All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome Tom Englehart back to the show.
He's otherwise known as Tom Editor or Tom Dispatch.
That's one word, Tom Dispatch.
And he edits a lot of great writers.
And he has his own archive at antiwar.com.
And the way it works is it's always a great little mini introductory essay by Tom.
Not always, almost always.
And then another article by one of his in-house writers there.
And a lot of great ones.
And in fact, I'm looking at tomdispatch.com right now.
And on the left side of the page are a bunch of books that Tom edited.
For example, The American Way of War.
Oh, no, this one is, well, I forget if you wrote this or if you're the editor of this one.
Tom, welcome to the show.
First of all, sorry.
Hey, Scott.
Hey, so you're the editor of that one or you just wrote that one, right?
That's actually my own writing.
Right, right.
And then The World According to Tom Dispatch is edited by you.
A bunch of great essays.
I know The End of Victory Culture, that's you.
Mission Unaccomplished.
The last, oh, this one is a novel that you wrote.
The Last Days of Publishing.
I never read that one.
But I did read The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan that Nick Terce did.
And I know you were part of that.
Michael Schwartz's War Without End also was great.
And this book, I think, is so important.
That's the reason I'm doing this whole rant about these books is because I really wanted to get to this.
The Complex.
How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives by Nick Terce.
That is some important work right there.
And that's along the lines of the topic I want to talk with you about today is the piece that's at the top of your page and at antiwar.com right now.
The Pentagon's Planet of Bases, you call it.
Nick Terce has gone and done the update on how many bases there are in the world.
Fill us in.
Well, you know, think of this, if you'll excuse the pun, as kind of a baseline.
He went back, I mean, there are all sorts of bases, numbers for bases, U.S. bases, that are quoted.
I mean, ranging from 400 to 1,000 odd.
And, you know, the Times had a piece just the other day, an op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff, where he had 560.
He claimed there were 560 bases.
Now, Nick's gone back and he's done the due diligence.
And what he's basically found, I think his first answer would be this.
Nobody knows how many American bases there are in the world, no matter how you're counting them up.
Probably the Pentagon doesn't know.
But best count, you know, is way higher than you imagine.
Over 1,000, could be 1,180, could be even above that.
And the problem with counting them is the Pentagon identifies a certain number of bases and sites around the world.
But the problem is that they don't identify all of them.
They don't include bases in war zones, to give you an example.
I mean, Nick spent about, you know, some months trying to nail down how many American bases there were, uncounted in any Pentagon count, in Afghanistan.
And he got from the military.
He got passed from public information officer to public information officer.
And from the military, he got figures ranging from, oh, I don't know, 250 to 400.
And finally, he ended up with the figure he had more or less begun with, which is a little over 400 bases.
This is from micro outposts to the kind of megabases like Bagram Air Base and Kandahar Air Base, which are enormous, you know, miles square.
They have traffic jams.
They have fast food joints.
They're American.
They're massive little American towns that we've built, you know, thousands and thousands of miles away.
But that's 400.
If you add that on to the, say, the 560 that Christoph is talking about, you've got 960 already.
Then there are a certain number of bases that nobody talks about, partially, for instance, in the Middle East.
You know, a lot of those governments, I mean, they're supporting U.S. bases or bases that they have been jointly built or sponsored by the U.S., but it's kind of embarrassing to them.
It's embarrassing to their publics.
I mean, that is, they don't want to put a lot of attention into it.
So in places like Qatar and Kuwait and so on and so forth, you know, the bases are there, but they're not counted.
They're not in the official count.
The government doesn't recognize them.
So you've got those.
You've got bases around the world.
You've got a certain number of bases that are bases that are, quote, not American bases because they're shared, for instance, in Pakistan.
I mean, our drones fly out of bases in Pakistan.
We've got small numbers of soldiers based in Pakistan, special operations types, but those bases are counted as Pakistani bases, so they don't count.
And then we've got teeny bases that the Pentagon doesn't bother to count at all, little pre-positioning bases or little things that are under, I don't know.
I'd have to look.
I don't have the piece in front of me, under $10 million in value or maybe 10 acres.
And often those little things aren't counted at all.
They have no count for them or some of them are agglomerated into, you know, kind of a single larger base for the purposes of accounting and you just get one there.
So the answer is, you know, however you look at it, the U.S. stance around the world is historically unprecedented.
There's never been anything like it.
And the odds are that the American base count, small, teeny to large, run somewhere in the count of a thousand, a hundred and something.
Well, you know, the most remarkable part of this to me is the bases in the countries that most Americans, a lot of times, even including me, have never even heard of before.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I guess you could say, oh, yeah, of course, we got a bunch of bases in Germany left over from the old Cold War days and World War II and whatever.
But bases in Kyrgyzstan, what the hell is a Kyrgyzstan?
Right, exactly.
Uh, you know, and we've got...
And they're isolated little bases out there, too.
It sort of seems like just a setup for a pretty hard fall, having these little isolated bases out there.
You know, we bribe their governments into, quote, unquote, inviting us in or whatever, but that doesn't mean they're ever really welcomed by the people in any of those countries, you know?
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, just to give you an example, in Kuwait, one of those places which just doesn't appear on the Pentagon's official list at all.
And I think the actual, the 2010 Pentagon Base Structure Report, which is the Pentagon report of their bases list, one nameless U.S. site in Kuwait.
But Nick counts up six of them.
Camp Harafjan, Camp Buring, Camp Virginia, Kuwait Naval Base, which is in essence ours or partially ours, Ali al-Salem Air Base, and Udari Range.
All six.
And, you know, and it goes on like that.
You know, it's similar for Qatar.
It's similar for Saudi Arabia, where we've theoretically withdrawn.
But the U.S. military continue to train and advise from sites like Eskin Village.
That's one, you know, base.
It's a compound 20 kilometers south of Riyadh.
And according to 2009 numbers, there were at that time 800 U.S. personnel, 500 of them advisors there at Eskin Village.
Not counted as anything.
I mean, it's, you know, publicly, we don't even, we don't even occupy, I mean, we no longer have a basis in Saudi Arabia.
And yet the reality is rather different and striking.
And in fact, as we've been withdrawing from Iraq, one of the striking things, and by the way, I'm really just summarizing here.
This is not my work.
This is the work of Nick Turses, the greatest, I've met some really good researchers in my day, including Chalmers Johnson and others.
And Nick is the best researcher I've ever met on this sort of thing.
Yeah, well, and we're going to have him on the show later in the week to follow up for sure, too.
Yeah, yeah.
And, but, you know, what's striking is that, for instance, we are now moving out of Iraq so that we had, at its height, according, I think it was the Washington Post.
I'd have to go back and check the piece.
We had about 400, as in Afghanistan, we had about 400 bases, you know, out in micro outposts to massive, you know, we had Balad Air Base, and this is in Iraq, which had, at one point, had traffic like O'Hare in Chicago.
I mean, that level of traffic.
So this was a massive base.
Down to little things.
We had about 400 of them in Iraq.
I think the last count that Nick could find, there were 88, because we are withdrawing our troops from Iraq, or most of them, anyway.
Yeah, well, up to Kurdistan, yeah.
But we're just withdrawing them for the rest of the Persian Gulf.
I mean, we're digging in elsewhere around Iraq.
Okay.
All right, now we'll have to pick that up on the other side of this break with the heroic Tom Englehart.
TomDispatch.com.
Unless you work in the State Department, you can't get there.
Get a proxy server.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking about the bases, the shape of America's far-flung military empire, with the heroic Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com, which, as I was saying before the break, you can't get there from a State Department website.
They got him blocked.
And so, Tom, we got to talk about that.
Sure.
We got to talk about the cost of just the bases, never mind like the Iraq and Afghan wars themselves, and even like the Navy fleet, but just the cost of the bases around the world, if we can talk about some of those ballpark numbers.
And also, we were talking about the bases in Arabia and the import there.
Yes.
We were saying that we're withdrawing or drawing down in Iraq, but in the course of this, and Nick Terse has also been doing this work for Tom Dispatch in slightly older posts, we've been building up our base structure all around Iraq, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in Qatar, in Bahrain, and so on and so forth.
Every place around Iraq, that base structure has been reinforced.
More money has gone into it.
It's grown larger and so on and so forth.
So far, there's been very little backing down from our global base structure at all.
I mean, sooner or later.
You asked me about figures.
I don't have figures on how much this costs, but it's fabulous sums of money.
The other day, you just read, you read, because the thing about the American bases is they're not much written about here.
You get base news here only when Congress threatens to cut it, or the Pentagon threatens to close down some base in the United States, and then people go crazy.
But otherwise, even though millions of Americans have cycled through these bases abroad, they're really dealt with almost as if they don't exist in this country.
Almost as if we don't, in this sense, militarily occupy the world.
So, you know, every now and then you see, I saw the other day, there was a Time magazine piece saying that we had just put $130 million into a new fueling system for airplanes at Bagram Air Base.
That's just one base, one fueling system, two miles of piping within a base big enough to hold two miles of piping.
And that was $130 million.
So, you know, I mean, all these things, the embassies that we now build around the world increasingly look like mini bases, like Citadel.
So that we're now spending, you know, it'll be close to a billion dollars to build a, quote, embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Another $500 million plus to build or upgrade our, again, embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
We spent $744 million to build our embassy, which is really a citadel, a kind of a base, our vast embassy base in the middle of Baghdad, which takes, if I remember rightly from the Washington Post, about $1.2 billion a year to run.
Of course, it takes a lot to run a base where you have over 1,000, you know, well more than 1,000, quote, diplomats.
So, you know, I mean, these are staggering sums.
And I've been arguing for a while that while in the United States, I mean, people can argue about whether the stimulus package was too small, too big, you know, and what we should do next in terms of the stimulus package.
But obviously, there are going to be no more real stimulus packages in the United States.
But abroad, there is an ongoing military stimulus package.
We've spent, you know, there was a piece the other day, I mean, when General Petraeus was surging in Baghdad back in 2007, he put a million dollars, this is in kind of hearts and minds stuff, he put a million dollars into renovating a water park, you know, like think Six Flags or something, a water park in the middle of Baghdad, which was briefly renovated, and now because they can't get electricity, it's just basically a pile of mud again.
But that was a million dollars to go into some water park.
I mean, this sort of thing goes on all the time.
Abroad, we are, you know, Marines can walk into a village in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and they can hand out any month, they can hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They can pave the bazaar.
They can hand out free cell phones.
They can do all this stuff.
You know, any town in Rhode Island or, you know, Indiana would love this sort of thing.
They can hire firemen, policemen.
I mean, in this country, we're laying off policemen.
In Afghanistan, we are putting multi-billion dollars, $11.6 billion this year, supposedly, into training up a huge Afghan army and police force.
We're hiring in Afghanistan.
We're hiring for the United States is hiring policemen.
That's the reality.
Yep.
And, well, geez, it's the biggest budgets ever.
I mean, Barack Obama's budget in general makes George W. Bush look like a fiscal conservative of some type when he, I guess, tripled the budget that Bill Clinton handed him.
I mean, we're way off the deep end here, a $14 trillion debt.
And it looks to me like as the people here get looted for every last cent, the empire is going to be the very last thing to go.
It looks like that.
I mean, I don't know if you followed the other day Robert Gates announced that it was huge headlines.
I've written about it.
It's coming up this Thursday as an introduction to a very good piece.
I wrote about this, the almost lurid headlines, Pentagon under the knife, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, huge cuts, blah, blah, blah.
So you actually look at this thing and the Pentagon claims to have cut $330 billion last year and $78 billion this year, all in the future.
And it's all cuts of what they claim they expected to spend at some future moment.
But in the meantime, and they talk about this as belt tightening, but it's really a belt loosening operation because, in fact, their projections, that is, Gates's projections after cuts of the Pentagon budget is that for the next three years, the Pentagon budget, already gigantic, will rise.
Right.
And, you know, it's worth mentioning that Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute, I forget her name, but there was a few that worked on the great project, shock and awe at Mother Jones, Dr. Ron Paul, and then PolitiFact.org, fact checking Ron Paul.
These sources all agree that the government basically count the nuclear weapons and the VA and the rest.
It costs us a trillion dollars a year.
And those numbers are actually a few years old.
Yes, those numbers, I think, are going to prove low.
And actually, if you keep your eyes on Tom Dispatch, probably next month, I should have some news on that.
Oh, man.
Did you hear that?
A trillion dollars a year on militarism is a lowball, too conservative estimate, according to Tom Dispatch.
I think that's accurate.
Oh, man.
I put it for the full national security budget.
All right.
Now, here's the thing, too.
This is a dying empire, and the more we lash out, the less influence we have in the world anyway, right?
You're talking about an empire blowing it, just like all the rest of them.
Yeah, I would say that's absolutely true.
But we're not the first.
We're not the first to do this.
And we're not the first to get the first empire already overstretched to get into ridiculous, small, expensive wars far away that can't be won.
You know, it would have been fun as if instead of David Frum and Richard Pearl, I'd been writing George Bush's speech.
And I just had him say the honest truth on the night of September 11th, when he finally came out of his cowardly hidey hole underground in hardened bunkers in Nebraska back to D.C. that night.
I would have had him say, look, this is the price we pay for empire.
3,000 dead of you people, civilian types, you know, who cares?
This is what it's just the price we pay.
And you're going to have to live with it and see if they could have got away with the same policy after that.
Scott, thank you so much.
It's always fun to be on.
Thank you very much for your time, everybody.
I'm sorry I didn't hear the music playing under my rent.
Thanks, Tom.
Everybody, that's TomDispatch.com.
Tom Engelhardt at Antiwar.com today, of course.
