07/16/12 – David Vine – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today, maybe our only guest, I don't know.
It's David Vine, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in D.C., and author of Island of Shame, The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.
And you've got to read that book, I beg you to read that book, it's really great.
And you know what, if you're too lazy, go back and listen to my interview of David Vine about it, because I think we pretty much covered as much as we could anyway.
This piece is at Tom Dispatch and at Antiwar.com, U.S. Empire of Bases Grows.
All right, now, this book, Island of Shame, it's so good and so important.
And when people are in, well, around here, I think it's seventh grade, they teach us about Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears of the Comanche Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma, and the forced march, and just women and children and elderly dropping dead on the side of the road, that kind of thing.
That's basically what this book is about, only instead of the Cherokee, it's the Chagossians from the islands of, well, the Chagossian chain there, and particularly from Diego Garcia, kidnapped and force-marched by boat, basically, by the Brits and the Americans, off of their island paradise home to some hellhole off the coast of Africa.
And it's such an important book, and you know, a hundred different people should have wrote it, and you finally did, David, and I really beg people to read that thing, I cannot praise it highly enough.
Thank you so much.
Alright, now, so, according to Tom Englehart's introduction here, you've been traveling the world doing a tour of American bases, is that right?
It is, and the strange thing about my research on Diego Garcia was that it's a base I can't go visit.
I requested permission on several occasions and was turned down by the US and British government, but basically, unless you're in the US military, or perhaps in the British military, you can't visit the islands.
Journalists haven't been allowed to go there for decades.
So I wanted to do some more research following up on the work I did in Island of Shame and the context in which I told the story of Diego Garcia, which is the context of the more than 1,000 military bases the United States has outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
So I wanted to see these bases firsthand, which has led me to, as Tom lays out, about three years of research that I've been doing now around the world.
Alright, now, from time to time, and I'm not really sure why, but the War Party, they're never too big on consistency of argument, you know, they make whichever point they can to serve their purpose at any given time, I guess.
So on one hand, they might try to say, yes, we're building a benevolent global hegemony of bases around the world just to keep the collective security and all the peace, and at the same time, they'll turn around and say, we do not have more than 800 bases.
That Ron Paul, he's crazy when he cites Chalmers Johnson.
Everybody knows that Chalmers Johnson and David Bynum, why?
They count a supply closet as a base.
They count any storage unit down the street from a base as a separate base, and that's how they get those crazy inflated numbers like that.
It's much, much less.
What do you say?
The statistic of over 1,000 bases outside the 50 states and DC comes pretty much directly from the Pentagon's own accounting figures.
By the Pentagon's figures, last they published their data, there are somewhere around 700 base sites outside the 50 states and DC, but that doesn't include numerous bases that they leave off their list that are well known, all the bases in Afghanistan, previously the bases in Iraq until they were closed in 2011, bases in Kuwait, and a number of other bases that are secretive or in some cases quite well known.
The total easily goes over 1,000.
They do range in size, absolutely, from megabases like Rammstein Air Base, where it was a couple weeks ago, to much smaller bases, warehouses in some cases, but nothing as small as a supply closet.
In fact, the Pentagon also does an accounting of all the buildings they maintain overseas and there are literally hundreds of thousands of buildings and structures and pieces of infrastructure.
So, I think among academics and journalists who follow the issue closely, the numbers that were on Paul's sites, for example, are quite commonly used and accepted.
All right, now, one thing about the empire bases is that it really is a different kind of empire.
And so, for that reason, the American people, I think in general, still would not recognize the form of our government, or at least the way it acts in the world, as imperial.
It's not the same thing as the French colonizing Algeria or something like that.
People like it here.
And so, it's not like our government, when they invade Iraq, they start moving American civilians to Iraq en masse to colonize the place and make it an American province or something like that.
But they do want to export our army and, of course, they lost it.
That's more of a complicated mess.
Maybe bad example.
But anyway, there's, as you say, a thousand of these things all over the world.
So, it's not that the Americans are taking over Tajikistan or something like that.
It's just that our military has bribed and or threatened and or cajoled in whatever ways in order to have a base or two established there, so that they can use it to attack the next door neighbor if they won't have one.
Something along those lines.
And so, the American people don't even really see it as an empire.
I forget if it was you or Tom in the introduction here that talks about the American people's almost complete ignorance of the empire of bases.
It really is a different kind of empire than we've seen in world history.
No, that's exactly right.
It is a new kind of empire, a new kind of imperialism, more in indirect form, but no less powerful in many, many ways.
And what I point to in the piece in TomDispatch.com is the way that that empire of bases is transforming as we speak and transforming in ways that the U.S. public is, as you put it well, totally unaware of in almost all cases.
People in the U.S. generally don't think about having bases overseas at all unless they happen to be in the military or maybe have a member of their family served overseas.
But we've maintained huge numbers of bases for over 60 years in Germany and Japan, of course, South Korea, Italy.
But what's going on now and what I point to in the TomDispatch piece is the development of smaller bases.
It's not that all the Cold War era megabases are closing, but many of them are consolidating.
We'll be right back with David Vine after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I think we got our technical difficulties ironed out.
We're talking with David Vine.
He's got this new piece at TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt's site, TomDispatch.com, U.S.
Empire of Bases Grows.
And like I was saying, he's the author of Island of Shame about American intervention in Diego Garcia.
And so he spent the last three years touring American bases around the world.
And I think where we were interrupted, David, and left off, you were talking about how it's not that they've really closed down all the bases in Germany.
It's just that they've opened up a bunch of new ones in Africa, for example, as you found out when you were in Germany.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that's how I begin the piece, by talking about some of the casualties that are coming into Germany, to the main military hospital in Europe, in Landstuhl.
Many of them, of course, are still coming from Afghanistan on a daily basis.
But other casualties are coming for the first time from Africa, which wasn't entirely news to me, but was revealing that the U.S. presence in Africa has been growing considerably, not just the base that was established there over the past decade in Djibouti, but a U.S. presence in a number of other countries, like Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, the Seychelles.
Across the continent, the U.S. is expanding its military presence, including with the creation of various types of military facilities, drone bases, bases for special operations forces.
Last week, there was a somewhat bizarre story about three special operations commandos killed in Mali, weeks after it was said that the U.S. had pulled out of Mali because of the coup that took place there.
These three are said to have died in a car accident, alongside three women who the U.S. military at least identified as three Moroccan prostitutes.
This is just a taste for all that people in the United States don't know that's going on in Africa in terms of our military presence there, and similar things are afoot in Central America, in South America, Asia, of course, with all the attention given to Obama's so-called Asia pivot.
The U.S. is looking to build what are generally relatively small new bases, really across the globe, in countries where the United States hasn't had a military presence previously, in many cases.
So I guess the whole strategy is to just be able to quickly support and or overthrow any government in the world within a week or whatever.
What is the point?
Or just selling drones?
I think there are many aims.
I think the military is interested in getting bases in as many countries as possible so that if it was ever prevented from using a base in a moment of war, as for example Turkey did to some extent in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, they can just turn from one country to another to use that facility or that base, that installation, to launch a war, to launch some sort of invasion.
But I think there are other aims as well.
I think the military is trying to build up a military-to-military relationship, the relationships the U.S. military maintains with other militaries.
In the process, it draws those militaries into the U.S. military system, essentially incorporating them in various ways as sort of a proxy army.
I think the bases also have some political and economic aims.
By developing these sorts of military relationships, deepening them, you also develop access and deepen access to political actors in a country and open up economic opportunities for U.S. business interests, markets, preferential access to contracts.
So I really think there are multiple aims and multiple desires at work here in this new lily-pad strategy.
Well, and I don't know if this is deliberate or not, but it certainly works as just a self-perpetuating kind of thing, right?
Wherever they expand, they end up, not necessarily everywhere they expand, many places they expand, they create brand new enemies, or at least they find some to justify their expansion and just keep the thing going.
So they start really working on that base in Djibouti, and all of a sudden they've got more and more enemies to attack in Somalia from that base in Djibouti, and I guess in Yemen too for that matter.
Yeah, those are definitely some of my concerns.
Often the bases are justified as providing regional security or local security, but I think in many cases they do lead to the militarization of regions.
If you were Iran, how would you feel if the U.S. is building up bases surrounding you, or China for that matter, and I think we can flip the situation and think about how would the United States respond if China or Russia or Iran were to build even a lily-pad base in Mexico or the Caribbean?
I think clearly it would lead to a build-up in the U.S. military response, so you can see how it just becomes a cycle and actually makes, in my mind, in many cases, war more likely, not less likely.
Yeah, well, and you know what, it's funny too, because it'd be even more that case, the rejection of the policy, if it was our own politicians selling us out that way, right?
Say after the dollar breaks and we're the weak country in the world and there's some other regional power rises up, and Rick Perry makes a deal with them that they may go ahead and put bases in Texas if they want, we'd be even more angry, you know, than if it was just a foreign army came and took over the place, you know what I mean?
Just because some local, I don't know, the government of the Philippines says, yeah, come on, back in, that doesn't mean that the people of the Philippines, we the people of the Philippines, express our will through our democratically elected, no, it just means that somebody got their arm twisted at their policy level there, you know?
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right, and in many of the countries where these new lily pad bases are being built, there isn't even a semblance of democratic rule, as there is in the Philippines, but even in places where there is some sort of democracy, it's absolutely right that the people haven't risen up and said, we want a U.S. base here, it's the political elites, economic elites, military elites, generally, who are crafting these deals and allowing the U.S. to insert greater military presence in their country.
Yeah, well, and you know, just like with the drones themselves, when it's these small bases, it's not a full scale war, in any real sense, then it's that much easier to get away with, right?
You know, President Bush did this spectacular thing where he built up the military in Kuwait for months and months and months, and then gave his big 48-hour speech and rolled them all in there and whatever, but Obama can just conquer Africa if he just puts a base here and a base there and a base here and a base there, a little bit at a time, no big invasion announced, the politicians in the local places, the military elites in the local places, bribed and bought off and made to agree beforehand, so it's not a war, but we just march right in, take over the land from the people, ultimately.
Yeah, I think you've pointed to a number of the real dangers that exist with this lily pad strategy.
For one, bases that are initially pitched as lily pads and are relatively small, they can often grow quite a bit larger.
That's actually exactly what happened with Diego Garcia, who was originally sold to Congress as an austere communications facility, the emphasis on austere, you know, a couple decades later it's a multi-billion-dollar major Air Force and Navy base, and the fear that the same sort of process could be underway, or you could see unfolding with some of the lily pads that the Pentagon's now building.
And then, as you were pointing out, the advantage for the Pentagon and for the administration of these lily pads is that you can do it under the cover of and out of the eyes of the U.S. public, and then to some extent out of the eyes and oversight of the U.S. Congress.
It's much easier to create, oh, it's just a small base and not arouse attention.
Thankfully, there's a bit of attention coming out of the Washington Post and the New York Times, but just a bit, and of course not with much of a critical eye, just sort of reporting on these developments and drifts and drabs.
But I think, and I hope the article contributes to this, that a lot more attention and discussion needs to be devoted to this lily pad strategy and these new bases that are being established around the world with consequences that we really can't predict and that could be quite dangerous.
Now, in your book, Island of Shame, David, you talk about, you quote some, I guess, Air Force people, maybe it was Navy people, seemingly in recognition of the phenomenon of consequences of actions, that maybe it's a bad idea to have all of these lily padded bases all across Eurasia, which don't really accomplish much other than creating new enemies, which from some national interest point of view could be a bad idea, right, if you care about anything but selling airplanes for a minute.
And so they were saying, they didn't want to forsake the empire, they just said we ought to be able to run the world from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.
In other words, long range nuclear bombers are enough to keep all of the local systems in line.
And I guess I'm curious as to whether that point of view inside the military is carrying any currency these days, or that's just too many generals would have to be retired from their bases and the politics just won't allow it, or how's that working?
It's a really good question, and I think, as always, there are conflicting views and tension within the Pentagon and within the larger national security apparatus.
I would say what's developing, in fact, is some sort of hybrid, where you have a shrinking number of major bases, like Guam, like Diego Garcia, like Rammstein, that are themselves actually expanding as other large bases are closed.
And these bases are, as you said, home to the entire bomber fleet that can carry out long range strikes really across the globe.
So it's a combination of these large air force, in some cases army and navy bases, with this increasing number of smaller lily pad bases.
So it's really a hybrid where you're seeing bases at either end of the size spectrum.
And the dream of those who were focused on the Diego Garcia's, the Guam's, was that even if we get kicked out of everywhere else, we still can rule the world, dominate the globe from these two or three or four major bases that allow us to exert control.
All right, and with that, I better let you go.
We're over time.
But I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's a really great piece here at TomDispatch.com and Antiwar.com, and I hope people go and check it out.
U.S. Empire of Bases grows.
It's under Tom Englehart's name, of course, at Antiwar.com, but you know how that works.
David Vine, author of Island of Shame, the secret history of the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia.
Thanks very much, David.
Thanks so much, Scott.
It's great to be with you.