, first of all, we talked with Juan Cole on the show yesterday, and to hear him tell it, Muqtada al-Sadr still is in the catbird seat over there in Iraq.
Not only that, but he's just as determined as he ever was to kick the U.S. out, which is the best hope I think that we have.
How ironic is that?
Muqtada al-Sadr, this dog who murders people by putting drills in their skulls, is our best hope for ever having our war in their country end.
If we can go with that, you're saying I guess it looks like the Pentagon sees the truth in that too.
What does that mean?
They're just going to double down in Bahrain and Kuwait?
That's what it looks like.
If Sadr and Iran have been able to broker that, the U.S. has to look elsewhere.
Right now, they're building up in Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Qatar now.
They're also funding projects in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
These are generally Jordanian military and Saudi Arabian military, but it's U.S. Pentagon funding that's driving these projects.
I think the only thing that Paul Wolfowitz ever said in his whole life that was true was that, and it was funny the way he said the context in which he said it was, this is one of the great things about the Iraq war is now we can move our bases north out of Saudi Arabia, which was the reason we got attacked and which is helping drive Osama bin Laden's recruitment.
This is what got America attacked on 9-11 in the first place, bases on the Arabian Peninsula, the holy land of Mecca and Medina.
That's right.
That's really where I get the title of the piece, 21st Century Blowback, from.
Bin Laden explicitly said in his declaration of war in 1996 that the reason was crusaders in the holy land, that it was U.S. military presence there.
What I want to bring up is that this is going on in the Arabian Peninsula, all around the Persian Gulf.
Most Americans have no idea what the military is up to there.
This is just another chance for increased blowback from Al Qaeda and who knows who else in the Middle East who doesn't like the idea of U.S. digging in further and further.
Another thing Juan Cole pointed out on the show yesterday was Iraq doesn't have an air force and they're not going to have an air force for at least, I think he said, 2018 at the soonest or something, which means that the USAF is the IAF, really.
That's right.
That's one of the things you need to look at when the U.S. says they're going to get out of there.
If they do, there's still a tremendous presence all throughout the region.
Qatar is the major place.
They have Al Udeid Air Base there.
This was built, actually, by the nation of Qatar back in 1996.
They didn't have an air force of their own at all, but they built a big air base with the idea of luring the U.S. military there.
They knew how to get them, so the U.S. military moved in after 9-11.
It's been building up ever since.
Last year, they spent somewhere along the lines of $100 million there.
This year, the Obama administration requested another $60 million for construction in Qatar, and they've asked for another $64 million for next year.
They just continue to build there.
That's the massive regional air base.
They use that for operations in Iraq and also in Afghanistan.
Since we mostly turned Iraq over to Iran anyway, maybe we could just give Iran a bunch more F-14s and let the Iranians be the Iraqi air force.
Yeah, it's really a good point.
One thing I mentioned is if it was Iran who was doing all this building, you'd have hawks in the U.S. talking war.
It'd be front-page news, but because it's the U.S. military digging in all over the region, there's just no mention of it.
Now, Nick, in the book Island of Shame by David Vine about Diego Garcia, he kind of gives an update.
There's really good stuff on empire in that book in general, not just in the particular story of the Chagossians.
He counts more than 1,000 bases around the world now.
Ron Paul usually uses the Chalmers-Johnson figure of 700, something like that.
Can you give us an accurate count?
Obviously, there are secret bases that are eyes-only, top-secret kind of stuff, but they do have pretty extensive base reports that explain the garrisoning of the planet.
Can you give us kind of an overview of how exactly that is?
Well, no one knows for sure.
The base structure report, what Chalmers-Johnson always used for his fantastic work, currently says about 761 bases around the world, but what's left out of that total are the active war zones.
Now, in Iraq, they've allegedly shrunk down to around 20 or 30 facilities, but in Afghanistan, the numbers that I've been able to pry out of the military say there's 400 U.S. bases in Afghanistan right now.
And for every Bagram prison, there's a wink-wink secret actual Bagram prison where people are being tortured under Army Field Manual Appendix M. You just never know how many black sites are out there, but we're really talking about at least 1,000 bases, but likely more than that.
I wonder, is there mathematics on what's the total cost of just the bases themselves around the world?
You know, there aren't really good numbers.
The way the Pentagon breaks up its budget, it's very tough to figure this out, but I mean, you have to know that it's in the many billions.
Well, you know, when people argue about, well, we have to stay in Afghanistan or Pakistan because there's al-Qaeda there, I've heard Justin Armando a few times say, yeah, but if you follow that logic, then we could follow that same train all the way through.
He doesn't name Yemen and Somalia and all these Gulf states.
He starts talking about Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and all these countries where they basically have these former Soviet dictators who've been clamping down on Islam for their own purposes this whole time, and where America could follow, we could follow that same chain of logic all through the Turkic countries, all through Central Asia, and everywhere we go, everywhere we build bases, everywhere we support dictators and torture people and bomb people, we can actually create more enemies and more justification and really have a long war, huh, from now on till America falls.
Yeah, it's just dismaying.
And do you know about, like, how many bases we have in those Turkic countries?
You know, I don't have the figures right in front of me, but, you know, the U.S. does whatever it can to hold on to its bases.
All right, now, I know you got to go, so we'll just have to come back and talk about the Cold War against Russia aspect of this later on.
But listen, I really appreciate all the work you do and your time on the show.
Everybody, that's Nick Terse.
He's the author of The Complex, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, and the editor of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He's associate editor at TomDispatch.com.
Thanks very much.
Thanks so much, Scott.
