Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

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As distinct from other peoples on this earth, most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire.

Our country deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations and just under a dozen carrier task forces in all the oceans and seas of the world. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another. Our globe-girding military and intelligence installations bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, the Defense Department ordered 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock (SPF 15), almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.¹

The new American empire has been a long time in the making. Its roots go back to the early nineteenth century, when the United States declared all of Latin America its sphere of influence and busily enlarged its own territory at the expense of the indigenous people of North America, as well as British, French, and Spanish colonialists, and neighboring Mexico. Much like their contemporaries in Australia, Algeria, and tsarist Russia, Americans devoted much energy to displacing the original inhabitants of the North American continent and turning over their lands to new settlers. Then, at the edge of the twentieth century, a group of self-conscious imperialists in the government—much like a similar group of conservatives who a century later would seek to implement their own expansive agendas under cover of the “war on terrorism”—used the Spanish-American War to seed military bases in Central America, various islands in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines.

With the Second World War, our nation emerged as the richest and most powerful on earth and a self-designated successor to the British Empire. But as enthusiastic as some of our wartime leaders, particularly President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were for the task, the American people were not. They demanded that the country demobilize its armies and turn the nation’s attention to full employment and domestic development. Peace did not last long, however. The Cold War and a growing conviction that vital interests, even national survival, demanded the “containment” of the Soviet Union helped turn an informal empire begun during World War II into hundreds of installations around the world for the largest military we ever maintained in peacetime.

During the almost fifty years of superpower standoff, the United States denied that its activities constituted a form of imperialism. Ours were just reactions to the menace of the “evil empire” of the USSR and its satellites. Only slowly did we Americans become aware that the role of the military was growing in our country and that the executive branch—the “imperial presidency”—was eroding the democratic underpinnings of our constitutional republic. But even at the time of the Vietnam War and the abuses of power known as Watergate, this awareness never gained sufficient traction to reverse a Cold War-driven transfer of power from the representatives of the people to the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies, especially the Central Intelligence Agency.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and with it the rationale for American containment policies, our leaders had become so accustomed to dominance over half the globe that the thought of giving it up was inconceivable. Many Americans simply concluded that they had “won” the Cold War and so deserved the imperial fruits of victory. A number of ideologists began to argue that the United States was, in fact, a “good empire” and should act accordingly in a world with only one dominant power. To demobilize and turn our resources to peaceful ends would, they argued, constitute the old-fashioned sin of “isolationism.”

In the first post-Cold War decade, we mounted many actions to perpetuate and extend our global power, including wars and “humanitarian” interventions in Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Colombia, and Serbia, while maintaining unchanged our Cold War deployments in East Asia and the Pacific. In the eyes of its own people, the United States remained at worst an informal empire. After all, it had no colonies and its massive military forces were deployed around the world only to maintain “stability,” or guarantee “mutual security,” or promote a liberal world order based on free elections and American-style “open markets.”

Americans like to say that the world changed as a result of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It would be more accurate to say that the attacks produced a dangerous change in the thinking of some of our leaders, who began to see our republic as a genuine empire, a new Rome, the greatest colossus in history, no longer bound by international law, the concerns of allies, or any constraints on its use of military force. The American people were still largely in the dark about why they had been attacked or why their State Department began warning them against tourism in an ever-growing list of foreign countries. (“Why do they hate us?” was a common plaint heard on talk shows, and the most common answer was “jealousy.”) But a growing number finally began to grasp what most non-Americans already knew and had experienced over the previous half century—namely, that the United States was something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination.

Americans may still prefer to use euphemisms like “lone superpower,” but since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible. It suddenly became “un-American” to question the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism,” let alone a war on Iraq, or on the whole “axis of evil,” or even on the sixty or so countries that the president and his secretary of defense announced contained al-Qaeda cells and so were open targets for unilateral American intervention. The media allowed themselves to be manipulated into using sanitized expressions like “collateral damage,” “regime change,” “illegal combatants,” and “preventive war” as if these somehow explained and justified what the Pentagon was doing. At the same time, the government was making strenuous efforts to prevent the new International Criminal Court from ever having the option of considering war crimes charges against American officials.

This book is a guide to the American empire as it begins openly to spread its imperial wings. Its reach is global: as of September 2001, the Department of Defense acknowledged at least 725 American military bases existed outside the United States. Actually, there are many more, since some bases exist under leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds. And more have been created since the announcement was made. The landscape of this military empire is as unfamiliar and fantastic to most Americans today as Tibet or Timbuktu were to nineteenth-century Europeans. Among its recent additions are the al-Udeid air base in the desert of Qatar, where several thousand American military men and women live in air-conditioned tents, and the al-Masirah Island naval air station in the Gulf of Oman, where the only diversion is “wadi ball,” a cross between volleyball and football. It includes expensive, permanent garrisons built between 1999 and 2001 in such unlikely places as Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. America’s modern empire of bases also has its entertainment and getaway spots, much like those north Indian hill towns the administrators of the British Raj used for rest and recreation in the summer heat. The modern equivalents of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Srinagar are the armed forces’ ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps, its resort hotel in downtown Tokyo, and the 234 military golf courses it operates worldwide, not to mention the seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation luxury jets used to fly admirals and generals to such spots. At a cost of $50 million apiece, each Gulfstream accommodates twelve passengers plus two pilots, one flight engineer, a communications systems operator, and a flight attendant.

Like empires of old, ours has its proconsuls, in this case high-ranking military officers who enforce extraterritorial “status of forces agreements” on host governments to ensure that American troops are not held responsible for crimes they commit against local residents. Our militarized empire is a physical reality with a distinct way of life but it is also a network of economic and political interests tied in a thousand different ways to American corporations, universities, and communities but kept separate from what passes for everyday life back in what has only recently come to be known as “the homeland.” And yet even that sense of separation is disappearing—for the changing nature of the empire is changing our society as well.

For example, slowly but surely the Department of Defense is obscuring and displacing the Department of State as the primary agency for making and administering foreign policy. We now station innumerably more uniformed military officers than civilian diplomats, aid workers, or environmental specialists in foreign countries—a point not lost on the lands to which they are assigned. Our garrisons send a daily message that the United States prefers to deal with other nations through the use or threat of force rather than negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction and through military-to-military, not civilian-to-civilian, relations. This point was made clear in a speech at the military academy at West Point on June 1, 2002, when President George W. Bush argued that the United States must be prepared to wage a “war on terror” against as many as sixty countries. “We must take that battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Americans must be “ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.... In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”

As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., adviser to President John F. Kennedy, observed on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, “One of the astonishing events of recent months is the presentation of preventive war as a legitimate and moral instrument of U.S. foreign policy.... During the Cold War, advocates of preventive war were dismissed as a crowd of loonies.... The policy of containment plus deterrence won the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyone thanked heaven that the preventive-war loonies had never got into power in any major country. Today, alas, they appear to be in power in the United States.”² He was referring specifically to the first Bush administration’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney—now, of course, vice president—the second Bush administration’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and their cronies in the Pentagon. The last time civilian and uniformed militarists even approximated the domination of American political life we see today was when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was dictating policy toward Vietnam.

Like most other Americans who are not actively involved with the armed forces, I paid very little attention to our empire of military bases until February 1996, when I made my first visit to our de facto American military colony of Okinawa, a small Japanese island that we have continuously occupied since 1945. My last encounter with the military had ended forty years earlier—when, in the summer of 1955, I left active duty as a naval officer in the western Pacific. In 1996, in the wake of the rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by two American marines and a sailor, I was invited by the island’s governor, Masahide Ota, to speak about the problem of our bases. I visited Kin village—almost totally swallowed by the marines’ massive Camp Hansen, where the abduction and rape had occurred—and interviewed local officials. I came away deeply disturbed both by Okinawan hostility and by the fact that no serious American strategy could explain the deployment of thirty-eight separate bases on the choicest 20 percent of the island.

It was apparent from the numerous beaches, golf courses, and other recreational facilities reserved for the use of our military and the duplication involved in separate air force, navy, and Marine Corps airfields that the bases had simply sprouted willy-nilly with the advent of the Cold War. No consideration had been given to equitable land use or the lives of the 1.3 million Okinawans. The military’s situation in Okinawa struck me as similar to that of Soviet troops in East Germany after the Berlin Wall came down. In both cases the troops preferred to stay on because the pleasures of life as a legionnaire in an imperial garrison far outstripped those of life back in the “homeland.”

The troops and their families were happy with their clubs, apartments, gyms, swimming pools, and shopping malls (known in military argot as “base exchanges”) and undoubtedly preferred Okinawa to being stuck in small stateside towns like Oceanside, California, adjacent to the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton. If nothing else, the penalty for a rape conviction in California is considerably more onerous than for servicemen convicted of the same felony in Okinawa by the Japanese. Under terms of the Status of Forces Agreement the United States imposed on Japan in 1953, the Japanese are even required to provide special meals for those few American servicemen turned over to Japanese authorities and actually imprisoned. On average there were 2,800 calories in the meals served to Japanese prisoners but 4,000 in those served to the twelve Americans jailed at the end of 2001.³

After visiting Okinawa, I began to research, and write about, the history of our military there—from the final bloody battle of World War II against the Japanese army to the attempts of senior U.S. officers and Department of Defense officials to trivialize the rape of September 4, 1995.⁴ My perspective was that of an academic. I had spent my life as a university professor studying the politics and economics of Japan and China, not as an analyst of America’s global military hegemony. As was true of many Japanese not resident in Okinawa, I tended to see the island’s situation as unique and at worst a sad case of Pentagon complacency and neglect. The solution seemed self-evident: close some of the unneeded bases, return substantial ground forces to American territory, lessen the burdens imposed on the Okinawan people, and so begin to reverse some of the hatred of the United States evident everywhere on the island. I thought that if the Pentagon imposed real priorities, it might even be able to preserve some of its facilities there, like Kadena Air Force Base, that might prove useful in a post-Cold War world. Otherwise, it seemed to me that sooner or later the Okinawans would revolt and throw us out, as the Filipinos had done in 1992 and the South Koreans threatened to do in 2003—just as the East Berliners had done to the Soviet Union in 1989.

Only slowly did I come to understand that Okinawa was typical, not unique. The conditions there—expropriation of the island’s most valuable land for bases, extraterritorial status for American troops who committed crimes against local civilians, bars and brothels crowding around the main gates of bases, endless accidents, noise, sexual violence, drunk-driving crashes, drug use, and environmental pollution—are replicated anywhere there are American garrisons. Compared with the numerous bases on the Japanese mainland, the more than one hundred installations in South Korea, and the huge deployments in Germany, Britain, Italy, the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, Latin America, and elsewhere, Okinawa is not unusual except in the number of bases given the size of the island. America’s military proconsuls being publicity-averse, the American press seldom visits, or reports on, its empire of bases. I had been given a glimpse into an aspect of contemporary American life that most Americans never see.

In light of these experiences, in the late 1990s I devoted myself to writing a book about American foreign policy, which I entitled Blowback, using the CIA’s term for the unanticipated consequences of unacknowledged actions in other people’s countries. My intention was to warn my fellow Americans about the conduct of our foreign policy over the previous half century, focusing particularly on the decade after the demise of the Soviet Union and on the evolving political situation in East Asia. The book appeared in the early spring of 2000. In it I argued that many aspects of what the American government had done abroad virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and peoples who had been victimized. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun. In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although individual Americans usually know what they have sown, they rarely have the same knowledge at a national level, since so much of what the managers of our empire have done has been kept secret.

Although I became interested in our overseas bases when I visited Okinawa, I had already gained some insight into the organization of American imperialism and its secret operations. From 1967 to 1973, I served as a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency.⁵ I had been asked to join a panel of about twenty international relations specialists from outside the agency to read drafts of national intelligence estimates and offer nonbureaucratic critiques of them. Intelligence estimates are formal analyses and conclusions compiled from raw intelligence data that the CIA director is charged with coordinating with the other intelligence agencies and then delivering to the president and his advisers. These estimates, which do not indicate the sources of the intelligence under consideration, are written in an inoffensive bureaucratic prose intended to smooth over differences of interpretation between, say, the State Department’s intelligence bureau and the Defense Intelligence Agency. I was invited to become a consultant by Richard Helms, the director, who only a few years later would be convicted of lying under oath to Congress for testifying that the agency had nothing to do with the overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile. Thus began my introduction to the secret world.

In 1967, I was best known as an academic specialist on China. The agency was interested in my opinions on several major issues of the time—the war in Vietnam, the Sino-Soviet split, and the internal Maoist purge of the Communist Party known as the Cultural Revolution, as well as insurgency and counterinsurgency, what the Chinese called People’s War, a subject that then preoccupied Washington. The meetings with us outside consultants were held twice a year in former director Allen Dulles’s home on the property of Camp Peary, then a “secret” CIA training base in Virginia.

Although I had been given a very high security clearance, I soon found that I did not have to worry about inadvertently disclosing national secrets. The best reason to keep the national intelligence estimates secret, I once told my wife, was their utter banality. Perhaps they were so highly classified because it would have been embarrassing to have it known that such conventional journalism passed for strategic thought in the Oval Office. The meetings were convivial and stimulating, but only rarely did national estimates wander from the standard militarist wisdom of the Vietnam War era. (On the other hand, CIA analysts who knew Vietnam well privately applauded Daniel Ellsberg’s release of “The Pentagon Papers,” because they were convinced that the war could not be won.)

There was one perk associated with being a consultant to the Office of National Estimates that I greatly treasured: the library in Dulles’s home, filled with the latest CIA reports on subjects not on the agenda, back copies of old intelligence estimates, and classified journals devoted to the tradecraft of spying, was open all night. Those who did not spend the evening playing poker or telling one another tales of Cold War derring-do were welcome to sit in the library and browse through the collected documents for as long as they could stay awake. I recall spending most of one night reading in fascinating detail how the Russians had sprung their spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London.

In the course of this enlightening nocturnal activity, I slowly realized that, at the CIA, the tail wagged the dog, that America’s real business was covert activities, not intelligence collecting and analysis. During World War II, William J. Donovan founded the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor. Only later did I learn that “an internal CIA history of Donovan’s imprint on the Agency says he saw intelligence analysis as a convenient cover for subversive operations abroad. This subterfuge proved useful down the years.”⁶ So much for the valuable contributions of my consultancy, an experience that cured me of any tendency to think that the government keeps secrets as a matter of national security. Agencies classify things in order to protect themselves from congressional scrutiny or from political or bureaucratic rivals elsewhere within the government. True secrets need not be classified. They are simply closely held by prudent leaders. Interestingly enough, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was daily terrifying the world with statements about Saddam Hussein’s clandestine weapons and the need for a preventive invasion of Iraq, the CIA revealed that there was no national intelligence estimate on Iraq and that it had not thought to prepare one for over two years.⁷

Part and parcel of the growth of militarism in the United States, the CIA has evolved into the president’s private army to be used for secret projects he personally wants carried out (as, for example, in Nicaragua and Afghanistan during the 1980s). One begins to understand why John F. Kennedy was such an avid fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond tales. In 1961, Kennedy listed From Russia with Love as one of his favorite books. No doubt he envied Dr. No and the head of SMERSH, both of whom had private, semimilitary forces at their disposal to do whatever they wanted. Kennedy found his first in the CIA, until it humiliated him in the failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, and then in the army’s Green Berets.

Today the CIA is just one of several secret commando units maintained by our government. In the Afghan war of 2001, the CIA’s semimilitary operatives worked so closely with army Special Operations troops (Green Berets, Delta Force commandos, etc.) that it became impossible to distinguish them. The United States has proudly admitted that its first casualty in the Afghan invasion was a CIA operative. During August 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed plans to expand Special Operations forces within the military and merge them with the CIA’s Special Activities Division (its covert operatives). Although it seems unlikely that the numerous private armies of our government can ever fully overcome interservice and bureaucratic rivalries, their story is an integral part of the growth of American militarism and the secrecy that accompanies it.⁸

The present book, The Sorrows of Empire, follows from my earlier book Blowback. In that book I assumed that the American government still functioned more or less as it had during the Cold War, and I stressed the potential for conflict in East Asia. But I did not focus on the extent of militarism in America or on the vast empire of military bases that had sprung up more or less undetected and that is today a geopolitical fact of life. In the wake of September 11, 2001, it no longer seems necessary to issue warnings; instead a diagnosis, even an autopsy, maybe more appropriate. In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the United States is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is probably irreversible. A revolution would be required to bring the Pentagon back under democratic control, or to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency, or even to contemplate enforcing article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

This article is the one that empowers Congress and makes the United States a democracy. It guarantees that the people’s representatives will know what the state apparatus is actually doing and it authorizes full disclosure of these activities. It has not been applied to the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency since their creation. Instead there has been a permanent policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The White House has always kept the intelligence agencies’ budgets secret, and deceptions in the defense budget date back to the Manhattan Project of World War II and the secret decisions to build atomic bombs and use them against the Japanese. In 1997, then Senator Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey) proposed an amendment to the 1998 Defense Authorization bill requiring that Congress disclose aggregate intelligence expenditures. He lost, but he was able to point out that the intelligence agencies spend more than the combined gross national products of North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Iraq—and they do so in the name of the American people but without any advice or supervision from them.

The subject matter of this book is American militarism, its physical presence in the world, the growth of the “special forces” as a private army of the president, and the secrecy that allows ever more militarized and secret institutions to live and thrive. This is not an optimistic report. As the great sociologist of the modern state, Max Weber, concluded, “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of ‘secret sessions’: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism.... The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention of the bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude.... In facing a parliament the bureaucracy, out of a sure power instinct, fights every attempt of the parliament to gain knowledge by means of its own experts or interest groups.... Bureaucracy naturally welcomes a poorly informed and hence a powerless parliament—at least in so far as ignorance somehow agrees with the bureaucracy’s interests.”9

Weber could have been describing America’s government today. In the war against Afghanistan the only information available to the public and its representatives came from the Department of Defense. The military has become expert at managing the news. Following the attacks of September 11, government at every level began to restrict information available to the public, including charges it was bringing against people it had picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere and was holding incommunicado in a Pentagon prison in Cuba. Our newspapers began to read like official gazettes, television news simply gave up and followed the orders of its corporate owners, and the two political parties competed with each other in being obsequious to the White House.

As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America’s democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country. If I overstate the threat, I am sure to be forgiven because future generations will be so glad I was wrong. The danger I foresee is that the United States is embarked on a path not unlike that of the former Soviet Union during the 1980s. The USSR collapsed for three basic reasons—internal economic contradictions driven by ideological rigidity, imperial overstretch, and an inability to reform. Because the United States is far wealthier, it may take longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But the similarities are obvious and it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever.

reporting from the United Nations, September 13, 2002

Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

In the American political tradition, “empire” has normally been a term of opprobrium. President Ronald Reagan famously used it to demonize the Soviet Union, which he labeled an “evil empire.” Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly since the attacks of September 2001, however, the idea of empire has gained traction here. As Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations, describes the change, “In all of American public life there is [now] hardly a single prominent figure who finds fault with the notion of the United States remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time.”¹ Not since the jingoists of the Spanish-American War have so many Americans openly called for abandoning even a semblance of constitutional and democratic foreign policy and endorsed imperialism. Now, as then, the imperialists divide into two groups—those who advocate unconstrained, unilateral American domination of the world (couched sometimes in terms of following in the footsteps of the British Empire) and those who call for an imperialism devoted to “humanitarian” objectives.

Typical of the former is the widely read Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, he celebrated the “success” of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan with an article entitled “Victory Changes Everything.” “The elementary truth,” he wrote, “that seems to elude the experts again and again—Gulf war, Afghan war, next war—is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychology above all. The psychology in the region [Central Asia] is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it to deter, defeat, or destroy the other regimes in the area that are host to radical Islamic terrorism.”² But even six months before the president declared “war on terrorism,” Krauthammer asserted: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to re-shape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”³

Many among the commentator class agree with Krauthammer. Robert D. Kaplan believes that the United States must not only take on the role of successor to the British Empire but that we must be devious and secretive about it. “Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization.... There will be less and less time for democratic consulation, whether with Congress or with the U.N.”⁴ Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, who thinks that the United States is “the gyroscope of world order,” is fearful that the American public, if left to its own preferences in a post-Cold War world, would demobilize as it has done in the past and return the country to its time-honored constitutional norms and restraints on executive power. To prevent that from occurring, Mead advocates open imperialism to fill the void left by the Cold War.⁵

Few of these writers like to dwell on what, concretely, the United States has done in the past and will have to continue to do to maintain its empire. From the moment we turned Japan and South Korea into political satellites in the late 1940s, the United States has paid off client regimes, either directly or through rigged trade, to keep them docile and loyal. We have taught state terrorism to thousands of Latin American military and police officials at the army’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. We have utilized the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Monetary Fund to bring about “regime changes” via coups, assassinations, or economic destabilizations and have bombed or invaded countries that have openly broken with or opposed our hegemony. The civilian costs of these Cold War operations were high. To take just one example, the militarists whom the United States assisted in coming to power in Indonesia in 1965 slaughtered at least half a million of their people, claiming they were supporters of the Communist Party. Our embassy supplied the Indonesian army with lists of people it thought should be executed.⁶

In Latin America, the United States implemented a policy that was the mirror image of the former USSR’s “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which called for Soviet military forces to intervene against any socialist country that tried to opt out of the Soviet bloc, as Czechoslovakia did in 1968. On December 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush sent 26,000 troops, including U.S. Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and the Eighty-second Airborne Division, into Panama to depose the local leader, Manuel Noriega, a former ally and CIA “asset” who had ceased to follow Washington’s orders. In the course of bombing Panama City, the American military killed 3,000 to 4,000 Panamanian civilians. (No one knows for sure exactly how many and no one in the United States has ever cared to find out.) Eyewitnesses and several independent humanitarian groups reported widespread atrocities, including the murder of unarmed civilians, the shoveling of their bodies into mass graves, and the burning to the ground of the old workers’ barrio of El Chorrillo. It was evidently Bush’s intent to decimate the Panamanian army, the main force backing Noriega, and to ensure that even after sovereignty over the Panama Canal was returned to Panama, that country would remain within the American orbit. The cover story for “Operation Just Cause” was that Noriega dealt in recreational drugs bound for the American market.

This demonstration of power occurred only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gorbachev had already renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine in a speech the year before at the United Nations. When, on Christmas Eve 1989, Jack F. Matlock, the ambassador to Moscow, met with Deputy Foreign Minister I. P. Aboimov to sound him out about Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, Aboimov told him, “We stand against any interference in the domestic affairs of other states and we intend to pursue this line firmly and without deviations. Thus, the American side may consider that ‘the Brezhnev Doctrine’ is now theirs as our gift.”⁷

Actions like the invasion of Panama are intrinsic to imperialist behavior. When the historical record is considered, American foreign policy over the past half century may not prove to be particularly exceptional or evil, but the gap between what the government has been doing and the explanations it has given to the public continues to widen. Our imperialists like to assert that they are merely bringing a measure of “stability” to the world. For them, dirty hands belong to older empires, not to our own and—if they see us as following in British footsteps—not to our predecessor’s either. Max Boot, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, for example, believes, “We are an attractive empire.... Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”⁸ It is unclear whether Boot is indifferent to the ruthless and bloody repression that stood behind the British Empire or has simply never heard of events like the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, in which the British army slaughtered Punjabis until it ran out of ammunition; or the use of the Andaman Islands as a camp for political prisoners, complete with torture and forced labor; or the bombing and machine-gunning of, and the occasional use of poison gas against, rebellious Iraqis after Britain seized Mesopotamia from Turkey following World War I; or the decision to partition India, which led to the wholesale slaughter of Hindus and Muslims and to a bloody fifty-year-old war over Kashmir. If this was enlightened foreign administration, one hesitates to imagine what unenlightened imperialism might have looked like.

The intellectual heritage of America’s neoconservative triumphalists is a complex amalgam of the military imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic imperialism of Woodrow Wilson. Most neocons have their roots on the left, not on the right. A number of them came out of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. During the first thirty years of the Cold War, they adopted an anticommunist liberalism, which during the Reagan administration led them to embrace militarism and right-wing imperialism. These neocon defense intellectuals espouse preventive war, modeled on Israel’s 1981 raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, but they are simultaneously enthusiasts for the forcible spread of democracy, or at least so they claim in their propaganda. One of their apologists, Max Boot, calls neocon foreign policy “hard Wilsonianism.”⁹ Their crowning achievement thus far was the 2003 war against Iraq, which the United States devastated in a one-sided military assault and then occupied. As the historian Paul Kennedy observes, Iraq had Western-style democracy thrust upon it through “an odd combination of Wilsonian idealism and Reaganite muscularity.”¹⁰

Another group of American ideologues might be called humanitarian imperialists. They are globalist liberals, direct descendants of Woodrow Wilson. They believe in “making the world safe for democracy” and in the idea, endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, that the United States has history on its side. (Thus, just before his 1998 trip to Beijing, Clinton chastised China, the world’s oldest continuously extant civilization, for languishing on “the wrong side of history.”) These soft imperialists prefer to use the term imperialism with a prettifying modifier—they advocate “postmodern imperialism,” “imperialism lite,” “neoimperialism,” “liberal imperialism,” and above all the “right of humanitarian intervention.”¹¹ As genuine Wilsonians, they advocate, for example, self-determination for people such as the Palestinians, whereas the neocons have a record of indifference to their plight.

Sebastian Mallaby, an editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post, is a typical exponent of such liberal imperialism. “The rich world increasingly realizes that its interests are threatened by chaos,” he writes, “and that it lacks the tools to fix the problem.”¹² To deal with the danger of “failed states,” he thinks “an imperial America” should fill the global gap. “The question is not whether the United States will seek to fill the void created by the demise of European empires but whether it will acknowledge that this is what it is doing.” At no point does he mention that European (as well as American and Japanese) imperialism was a root cause of today’s failed states in what used to be called the Third World. Mallaby proposes, among other things, that the United States create a new American-dominated “international” organization modeled after the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to “fill the security void that empires left.”

The complex issue at the heart of liberal imperialism is “humanitarian intervention.” (The neocon triumphalists, generally speaking, are uninterested in anything with the adjective humanitarian attached to it.) The idea behind the term is: a powerful nation may violate another nation’s sovereignty and even forcibly displace its administration in order to stop or prevent gross violations of human rights, ethnic cleansings, genocide, state terrorism, the operations of “death squads,” or large-scale military reprisals against civilians. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, cochaired by a former foreign minister of Australia, refers to such actions as “the responsibility to protect” and offers detailed conditions that, in its view, must be met for such intrusions ever to be justified.¹³ These include that serious and irreparable harm to human beings is actually occurring or is imminent, that the use of military force is a last resort, that the military force employed is appropriate in scale, and that there are reasonable prospects for success.

Since the early 1990s, the United States has claimed such humanitarian motivations in a series of armed intrusions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Humanitarian intervention was not originally raised as a factor in our invasion of Afghanistan. After we got there, however, the Bush administration claimed that one of our concerns was the harsh treatment of Afghan women under Taliban rule. This was not an issue, however, that had interested American leaders during the 1980s when they lavishly armed and supported the forces that became the Taliban. During those years, the United States and many of its allies failed to recognize their “responsibilities” to Rwandans, Chiapans, Chechens, Tibetans, Kashmiris, East Timorese, and Palestinians.

No one denies that, in extreme cases, foreign intervention to save innocent lives may be required. The issue is who gets to declare that a military intervention is humanitarian. The International Commission thinks that only the United Nations Security Council should authorize and legalize such activities, whatever the rationale; a self-declaration of humanitarian intervention like that of the United States in Somalia or Serbia thus becomes an act of imperialism. Positing a new, unilateral “responsibility to protect” that is to be the sole responsibility of the world’s last great power and then assuming it only when that superpower finds it convenient to do so may actually worsen relations among nations.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, our government no longer appears to want Security Council authorization for its foreign wars (if it ever did) and does not seem to think it needs it. President Bush’s speech at the United Nations on September 12, 2002, was more ultimatum than request: if the United Nations was not going to act against Iraq, then the United States would do so alone. On March 19, 2003, facing an almost certain veto and probably an outright majoritarian defeat if he had sought Security Council authorization for a war with Iraq, Bush made good on that threat and launched the war himself. Imperialism means, among other things, unilateralism in the decision making and actions of a nation, regardless of any humanitarian or other motives it may put forward. “The Rule of Power or the Rule of Law,” a major study by two nonprofit research organizations, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, analyzed the U.S. response to eight major international agreements, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “The United States has violated, compromised, or acted to undermine in some crucial way every treaty that we have studied in detail,” says Nicole Deller, coauthor of the report.¹⁴ The United States “not only refuses to participate in newly created legal mechanisms, it fails to live up to obligations undertaken in treaties that it has ratified.”

According to the report, the United States is “drifting away from regarding treaties as an essential element in global security to a more opportunistic stand of abiding by treaties only when it is convenient.” Its attempt to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, is a vivid example of its unilateralist motives. On December 31, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the treaty that created the court, originally drafted during multilateral talks in Rome in July 1998 and subsequently signed and ratified by all of America’s closest democratic allies. But the administration of the younger George Bush, fearing that someday American high officials might find themselves called before the court (though “safeguards” in the treaty make this an unlikely prospect), not only refused to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification but, in an unprecedented move, retroactively “unsigned” it. As journalist David Moberg has written, “U.S. rejection of the court is thus mainly a symbolic statement that America is not accountable to anyone .... Bush wants the United States to serve as the world’s investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. This is an imperial ideal, not an assertion of sovereignty.”¹⁵ The administration simultaneously claimed itself no longer bound by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which requires signatory nations to refrain from taking steps to undermine treaties they sign, even if they do not ratify them. As with the treaty for the ICC, the United States had signed but not ratified the Vienna agreement.

Our government became so paranoid on the subject of the ICC that it attempted to bar former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke from even testifying in the war crimes trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic before the special U.N. tribunal on war crimes in the Hague. The State Department claimed it feared setting a precedent for cooperation with an international criminal court with jurisdiction over individuals, given that the ICC treaty had been successfully ratified by a sufficient number of nations and had come into being despite American opposition.¹⁶

On March 11, 2003, the ICC began formal operations in The Hague considering charges of war crimes committed after July 1, 2002. Anticipating that development, both houses of Congress passed the American Services Members’ Protection Act, which would, in effect, allow the United States to use military force to free any American citizen held by the court. Dutch politicians, longtime American allies, mystified and outraged by what they saw as senseless grandstanding, sardonically referred to the legislation as the “Hague Invasion Act.”¹⁷

The Bush administration claims it fears “capricious” prosecutions of its officials and military officers by an international prosecutor over whom it has no control, even though the Treaty of Rome contains many safeguards against arbitrary prosecutions, including the right of any nation to precedence over the ICC in trying its own citizens for war crimes. If the United States resists the establishment of a court that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, it is precisely because its global imperialist activities almost inevitably involve the commission of such crimes. The United States is the sole country the old World Court (which can try only nations, not individuals) ever condemned for terrorism—owing to the Reagan administration’s covert action to destabilize and destroy the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in 1984.

The administration has always claimed that its opposition to the ICC is rooted in its desire to shield ordinary servicemen and low-ranking officers from war crimes charges, but its real concern clearly has been that the court might try to prosecute President Bush or other prominent civilian and military leaders. Remembering well the impact of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton for his sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, the administration fears that were an international prosecutor to open a public investigation into the acts of President Bush, it might have a deleterious political impact, even if it never led to an indictment.¹⁸

These fears are, in some ways, not that far-fetched. After all, General Wesley Clark, commander of the NATO air war against Serbia, is as liable under the Geneva Convention of 1949 for not stopping the illegal bombing of water-treatment plants, hospitals, and schools, which killed almost 2,000 civilians, as Dragan Obrenovic, the Bosnian Serb general who commanded the assault on Srebrenica in July 1995 and subsequently was turned over to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for trial. Prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain, and France would like to put former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on trial for his support and sponsorship of the military dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador while, in the 1970s, they were killing, torturing, and “disappearing” their own citizens and those of neighboring lands.¹⁹

Similarly, the newly independent nation of East Timor would like to ask Kissinger under oath what he meant when, the day before Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of the former Portuguese territory began, he seemed to give the green light to Indonesian strongman General Suharto. On December 6, 1975, on their way home from a visit to Beijing, President Gerald R. Ford and Kissinger stopped off in Jakarta for a meeting with Suharto. The general told them of his plans to seize the territory against the will of its inhabitants and incorporate it into Indonesia. Even though the Indonesian army was equipped in part with American weaponry, and the use of such arms for domestic purposes is illegal under U.S. law, Kissinger said, “It is important that whatever you do succeed quickly” and asked whether the Indonesians anticipated a “long guerrilla war.” General Ali Murtopo, one of the architects of the seizure, replied that “the whole business will be settled in three weeks.”²⁰ The Indonesian army went on to kill some 200,000 East Timorese.

The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refused to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States’s democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite the boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. In the conference’s final statement, they also produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity” but did so without language that would have made slave-holding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, the walkout seemed a display of imperial petulance—or yet another message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many domestic and foreign observers expressed hopes that the United States would abandon its imperial unilateralism in recognition that its war against terrorism—or at least its efforts to control the financing of terrorism—required allies and a massive, coordinated international effort.²¹ But this hope proved illusory. In the months after 9/11, the Bush administration unilaterally denied rights normally accorded prisoners of war to the fighters it had seized in Afghanistan and was holding at “Camp X-Ray,” a complex of open-air wire cages on the old American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.²² It unilaterally declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea to be “rogue states” that constituted an “axis of evil” and reserved the right preemptively to destroy any or all of them or, in fact, any other nation deemed potentially hostile that maintained or planned to acquire “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. At the same time, the United States endorsed the development of new and more “usable” nuclear weapons of its own and dramatically expanded the circumstances in which the Pentagon would consider “going nuclear” in a future conflict, all this in open violation of its pledge under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to make an “unequivocal undertaking” to eliminate its nuclear arsenal.²³ The Bush administration has similarly exempted itself from a treaty prohibiting the manufacture of biological weapons because it might have to open “private” pharmaceutical plants to international inspectors.

From evidence of this sort, the late Flora Lewis, longtime New York Times analyst of international relations, concluded that “the U.S. is turning its back on any global rules.” She was concerned particularly by our attempt to subvert an international agreement to limit the world trade in small arms. In July 2001, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, had declared that the United States intended to thwart any agreement that might constrict the right of its citizens to possess guns.²⁴ Professor Michael Glennon, a specialist in international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, concludes that the Bush administration’s unilateralism and its refusal to be bound by Security Council resolutions means that “the [U.N.] Charter provisions governing the use of force are simply no longer regarded as binding international law.... The Charter has, tragically, gone the way of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact which purported to outlaw war and was signed by every major belligerent in World War II.”²⁵

“In half a year [since 9/11], we have reinvented ourselves as the most belligerent people on earth. How did this happen?” asks Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. “Because the September attacks were the first massive violence suffered in the continental United States since the Civil War,” he answers, “they left us uncertain and afraid. But elsewhere in the world, the devastations of war are all too common. To us they remain abstract. September memories, in fact, underscore how the horrors of modern warfare have never touched the cities of America. That is the only reason we can reorganize U.S. force projection around robot strikes, strategic bombing, and even usable nuclear weapons. All of this represents a failure of the American imagination to grasp the real effect on real people of such assaults. We wage war without knowing war.”²⁶

As late as 1874, well after the Civil War, our country’s standing army had an authorized strength of only 16,000 soldiers, and the military was considerably less important to most Americans than, say, the post office. In those days, an American did not need a passport or governmental permission to travel abroad. When immigrants arrived they were tested only for infectious diseases and did not have to report to anyone. No drugs were prohibited. Tariffs were the main source of revenue for the federal government; there was no income tax.²⁷

A century and a quarter later the U.S. Army has 480,000 members, the navy 375,000, the air force 359,000, and the marines 175,000, for a total of 1,389,000 men and women on active duty. The payroll for these uniformed personnel in 2003 was $27.1 billion for the active army, $22 billion each for the navy and air force, and $8.6 billion for the marines. Today, the federal government can tap into and listen to all citizens’ phone calls, faxes, and e-mail transmissions if it chooses to. It has begun to incarcerate native-born and naturalized citizens as well as immigrants and travelers in military prisons without bringing charges against them. The president alone decides who is an “illegal belligerent,” a term the Bush administration introduced, and there is no appeal from his decision. Much of the defense budget and all intelligence agency budgets are secret. These are all signs of militarism and of the creation of a national security state.

One unusual aspect of American militarism in the twenty-first century is that the government has elaborate plans to exert world dominance not merely through a vast military machine on this planet but through the control of space. The first hint of such aspirations could be found in the aerial bombardment of Serbia from March 24 until June 3, 1999. Pilots, including some in B-2 stealth bombers whose bomb runs took them from Missouri to the Balkans and back, flew more than 38,000 sorties over Serbia. In the course of this campaign only two aircraft were shot down and not a single American combat casualty occurred. General Richard B. Myers, then head of the U.S. Space Command, commented that Kosovo was “a space-enabled war,” “a new benchmark” for the future. Military satellites and a space-based global positioning system had allowed U.S. aircraft to launch more or less precise bombing and guided-missile attacks that kept soldiers and airmen far from danger. In August 2001, President George W. Bush named Myers to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first officer from such a background to be entrusted with the nation’s highest military post.²⁸

The next space-enabled war followed less than a month after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The Americans began high-altitude bombing of Afghanistan, a country already so devastated by over two decades of war that the dislodging of the repressive Taliban regime proved relatively easy. Despite Pentagon reports of only occasional “collateral damage,” the United States killed at least as many civilians in Afghanistan as the terrorist attacks had killed at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.²⁹ Nonetheless, the military claimed a great victory, with almost no American casualties, and further vindication for its new high-tech, space-based mode of war making.

In 2001, President Bush appointed Peter Teets, former chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin, undersecretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), in budgetary terms our largest intelligence agency. At the eighteenth annual National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April 2002, Teets was joined by General Ed Eberhardt, General Myers’s successor at the Space Command, in underscoring the message that the United States can control the world through a planned domination of space and that it intends to ensure that domination.

Teets and Eberhardt emphasized the role of space in the victory over the Taliban, arguing that satellites were heavily used in the war and that they “allowed for extremely precise bombing by fighters and unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan.”³⁰ Eberhardt asserted that the provision of broadband services from space was as important to soldiers as providing them with intelligence. “We in Space Command provided [General] Tommy Franks [commander in Afghanistan] seven times the bandwidth that was provided to [General] Norman Schwarzkopf, and an individual soldier had 322 times the bandwidth that was available in Desert Storm.” Jeff Harris, a former director of the NRO and now an executive of Lockheed’s Space Systems Company, told the convention, “The U.S. must now act regularly in a preemptive and proactive way around the globe, using space-based resources for local skirmishes.... The U.S. military should make all potential adversaries unquestionably afraid of U.S. capabilities.” Undersecretary Teets derided any talk of cooperation with NATO or the United Nations or other forms of “burden-sharing” or “multilateralism.” The United States, he said, should be proud of its unilateral capabilities and should exploit “our space supremacy, our space dominance, to achieve warfighting success.”³¹ More than anything else, it is this cybertech military prowess that is fueling a rethinking of the entire military establishment and its missions.³²

Even prior to the Afghan war, a group of right-wing “defense intellectuals” had started to advocate a comprehensive new strategy for global domination. Many had served in earlier Republican administrations and most of them were again given high appointive positions when George W. Bush became president. They focused on plans for the next decade or two in much the same way that Captain Alfred T. Mahan of the navy, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had emphasized sea power, Pacific bases, and a two-ocean navy at the end of the nineteenth century. Rarely taking the public into their confidence, the members of this new clique were masters of media manipulation, something they acknowledged they had “learned” as a result of bitter experience during the Vietnam War. The terrorist incidents of 2001, much like the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898, gave a tremendous boost to their private agenda. It mobilized popular sentiment and patriotism behind military initiatives that might otherwise have elicited serious mainstream doubts and protests.

The determination to militarize outer space and dominate the globe from orbiting battle stations armed with an array of weapons includes high-energy lasers that could be directed toward any target on earth or against other nations’ satellites. The Space Command’s policy statement, “Vision for 2020,” argues that “the globalization of the world economy will continue, with a widening gulf between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” and that the Pentagon’s mission is therefore to “dominate the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments” in an increasingly dangerous and implicitly anti-American world. One crucial goal of policy should be “denying other countries access to space.”³³

Such an aggressive attempt to ensure unilateral military hegemony requires that this country abandon all arms control agreements and constraints, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which placed limits on the militarization of space, since space is inherently global. (Satellites do not remain within national boundaries.) The logic behind the weaponization of space is an ancient one implicit in virtually all imperialist projects—the need to protect some territory or capability whose vulnerability has been exaggerated and where alternatives to military options have not even been considered. The U.S. claim is that it has become militarily dependent on satellite communications and espionage and that an adversary could gain an advantage by deploying antisatellite weapons to disrupt these signals. Much as Britain at the end of the nineteenth century had to make colonies of Egypt and South Africa in order, so it said, to protect the sea approaches to its imperial enclave in India, and then had to conquer Sudan and the upper Nile to protect Egypt and much of sub-Saharan Africa to protect South Africa, the United States now argues that it must totally dominate space to protect its new, casualty-free war-fighting technologies.

But this kind of logic—comparable to the “domino theory” in the Vietnam War—leads to an endless progression of places and commitments that must be protected, resulting inevitably in imperial overstretch, bankruptcy, and popular disaffection, precisely the maladies that plagued Edwardian Britain. Such strategic planning also tends to produce unintended consequences in the form of unjustifiably brutal wars of imperial conquest, such as Britain’s against the Boer settlers of South Africa. The Boer War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, resulted in the deaths of 22,000 British soldiers. In the course of defeating the settlers, who took to guerrilla warfare against their stronger enemy, the British built the world’s first concentration camps, where at least 28,000 Boer civilians (mostly women and children) and between 14,000 and 20,000 Bushmen, Zulus, and assorted other tribal peoples died.³⁴ Deaths in the camps amounted to about 10 percent of the Boer population. The root cause of all this mayhem was not the need to defend India but the urge to dominate globally—in short, imperialism and militarism. Alternative ways to achieve the same objectives—or a decision to abandon those objectives as not worth it—were never seriously considered.

In the contemporary clique of imperialists the main proponents of the militarization of space are Donald Rumsfeld (b. 1932), an old cold warrior and secretary of defense in the Ford administration (1975-77), who was brought back to the Pentagon by George Bush the younger a quarter century later, and Vice President Dick Cheney (b. 1941), President Ford’s chief of staff and Bush pére’s secretary of defense (1989-93). Immediately prior to becoming secretary of defense in 2001, Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, whose final report concludes, “It is in the U.S. national interest to ... use the nation’s potential in space to support its domestic, economic, diplomatic, and national security objectives; develop and deploy the means to deter and defend against hostile acts directed at U.S. space assets and against the uses of space hostile to U.S. interests.”³⁵

Rumsfeld and Cheney have received analytical support from within the Pentagon in the person of Andrew W. Marshall (b. 1921), a former Rand Corporation “thinker about the unthinkable,” who has specialized for many years in promoting a “revolution in military affairs,” meaning advanced forms of warfare utilizing cybertechnology. Rumsfeld immediately put Marshall in charge of producing a blueprint for the Pentagon’s future—and launched a full-scale campaign advocating a new space-based, high-tech grand strategy for transforming the military and securing global dominance for decades to come.³⁶ In a classic replay of paranoid imperialist thinking, American generals now warn about the country’s dependence on satellites and the danger of a “space Pearl Harbor.” To avoid this imagined catastrophe, militarists argue, the United States must seize and dominate space as soon as possible. In 2003, the United States created its first military unit intended to defend communications, weather, navigation, and missile-warning satellites from potential “enemy” attacks against ground stations or in space. This is the 614th Space Intelligence Squadron, based at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. “All smart bombs and smart weapons are controlled by the GPS (global positioning system),” says Major Kurt Gaudette, director of operations for the new squadron. “If those don’t work, we don’t have any smart bombs anymore. So it’s critical that those assets stay up there and are safe.”³⁷

As a key part of this program, the United States must not only put significant resources into developing “killer” satellites to keep other nations from “inhabiting” space but also build defenses, ultimately space-based ones, against other countries’ ballistic missiles. This latter program, the open face of the more secretive project to militarize space, has been the subject of a great deal of presidential and political grandstanding. During 2001, advocating ballistic missile defenses became the primary way for our leaders to show their commitment to “unilateralism,” a powerful demonstration of which was the president’s decision on December 13, 2001, to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union. He took this action well before the United States had developed any kind of antiballistic missile defenses, much less tested and deployed them, and despite open opposition by Russia, China, and the leading NATO nations.

Not surprisingly, China suspects that ballistic missile defense (BMD) is actually a program aimed at neutralizing its minuscule nuclear deterrent, and most of America’s main allies implicitly agree and so have proved reluctant to go along with it, fearing that BMD will unleash a new arms race as challenged nuclear nations like China build more and better missiles to overwhelm such defenses. Nonetheless, the Bush administration is determined to go ahead with this unproven—in fact, still nonexistent—and highly destabilizing system, for which, given the patriotic mania that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress voted every last dollar the Pentagon requested.

In the process, the Bush administration has done everything in its power to classify and so hide official information on the high probability that the system will malfunction. For example, the Pentagon suppressed a report written in August 2000 by Philip E. Coyle, its own director of operational testing and evaluation, despite six different congressional requests for it. Among other things, Coyle documented how the command and control system for BMD is easily confused and has in the past caused a simulated launch of multiple interceptors against missiles that did not exist. As Representative John Tierney (D-Massachusetts) commented, “One immediate danger in these types of situations is that adversaries may interpret these launches as a hostile first strike and respond accordingly.”³⁸ Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said that he wants a ballistic missile defense even if it has not been thoroughly tested and is admittedly not able to perform to specifications.

BMD derives some legitimacy within Republican Party circles from former president Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of a strategic defense initiative (SDI), which had as its objective the building of a kind of protective electronic astrodome of rockets and lasers over the country, an idea that never proved technically feasible. Reagan undoubtedly thought of SDI as defensive, but both SDI and BMD are in truth offensive concepts. It may be good public relations for its current advocates to imply that BMD is meant only to defend us against what are now called rogue states, places like North Korea and Iran that have not acquiesced in American hegemony and might conceivably be able to produce missiles with an intercontinental range. But no one seriously believes that any nation, small or large, plans to commit suicide by launching anything as traceable as a nuclear missile against the United States. As neoconservative pundit Lawrence F. Kaplan puts it, “Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America. It’s a tool for global dominance.”³⁹ Or, in the words of Jim Walsh, a research fellow in science and international affairs at Harvard, “missile defense is more missile than defense.”⁴⁰

If BMD were a genuine defensive strategy, it would be subject to the same problems as China’s Great Wall, which stopped neither Mongol nor Manchu invaders, or France’s Maginot Line, which was supposed to protect the country from a German invasion but failed spectacularly when the Germans simply went around it. Even in the unlikely event that our BMD proved technologically perfect, its very existence would immediately elicit plans to overwhelm it with more missiles than it had interceptors. But that matters little to those planning for our militarized future. For them, BMD is a reasonable cover for the extensive research program required to “weaponize” space, a good conduit for supplying extensive funding to key defense contractors; and finally, a way to complicate the decision making of any opponent who might threaten to “deter” the United States with a nuclear attack. BMD strategists conjecture that such an enemy would have to wonder whether its threat was credible in the face of missile defenses. As New York Times columnist Bill Keller puts it, military theorists “fear that any nation with a few nuclear weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets—deter us from projecting our vastly superior conventional forces into the world.”⁴¹ The fact is, missile defense is not about defense. It is about offense, and it offers ample fuel for a new global nuclear arms race while ironically making the United States considerably less secure.

Not surprisingly, the 1998 commission that developed the plans for the present BMD system was headed by Donald Rumsfeld.⁴² One of its members, and a figure who typifies this group, was Paul Wolfowitz, who has a Ph.D. in political science but no experience of either war or the military. Wolfowitz has used his many positions in the Reagan and both Bush administrations to push for ever-greater military supremacy over all rivals, including our Cold War allies. In 1992, he argued that the objective of foreign policy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” These regions, he suggested, included Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East—Africa and Latin America (which we already controlled) excepted, essentially the world. Just before returning to the Pentagon in 2001 as Rumsfeld’s deputy, Wolfowitz asserted that his earlier insistence on the need to establish a Pax Americana, although heavily criticized at the time, had become mainstream strategic thought.⁴³

Nowhere is this need more strongly felt (and yet more strenuously denied) than vis-á-vis China. Supporters of BMD insist that the system is in no way aimed at China. “We don’t think that they should really be concerned about missile defense,” commented John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. “It’s not directed against them. After all it is defensive.”⁴⁴ But defensive is precisely what it is not, and the status of Taiwan is at the heart of the BMD plan.

Since the Chinese civil war (1946-49) and the 1950 intervention of Chinese troops in the Korean War, the right wing of the Republican Party has never been able to accept that our wartime ally, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), was defeated by the Communists owing to its hopeless corruption and incompetence. After Chiang retreated with the remnants of his forces to the offshore island of Taiwan, the “China Lobby” pushed for the United States to defend him. It did so until 1971, when a majority vote by the United Nations General Assembly finally dislodged Taiwan from the seat reserved for China in the United Nations Charter. Even after the Carter administration belatedly recognized China in 1978, it continued to arm Taiwan. Congressional supporters of Taiwan have done everything in their power to commit the country to defending Taiwan militarily, even were it to invite Chinese military action by unilaterally declaring its independence.

Throughout the 1990s, official Washington reverberated with anti-Chinese statements, actions, and provocations. These included a May 25, 1999, report of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, headed by Representative Christopher Cox (R-California). The Cox Report asserted that espionage had enabled China to achieve a nuclear weapons capacity “on a par” with that of the United States. At the time, China had roughly twenty old, liquid-fueled, single-warhead intercontinental-range missiles, whereas the United States had about 7,150 strategic warheads deliverable against China via missiles, submarines, and bombers. The hysteria the Cox Report generated, however, contributed to a governmental witch-hunt against Wen-ho Lee, an American computer researcher of Taiwanese ancestry at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. Lee was accused of being a spy for mainland China and was freed after 277 days of brutal solitary confinement only when a federal judge threw out the government’s case and denounced the FBI and the Justice Department for harassing Lee, probably because the officials in charge of the case were racists.⁴⁵

In 2001, with the advent of the latest Bush administration, the Pentagon shifted much of its nuclear targeting from Russia to China. It also began regular high-level military talks with Taiwan over defense of the island, ordered a shift of army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region, and worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan. On April 1, 2001, a U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter off Hainan Island. The American aircraft was on a mission to provoke Chinese radar defenses and then record the transmissions and procedures the Chinese used in sending up interceptors.⁴⁶ These flights were ordered by the commander in chief in the Pacific, one of the United States’s increasingly independent military proconsuls who are the de facto authors of foreign policy in their regions. While the Chinese jet went down and the pilot lost his life, the American plane landed safely on Hainan Island, and its crew of twenty-four spies were well treated by the Chinese authorities.

It soon became clear that China, after the United States and Britain now the third-largest recipient of direct foreign investment, was not interested in a confrontation. Many of its most important investors have their headquarters in the United States. But it could not instantly return the crew of the spy plane without risking powerful domestic criticism of obsequiousness in the face of provocation. It therefore delayed eleven days, until it received a pro forma American apology for causing the death of a Chinese pilot on the edge of China’s territorial air space and for making an unauthorized landing at a Chinese military airfield. Meanwhile, our media promptly labeled the crew “hostages,” encouraged their relatives to tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees, claimed that the president was doing “a first-rate job,” and endlessly criticized China for its “state-controlled media.” Washington carefully avoided mentioning that the United States enforces a 200-mile aircraft-intercept zone around the country, which stretches far beyond territorial waters.

On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush was asked whether he would ever use “the full force of the American military” against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself.” Some American militarists argue that a missile defense would make this commitment credible by protecting American cities from any Chinese retaliatory attack. After 9/11, as America became preoccupied with al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq, China temporarily disappeared from the Pentagon’s radar screen. But during 2002-03 the issue of nuclear deterrence arose again in East Asia, not with reference to China but to North Korea.

The diehards of the Republican Party who have never been able to accept that China is not and never will be an American satellite have even greater trouble accepting a small, poverty-stricken, but resolutely defiant regime in North Korea. In his State of the Union address of January 29, 2002, the president famously included North Korea on his short list of countries the United States was thinking of preventively “taking out.” With the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the “shock and awe” and bloody slaughter phase of the American “liberation” of Iraq came to an end. Our full armada of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers, five carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf, innumerable surface ships and submarines armed with cruise missiles, and the command and control staffs who fought the war from air-conditioned tents in Qatar were released for redeployment. Flushed with success, they may well choose as their next target—if not the Middle East—North Korea. It seems likely that the North Koreans themselves are thinking along these same lines and believe that George Bush plans to order an attack on them. North Korea illustrates the kinds of explosive situations the United States, in its guise as a New Rome, creates for itself.

A little history may be in order. Back in 1994, the United States discovered that the Pyongyang regime was producing plutonium as a byproduct of an old Russian-designed reactor for generating electric power. A crisis over the possibility that North Korea might be able to turn out a few atomic bombs was resolved within the year by the oddly titled “Agreed Framework.” In return for Pyongyang’s pledge to mothball its old reactor and allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States and its allies promised to build two new reactors that would not produce weapons-grade fissionable material and to open some form of diplomatic and economic relations with the isolated North. The United States also agreed to supply the North with fuel oil to replace the energy lost by shutting down the reactor (since the country has no independent sources of energy of any sort). For three years the Clinton administration stalled on implementing the agreement, hoping that the highly militarized North Korean regime, its people suffering from starvation, would simply collapse.

By the end of the decade this standoff had degenerated into stalemate. In June 2000, the president of South Korea, Kim Dae-jung, acting on his own initiative and without consulting the United States, undertook a historic journey of reconciliation to Pyongyang, trying to eradicate the last vestiges of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula. His visit produced a breakthrough, and for his efforts he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Even more important, President Kim’s initiative caught the imagination of his own people, much as Richard Nixon’s 1971 opening to China captured the imagination of millions of Americans.

South Korea has a population of forty-seven million, more than twice the North’s twenty-one million, and is twenty-five to thirty times richer than its desolate neighbor. The South’s willingness to help the North reflects a growing democratic and economic self-confidence. It is important to remember that South Korea is one of only three countries in East Asia (the others being the Philippines and Taiwan) to have achieved democracy from below. In South Korea and the Philippines, mass movements fought against oppressive dictators imposed and supported by the United States—General Chun Doo-hwan in Seoul and Ferdinand Marcos in Manila.

During 2000, relations between North and South Korea continued to improve, leading to an October visit to Pyongyang by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In the early days of the Bush administration, however, these favorable trends in Korea and in Washington came to a halt. On a visit to Washington in March 2001, Kim Dae-jung was rudely brushed off by Bush; the administration began to include North Korea in its increasingly bellicose statements.

In September 2002, when the Bush administration asserted in its National Security Strategy a right to wage “preventive war,” this rhetoric gained an almost immediate reality for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. As the United States began mobilizing a powerful invasion force on the borders of Iraq and then invaded, North Korea prepared to defend itself in the only way it thought the Americans could understand. It withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelled international inspectors, and restarted its old power reactor.

At first, the Bush administration’s response was muted. It was already launching one war. Another in Korea would have threatened the South Korean capital, Seoul, a city of 10.8 million within easy artillery range of the North. Among them were thousands of American troops stationed for decades near the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas as a “tripwire” against an attack from the North. This was meant to ensure, among other things, that, as the first casualties came in, the American people would have no choice but to back the war.

On the other hand, the men (and woman) of the Bush administration made no effort to back down from or soften their positions or offer to negotiate. Kim Jong-il’s regime thus reached the almost unavoidable conclusion that it was likely to be the next victim of a bully and began trying to “deter” the Americans. It insisted on a nonaggression treaty with the United States in return for shutting down its dangerous reactor and halting its nuclear weapons development program. At the same time, it offered to allow the expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to return to monitor its nuclear facilities.

After the United States invaded Iraq, North Korea pulled back from even this offer. On April 6, 2003, it announced that only by arming itself with a “tremendous military deterrent” could it guarantee its security. “The Iraqi war shows that to allow disarming through inspection does not help avert a war but rather sparks it.... This suggests that even the signing of a nonaggression treaty with the U.S. would not help avert a war.” Much like Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain, North Korea was now telling its citizens, “If you’ve got to go, take one with you.” The places it threatened to take with it were Seoul, some of the thirty-eight American bases on Okinawa, and as many Japanese cities as it could hit (though its nuclear-tipped missiles may not have the capability to reach as far as either Okinawa or the Japanese mainland). The South Koreans estimate that the North possesses 175 to 200 Rodong missiles with a range of 1,300 kilometers, capable of striking anywhere in Japan, and 650 to 800 intermediate-range Scud missiles targeted on South Korea and stored in underground facilities.⁴⁷

Over the previous two years, South Korean public opinion had shifted radically on the issue of North Korea. The prosperous and well-informed people of the South know that their fellow Koreans—hungry, desperate, oppressed, but well armed—are trapped by the ironies of the end of the Cold War and by the harshness of the Kim Jong-il regime but are also being pushed into an exceedingly dangerous corner by the Americans in their newly proclaimed role as the reigning global military colossus. The South no longer much fears the North—at least a North not pushed to extreme acts by Washington. It fears instead the enthusiasm for war emanating from Washington and the constant problems generated by the American troops based in South Korea over the past fifty years.

Here, too, some history is needed of this peninsula where the past is seldom forgotten. Ever since the United States occupied the southern half of it in 1945 and created the “Republic of Korea,” it has maintained a strong military presence there. During 2002, the Department of Defense listed among its properties and personnel in South Korea 101 separate military installations manned by 37,605 American troops, 2,875 U.S. civilians working for the military, and 7,027 resident American dependents.⁴⁸ The installations include Osan Air Base, known as K-55 during the Korean War, which is the headquarters of the Seventh Air Force, and Kunsan Air Base on the west coast of the country, which is the main fighter base. Easily the most astonishing facility in South Korea, however, is the Yongsan Army Garrison. A monument to American cultural and historical insensitivity, it is located on the site of Japan’s old military headquarters, created in 1894 and a symbol of Japan’s hated occupation of Korea. Originally on the outskirts of old Seoul, it occupies 630 prime acres squarely in the center of the densely populated capital. It has been the headquarters for American military operations in Korea since 1945.⁴⁹

Today, Yongsan features the Dragon Hill Recreation Center, “the largest exchange in Korea with shopping arcade,” including half a dozen bars and restaurants, a state-of-the-art hotel (with different room rates for different ranks), a fitness center, and numerous other amenities. Dragon Hill is a vacation resort for American officers, servicemen and women, and their families located smack in downtown Seoul, and it is not open to Koreans. This facility has so irritated the Koreans that on April 9, 2003, the United States agreed to move it to some other location, probably to another base located in a remote area. It remains to be seen how expeditiously the U.S. Forces Korea command will actually implement this agreement.

Just forty miles north of the South Korean capital and twelve miles south of the Demilitarized Zone is Camp Casey, the most powerful, forward-deployed location of the army’s Second Infantry Division. It houses more than 6,300 troops, a large proportion of the American military personnel in Korea. Casey is a 19,000-acre domain of brick buildings and Quonset hut-like sheds that resembles nothing so much as a penitentiary. Private Kenneth Markle, easily the most notorious American in South Korea because in 1993 he raped and murdered a Korean woman, Kum E. Yoon, was based there. The strangling in 1996 of Lee Ki Sun, another Korean woman, over an argument about paying for sex, by Private Eric Munnich, a twenty-two-year-old soldier, took place in the nearby village of Tongduchon.

On June 13, 2002, a sixty-ton army tracked vehicle from Camp Casey rumbled down a narrow two-lane road through small villages a few miles north of Seoul. The two sergeants manning the vehicle failed to see two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls walking along the road on their way to a friend’s birthday party. Both girls were crushed to death. It is not clear whether the two soldiers were operating the vehicle as part of their official duties, whether they failed to see the girls because of equipment faultily mounted on their vehicle, or whether the vehicle’s internal communications system malfunctioned or just had not been plugged in properly.

The Korean government demanded that the sergeants be handed over to them to be tried in a Korean court for manslaughter. The United States refused, claiming that right under a status of forces agreement (SOFA) it forced on the country during the Korean War. Instead the men were tried in an American military court for “criminal negligence” and exonerated for the “accidental” deaths. No real prosecution evidence was introduced at the trial, and the men’s commanding officer, who was in Korea, was never called to testify on the soldiers’ training and supervision. Anti-American riots erupted throughout the South, first calling for the SOFA to be revised and later demanding that American forces get out of the country altogether.⁵⁰

On December 19, 2002, South Korea elected Roh Moo-hyun, a human rights lawyer, to succeed Kim Dae-jung as president. In his campaign, Roh pledged to continue Kim’s opening to the North and asked for changes in South Korea’s military relations with the United States. His incoming administration is said to have told Bush that South Korea would rather live with a nuclear North than join the United States in another war. On April 9, the day Baghdad fell, the Pentagon and the Roh government entered into negotiations over the future of U.S. forces in the Republic of Korea, and the American delegation suddenly showed extraordinary impatience to move the Second Infantry Division back from the Demilitarized Zone as quickly as possible. One source quoted Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, head of the Pacific Command, as saying, “I’d like to be out yesterday.”⁵¹

As it was no doubt meant to do, the American plan threw fear into both the official South and the southern public. The concern among the Republic of Korea’s citizens was that such a sudden redeployment of U.S. troops out of harm’s way would not only look to the North like preparations for a preemptive strike but might actually prove to be so. Equally ominous, the Bush administration sent B-1 and B-52 strategic bombers to Guam “in case they might be needed in Korea” and later announced that an undisclosed number of F-117 stealth fighter jets and F-15E Strike Eagles deployed to South Korea for recently concluded military exercises would remain in the country. The radar-evading F-117s would be highly suitable for attacking a broad variety of targets in the North, including the nuclear plant at Yongbyon. The last time F-117s were based in South Korea was in 1994, when the Clinton administration was also contemplating a “surgical strike” on the North. That crisis ended peacefully only when former President Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang and opened direct negotiations with Kim Il-sung.

As might be expected, the Bush administration sees these developments on the Korean Peninsula as further evidence of the need for a ballistic missile defense—to protect against future nuclear-tipped North Korean Taepodong II missiles. But, in fact, even if such a system succeeded in shooting down a North Korean nuclear warhead, the fallout over South Korea or perhaps Japan and Okinawa might be almost as hazardous as a direct hit. The most serious outcome of this American-generated crisis has been to give great impetus to nuclear proliferation around the world. Smaller nations everywhere now believe that the only way to deter the United States from exercising its imperial will over them is to acquire a nuclear capability.⁵² Iraq’s problem, from this perspective, was that it really did not have any weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea remains a failed Communist regime with much of its population on the edge of starvation. It has been attempting, fitfully and with great trepidation, to come in from the cold in somewhat the same way China has so successfully over the past twenty years. As Kim Dae-jung understood, the United States and South Korea should be magnanimous winners instead of threatening a renewed use of force. No surrounding nation—not the Republic of Korea, or Japan, or China, or Russia—wants, or sees the need for, a renewed civil war on the Korean Peninsula.

The Bush administration is trying to soothe the South Koreans’ fears about a preventive war with talk of America’s “precision-guided missiles,” its commitment to avoiding civilian casualties, its superbly trained fighting forces, and its conviction that the North Koreans who survive our bombers will hail the Americans and South Koreans as liberators. But the South Koreans know better and are unlikely to go along with American ideas about the need for a preventive war. One certain legacy of the war in Iraq is that American political and military leaders can no longer be believed or trusted.

The army’s target for 2002 was to hire 79,500 young adults as new recruits. Demographics and salesmanship matter in trying to raise and retain an all-volunteer army, and, until recently, the main recruiting slogans were “Be all you can be” and “An Army of one” (meaning that the army is a collection of quintessential American individualists). A recent gimmick is a free computer game, called America’s Army, aimed directly at capturing the hearts and minds of technology-savvy teenagers. By the autumn of 2002, more than 500,000 copies had been downloaded from americasarmy.com, and recruiters now have a two-CD set of the game to give away to likely prospects. During the summer of 2002, many videogame magazines included the CDs with issues.

The game differs from most other combat videos now on the market in that bullet hits are recorded only by little red puffs instead of gushers of blood and flying body parts. The army wants to avoid any suggestion that actual combat might be unpleasant. According to the game instructions, “When a soldier is killed, that soldier simply falls to the ground and is no longer part of the ongoing mission. The game does not include any dismemberment or disfigurement.” In “Soldiers,” the second part of the game, players progress through a virtual career in the army, serving in a variety of units and improving their ratings in categories like loyalty, honor, and personal courage as they go. Enemies are portrayed as both white- and black-skinned but have one trait in common—nearly all of them are unshaven. The government has so far spent $7.6 million to develop the game, and plans to devote about $2.5 million a year to updates and another $1.5 million to maintaining a multiplayer infrastructure. The army hoped to use it to attract 300 to 400 recruits in 2003.¹

Another aspect of the attempt to interest adolescent boys in a military career is the army’s sponsorship of drag racing. Its twenty-four-foot, 6,000 horsepower dragster “The Sarge” is fueled with nitromethane at thirty dollars a gallon and has emblazoned in gold on its side, “GO ARMY.” Anyone who has been to an auto speedway and seen (or heard) the car accelerate from 0 to 200 m.p.h. in 2.2 seconds will appreciate the mechanical machismo the army is using to attract young recruits. In the 1970s, the army had sponsored racing cars with its name on them but gave the effort up as a waste of money. In 1999, it began a new collaboration with the National Hot Rod Association, this time to enter its own car and to install recruiting booths at the racetracks with helicopters and assault vehicles for boys to climb on. In the 2002 season, to compete at twenty-three drag racing events, the army’s recruiting command invested about $5.5 million. All the drivers are professionals, though few are veterans of the armed forces. High schools around the country are encouraged to take their pupils out for a “day at the track.” In 2001, of some 56,000 young people who were sent to a drag race by their schools, 300 joined the army.² One thing that does seem to work in attracting recruits is the military’s offer of up to $50,000 in grants to attend college, although few who enlist end up taking advantage of this program.

Video games and hot rods are both very American examples of the art of advertising, but they seem unlikely to change the composition of the armed forces very much. Race, socioeconomic class, and the state of the U.S. economy, as well as the possibility of an upcoming war, influence the decision to sign up, and women do not respond to video games or dragsters in the same way that men do. During the run-up to the second U.S. war with Iraq, military recruiters noted that virtually no one was joining up to serve the nation in an actual war.

A real deterrent to recruitment is the possibility that a new soldier will find himself or herself in combat. Roughly four out of five young Americans who enlist in our all-volunteer armed forces specifically choose non-combat jobs, becoming computer technicians, personnel managers, shipping clerks, truck mechanics, weather forecasters, intelligence analysts, cooks, forklift drivers—all jobs that carry a low risk of contact with an enemy. They often enlist because of a lack of good jobs in the civilian economy and thus take refuge in the military’s long-established system of state socialism—steady paychecks, decent housing, medical and dental benefits, job training, and the promise of a college education. The mother of one such recruit recently commented on her nineteen-year-old daughter, who was soon to become an army intelligence analyst. She was proud but also cynical: “Wealthy people don’t go into the military or take risks because why should they? They already got everything handed to them.”³

These recruits do not expect to be shot at. Thus it must have been a shock to the noncombat rank and file when in March 2003 Iraqi guns opened up on an army supply convoy, killing eleven and taking another six prisoner, including Private First Class Jessica Lynch of Palestine, West Virginia, a supply clerk. The army’s response has been, “You don’t have to be in combat arms [of the military] to close with and kill the enemy.” Despite her high-profile story, Jessica Lynch is still the exception to the rule. It is rare for noncombat military personnel to find themselves in a firefight. But that hardly means that soldiers doing noncombat duty are not at risk. What the Pentagon is not saying to the Private Lynches and their families is that all soldiers, regardless of their duties, stand a real chance of injury or death because they chose the military as a route of social mobility.

Our recent wars have produced serious unintended consequences, and these have fallen nearly as heavily on noncombat soldiers as on their frontline compatriots. The most important factor in that casualty rate is the malady that goes by the name Gulf War Syndrome, a potentially deadly medical disorder that first appeared among combat veterans of the 1990-91 conflict with Iraq. Just as the effects of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War were first explained away by the Pentagon as “posttraumatic stress disorder,” “combat fatigue,” or “shell shock,” so the potential toxic side effects of the ammunition now widely used by the armed forces have been played down by the Bush administration. The implications are devastating, not just for America’s adversaries or civilians caught in their country turned battlefield but for American forces themselves (and even possibly their future offspring).

The first Iraq war produced four classes of casualties—killed in action, wounded in action, killed in accidents (including “friendly fire”), and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations. As of May 2002, however, the Veterans Administration reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected “exposures” suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly, the VA revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation, and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as “disabled veterans.” In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War may actually be a staggering 29.3 percent.

Doug Rokke, a former army colonel and a professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University, was in charge of the military’s environmental cleanup following the first Gulf War. The Pentagon has since sacked him for criticizing NATO commanders for not adequately protecting their troops in areas where ammunition made from depleted uranium (DU) was used, such as Kosovo in 1999. Rokke observes that many thousands of U.S. troops have been based in and around Kuwait since 1990, and their exposure to DU seems to produce a higher figure than the VA’s. He notes that between August 1990 and May 2002, a total of 262,586 soldiers became “disabled veterans” and 10,617 died. His numbers result in a casualty rate for the whole decade of 30.8 percent.⁴

The suggestion that DU munitions are a significant factor in these deaths and disabilities is a hotly contested proposition. Some researchers, often paid for by the Pentagon, argue that depleted uranium could not possibly be the cause of these war-related maladies and that a more likely explanation is dust and debris from the blowing up of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons factories in 1991, or perhaps a “cocktail” of volatile particles from DU ammunition, the destruction of nerve gas bunkers, and polluted air from burning oil fields. But the evidence—including abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq and also in the areas of Kosovo where we used depleted-uranium weapons in our 1999 air war—point toward a significant role for DU. Moreover, simply by insisting on using such weaponry, the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.

Depleted uranium, or uranium-238, is a waste product of power-generating nuclear reactors. It is used in projectiles like tank shells and cruise missiles because it is 1.7 times denser than lead, burns as it flies, and penetrates armor easily, but it breaks up and vaporizes on impact—which makes it potentially deadly in unexpected ways. Each shell fired by an American tank includes between three and ten pounds of DU. Such warheads are essentially “dirty bombs,” not especially radioactive individually but suspected of being capable in quantity of causing serious illnesses and even birth defects. In 1991, American forces fired a staggering 944,000 DU rounds in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon admits that it left behind at a bare minimum 320 metric tons of DU on the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed that their children had a higher possibility of being born with severe deformities, including missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused fingers. Rokke fears that because the military relied on DU munitions more heavily in the second Iraq war than in the first, postwar casualties may be even greater. When he saw TV images of unprotected soldiers and Iraqi civilians driving past burning Iraqi trucks destroyed by tank fire or inspecting buildings hit by missiles, he suspected that they were being poisoned by DU.⁵

Young Americans being seduced into the armed forces these days may thus quite literally be making themselves into “cannon fodder,” even if they have been able to secure noncombat jobs. These men and women comprise an ethnically heterogeneous group that nonetheless differs, in several important respects, from the population from which it is drawn. Because membership in the armed forces is entirely voluntary, they are no longer in any sense a citizen army, even though the Pentagon pretends otherwise. The contemporary military bears almost no relation to the armies that fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—all made up of conscripts. Nor do our forces resemble armies that are based on a universal obligation to defend the country, as, for example, the Israeli army, from which only the religiously devout are exempt. Because today’s soldiers and sailors know that they constitute a special stratum of society, they tend to think of themselves increasingly in distinct, corporate terms—an aspect of militarism—and not as people who expect soon to return to civilian life. Since the military also makes exit easy for those who sign up but find they do not like life in the armed forces, the special subculture of barracks and ships only solidifies further. During 2002, the army was losing 13.7 percent of all recruits during training.

According to the twenty-sixth annual Department of Defense report on “Population Representation in the Military Services,” covering fiscal year 1999, the most recent report available, the full-time active-duty military numbered just under 1.4 million.⁶ In addition, active reserves—made up of the Army National Guard, the Army Reserve, the Naval Reserve, the Marine Corps Reserve, the Air National Guard, and the Air Force Reserve—totaled just under 871,000. There were also more than 405,000 men and women in the inactive reserve and the inactive National Guard. In fiscal 1999, all the services took in approximately 184,000 new recruits, and nearly 6,000 prior-service members returned to the active-duty ranks. More than 16,000 newly commissioned officers reported for active duty. Also in 1999, about 55,000 recruits without and more than 88,000 with prior military experience enlisted in the reserves. In excess of 17,000 officers entered the National Guard or other active reserve units.

The active-duty military is, of course, much younger than the overall civilian population. Almost half of those in the active-duty enlisted force were seventeen to twenty-four years old, in contrast to about 15 percent of the civilian labor force. Officers were older than those in the enlisted ranks (with a mean age of thirty-four), but they too were younger than their civilian counterparts—college graduates whose mean age was thirty-six. This means that the Americans with whom foreigners come into contact most frequently tend to be late adolescents or twenty-year-old youths, almost totally ignorant of foreign cultures and languages but indoctrinated to think that they represent a nation that President George W. Bush has called “the greatest force for good in history.”

In terms of race and ethnicity, African Americans are overrepresented among enlisted ranks. Some 20 percent of 1999 recruits to active duty were African Americans, who constitute 12.71 percent of the nation’s civilian workforce of military age. African Americans also have higher retention rates in the armed forces, boosting their representation among active enlisted members to 22.5 percent.

Hispanics were underrepresented, making up only 11 percent of new recruits, whereas they constitute 13 percent of the general population. They contributed 9.5 percent of all active-duty enlisted personnel but were overrepresented in combat positions, where they constituted 17.7 percent of the forces who directly handle weapons. Latino underrepresentation can probably be explained by high dropout rates from high school—recruits must be high school graduates or hold an alternative credential—and the fact that many are living in the country illegally. In border cities like San Diego, army recruiters have occasionally crossed into Tijuana to try to sign up young Mexicans with offers of green cards (legal alien residents’ certificates) or possible citizenship after a hitch in the army.⁷ The navy and the Marine Corps generally recruit more Hispanics than the army and the air force. The Marine Corps has the highest retention rate for Hispanics. “Other” minorities (Native Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders), slightly more than 5 percent of the civilian population, made up a further 7 percent of enlistees. Thus, in 1999, 38 percent of the total active-duty enlisted force were people of color (22 percent African American, 9 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent other).

Among officers the percentages were different. Almost 9 percent of newly commissioned officers were African American, 4 percent Hispanic, and 9 percent other. Within the active-duty officer corps, 8 percent were African Americans, 4 percent Hispanics, and 5 percent other. African Americans thus constituted a much smaller proportion of officers than of enlisted men and women. The same pattern holds for the reserves. All three service academies, West Point for army officers, Annapolis for naval and marine officers, and Colorado Springs for air force officers, implement explicit race-preference policies in their admissions. West Point maintains specific percentage goals. It seeks an entering class of 10 to 12 percent African Americans and normally gets 7 to 9 percent. All three academies actively recruit racial minorities, sending promising but under-qualified candidates to one-year preparatory schools before admitting them. (These policies directly contradict those of the Bush administration, which on January 15, 2003, announced its opposition to the University of Michigan Law School’s employment of “affirmative action” to produce a “diverse” student body.)

The military defends its use of race in admissions on the grounds that since 28 percent of air force enlisted personnel and 44 percent of army enlisted personnel are racial minorities, an all-white officer corps would hurt morale, a possibility that also brings to mind fears of the “fraggings” of the Vietnam War era, when enlisted men conscripted into a war they did not support sometimes lobbed or rolled grenades into officers’ quarters.⁸ In many of the 209 reported fragging incidents in Vietnam, the men who tossed grenades or shot their officers were African Americans and the targets of the attacks were mostly white junior field officers. Racism in the armed forces was clearly a contributing cause. In a January 2003 background briefing at the Pentagon on the all-volunteer force, the issue of fragging came up. “Not a pretty picture,” commented the senior defense official who gave the briefing. There was at least one fragging incident, on March 23, during the subsequent war in Iraq.⁹

In 1999, women made up 18 percent of new recruits and 24 percent of new members of the active reserve. Among all enlisted personnel on active duty, 14 percent were women. Some 20 percent of new officers were women, who constitute 15 percent of the overall officer corps. Most significantly, military women, whether in the enlisted ranks, the officer corps, on active duty, or in the active reserve, are more likely to be members of racial or ethnic minority groups than military men. Half the enlisted women in the U.S. armed forces are members of minority groups. African American women made up 35.3 percent of the women in the enlisted force.

Sexual assault remains a pervasive problem for women serving in all branches of the armed forces, including those deployed overseas. According to a report in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 28 percent of female veterans reported sexual assaults during their careers—MSTs, or “military sexual traumas,” as they are called in the Pentagon and Veterans Administration offices. In 1996, the Defense Department surveyed women in the military about their experiences during the previous twelve months, and found that 9 percent in the marines, 8 percent in the army, 6 percent in the navy, and 4 percent in the air force had experienced a rape or an attempted rape that year. Since about 200,000 women serve in the military, these numbers would represent about 14,000 sexual assaults or attempted assaults each year. Few of these, however, are reported. According to the Department of Defense, only twenty-four cases of sexual assault were actually reported during the buildup to and carrying out of the first Persian Gulf War.

Marie Tessier, an authority on violence against women, writes, “The entire military criminal justice system is worlds apart from the civilian world.... The most important difference is that decisions about investigation and prosecution are made within the chain of command, not by an adversarial outside agency like a prosecutor’s office. This leaves commanders with an inherent conflict of interest.”¹⁰ A rape scandal at the Air Force Academy that burst into the open in 2003 exposed just these issues. The air force disclosed to Congress fifty-four reports of rape or other sexual assaults that had occurred there over the previous decade, but Air Force Secretary James G. Roche testified, “There’s probably another hundred that we’ve not seen.”¹¹ The director of the local civilian rape-counseling center said that the most consistent complaint of cadet women coming into the center was their fear that academy officers and investigators would violate their confidentiality. The issue of consent to a sexual encounter is also more complicated in the military than in civilian life because of hierarchy. Both male and female service personnel are indoctrinated to obey the orders of a superior officer or upperclassman.

Today a slight majority of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are married, up from about 40 percent in 1973. Men are more likely to be married than women. In terms of education, the Department of Defense reports that 1999 recruits had a mean reading ability at an eleventh-grade level, whereas the mean for civilian youths in the same age range was tenth grade. The South, in particular the South Atlantic and West South Central states (Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana), had the greatest geographical representation. More than two-fifths of new recruits came from this area. Both the Northeast and North Central regions were underrepresented, while recruits from the West were approximately equal to the percentage of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds in that region’s population. Based on a survey of parents’ education, employment status, occupation, and home ownership, the 1999 data also showed that both active and reserve recruits came primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle socioeconomic strata. As the report concludes, “Although the force is diverse, it is not an exact replica of the society as a whole. The military way of life is more attractive to some members of society than to others.”

The military is founded on the ideals of patriotism, defense of the nation, and loyalty to an abstract set of values often called the “American way of life.” Most of its members, however, are motivated by defense-establishment careerism, the possibility of using the military as a way out of racial and economic ghettoes, and a fascination, often media-inspired, with military technology. Young African Americans join the military in large numbers in part to escape from inner-city racial ghettoes and employment in the “informal economy,” which frequently leads to prison time. Almost none enlist primarily out of patriotic or public-service motives. In conversation after conversation with journalists, youthful soldiers and sailors referred to the problems of high civilian unemployment, made worse by the shift of entry-level manufacturing jobs abroad and the likelihood of a clash with the law if they tried to make it on their own. One said that if he had not joined the navy, “I would only have ended up in prison.”¹² “Probably if I hadn’t joined the Army,” said a nineteen-year-old woman, “I would be doing the same thing most of my friends are doing, which is working fast food.”¹³

Investigative reporter Kevin Heldman, who in 1997 interviewed troops at Camp Casey, twelve miles from the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea, quotes a soldier who was baited by his sergeant for not wanting to reenlist: “What are you going to do when you get out, go work at McDonald’s?” The soldier replied, “When I get out, if I am flipping burgers at McDonald’s at least I’d be wearing a uniform I was proud of.”¹⁴ The case of twenty-three-year-old Private Michael Waldron is typical. He told Heldman he joined the army because “when I got out of high school jobs sucked.” He served for two years and extended for six months during the first Gulf War. He left the army, joined the National Guard, married, and lived in a trailer in Georgia, where he worked in construction, roofing, and aluminum siding. He divorced his wife, his car broke down, he failed a police-officer test, moved back in with his parents, and after being off active duty for two years, reenlisted. It is worth noting that many recruits, like Waldron, claim they joined the army as a way of eventually becoming police officers. In many cities, applicants for the police force are allowed to substitute two years of military service for required college credits.

Crime and racism are ubiquitous in the military. Although the military invariably tries to portray all reported criminal or racial incidents as unique events, perpetrated by an infinitesimally small number of “bad apples” and with officers taking determined remedial action, a different reality is apparent at military bases around the globe. Heldman enumerates the best-known cases from the mid-1990s: “Soldiers with white supremacist ties are arrested for killing a Black couple in North Carolina; a soldier is sentenced to death for opening fire on a formation, killing one and injuring eighteen, explaining, ‘I wanted to send a message to the chain of command that had forgotten the welfare of the common soldier;’ ten Black soldiers at Fort Bragg beat a white GI into a coma off post; a soldier at Fort Campbell [Kentucky] rammed his vehicle into a crowd of fighting soldiers and civilians, killing two people; two soldiers are shot dead, one injured, at Fort Riley, Kansas, the second double homicide at the base in less than a year; fourteen service members are arrested for smuggling cocaine and heroin; twenty-three women working at Fort Bliss [Texas] file a class-action complaint charging that they have been harassed to pose nude or perform sexual acts; in Japan, a service member is accused of exposing himself to a sixth-grade girl; four others are sentenced for raping a fourteen-year-old girl; another service member is arrested for slashing the throat of a Japanese woman and stealing her purse; two marines are arrested for assaulting and robbing another 56-year-old Japanese woman; and a twelve-year-old girl in Okinawa is raped by three servicemen, inciting a protest of more than 50,000 people.”¹⁵ In South Korea alone during 1996, there were 861 reported offenses committed by American service members involving Korean civilians.

Only rarely do such incidents make it into the mainstream American press. During the summer of 2002, however, Americans were disturbed to read that within the space of six weeks four elite Special Forces and Delta Force soldiers based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, murdered their wives. In a fifth murder a Fort Bragg wife managed to shoot her husband, also a member of the Special Forces, first, while he slept. Three of the soldiers had recently returned from service in Afghanistan, leading U.S. News & World Report to wonder whether the training of the Special Forces could possibly “prime men for homicide.” In the end, it concluded that there simply was no explanation for the murders beyond “the complicated alchemy of military service and the sad mysteries of marriages gone desperately wrong.”¹⁶

According to one 1999 report, the rate of incidents of domestic violence in the military rose from 18.6 per thousand soldiers in 1990 to 25.6 in 1996. During the same period, such incidents within the overall population were actually on the decline. Some studies suggest that the rate of domestic violence in the military is two to five times higher than among civilians.¹⁷ It seems likely that the Fort Bragg killers’ experiences in Afghanistan had some effect on their inclination toward violence. Shortly after the murders, Newsweek reported in detail on Special Forces and Eighty-second Airborne troops in Afghanistan behaving toward unarmed Afghan civilians in an extremely brutal manner. For example, the soldiers took turns photographing one another holding a rifle to the head of an old Afghan man as he begged for his life on his knees. One report said that the soldiers of the Eighty-second Airborne were so indisciplined that they undid “in minutes six months of community building.”¹⁸

The military is aware of the problem. The Marine Corps canceled its 2002 annual meeting of snipers, to be held at its Quantico, Virginia, base at the end of October, because the entire District of Columbia area was then being stalked by a sniper, who turned out to be an army-trained marksman.¹⁹ During the same month, on the other side of the country, another sniper, a Gulf War veteran who had served eleven years on active duty and had received training in an elite Ranger unit, shot and killed three nursing instructors on the campus of the University of Arizona.²⁰

In September 2002, the navy made public a significant series of incidents involving the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, which has its home port at the Yokosuka naval base south of Tokyo, Japan, and served in the Arabian Sea in 2001-02 during the initial assault on Afghanistan. In August 2002, the carrier returned to Japan, where a series of crimes committed by its crew members led to the sacking of the captain for losing control of his ship and its personnel. On August 11, a petty officer assaulted and robbed a sixty-eight-year-old Japanese man and was arrested by the Yokosuka police at the gates of the naval base. Two days later, a nineteen-year-old crew member was arrested for a carjacking after attacking a forty-three-year-old Japanese woman sitting in her automobile at a traffic light. Ten days later, Japanese customs officers arrested a Kitty Hawk petty officer as he attempted to smuggle a kilogram of marijuana from Bangkok into Japan through Narita Airport. The publicity in Japan was devastating. Vice Admiral Robert Willard, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, relieved Captain Thomas Hejl and brought in Captain Robert Barabee from a cruiser, the USS Seattle, to restore some measure of discipline. (On February 13, 2003, Captain Barabee’s superior officer, Rear Admiral Steven Kunkle, head of the Seventh Fleet’s Carrier Group Five, organized around the Kitty Hawk, was himself relieved of his command for having “an improper relationship with a female naval officer.”)

In reporting on the troubled Kitty Hawk, two British journalists uncovered institutionalized conditions of racism on the ship similar to those that caused race riots on the same vessel during the Vietnam War. Roland Watson and Glen Owen wrote of their reactions on visiting the aircraft carrier, “Boarding [the ship] is like entering a time warp back to the former Deep South. In the bowels of the carrier, where the crew are cooped up for six months at a time, manual workers sleep dozens to a room. Most are Black or Puerto Rican, paid $7,000 to $10,000 a year to work in the broiling temperatures of the kitchens and engine rooms. As you move up the eleven segregated levels towards the pilots’ quarters beneath the deck, the living quarters become larger, the air cooler, and the skin tones lighter. Officers exist in almost total ignorance of the teeming world beneath them, passing around second-hand tales of murders, gang-fights, and drug abuse. Visitors are banned from venturing down to the lowest decks, which swelter next to the vast nuclear-powered engines.... Access to the flight deck, which buzzes with F-14 and F-18 aircraft taking part in exercises, is banned for all except the flight crew.”²¹ Such situations are commonplace throughout the armed services. In Korea, for example, soldiers have organized their own racial gangs—the NFL (“Niggas for Life”) for African Americans, the Wild Ass Cowboys and Silver Star Outlaws for whites, and La Raza for Latinos.²²

Under these conditions, recruiting and retaining enough people to staff all the outposts and ships of the empire is a full-time job, and the military has become extremely creative in finding ways to lure young men and women into signing up. A standard ploy by recruiters is to obtain the names, addresses, and phone numbers of students in a community’s high schools and flood their homes with unsolicited mail, phone calls, prowar videos, and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans. The message is aimed at parents as well as students and stresses the benefits of serving in the armed forces, including possible help toward a college education. When the recruiters get an interview with a prospect, they are obliged to ask whether he or she has ever smoked marijuana. According to many reports, if the student answers yes, they just keep asking the same question until the answer is no and then write that down.²³

Complaints about harassment by military recruiters in San Diego, California, became so numerous in 1993 that the San Diego Unified School District adopted a policy against releasing student information to recruiters of any kind. From then on, the military mobilized politicians, the chamber of commerce, the superintendent of schools, even the county grand jury to pressure the school board to reverse itself. Yet in those years of “the ban,” the Pentagon’s message was never absent from the San Diego schools because there are eleven Junior ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) units embedded in the city’s high schools that function as permanent on-campus recruiting centers. Finally the military decided to take a national legislative route to force all public high schools to allow recruiters to proselytize under threat of a cutoff of federal funds for education.

In 2000, President Clinton signed a new law promoted by the Pentagon that gave military recruiters the same access to high schools granted to college and business recruiters. This law contained no penalties for refusal, however, and exempted schools wherever an official districtwide policy, as in San Diego, had been adopted restricting military access. To overcome these obstacles, in 2001 the Pentagon engineered an amendment to a new law intended to help disadvantaged students. This amended law, which President Bush called (without apparent irony) his No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, states: “Any secondary school that receives federal funds under this Act shall permit regular United States Armed Services recruitment activities on school grounds, in a manner reasonably accessible to all students of such school.” The House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 366-57. The Senate did the same by a voice vote, and on January 8, 2002, President Bush signed it into law. As Representative John Shimkus (R-Illinois) said triumphantly, “No recruiters, no money.”²⁴

The Pentagon was so pleased by this development that it decided to extend its newly found leverage to the nation’s universities and graduate schools, most of which withhold their career placement services from employers that discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation. Until August 2002, Harvard Law School, for instance, managed to bar recruiters for the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the military because qualified students who wish to serve are rejected if they are openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual. However, the Department of Defense has reinterpreted federal law to say that if any part of a university denies access to military recruiters the entire university will lose all federal funds. Harvard could not afford to risk the loss of $300 million in federal grants and therefore forced its law school to comply. The military says that it will continue to bar openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual lawyers because they allegedly threaten “unit cohesion.” As George Fisher, a professor at Stanford Law School, commented, “On the battlefield, this justification is merely improbable; in a JAG Corps law office, it is absurd.”²⁵

Another aspect of the Pentagon’s creative efforts to attract more recruits is its support for prowar Hollywood films. This is nothing new. The first Hollywood film about aerial combat, made with military advice, personnel, and equipment in return for an advance look at the script and the right to make changes, was Wings in 1927. As Lawrence H. Suid, a historian of military films, has written, “What Price Glory, Wings, Air Force, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, and hundreds of other Hollywood films have created the image of combat as exciting, as a place to prove masculinity, as a place to challenge death in a socially acceptable manner. As a result, until the late 1960s, American war movies have always ended in victory, with our soldiers, sailors, marines, and fliers running faster than their enemy—whether German, Italian, or Japanese. These screen victories reinforced the image of the American military as all-conquering, all-powerful, always right.”²⁶ During and after Vietnam there were some changes—Patton (1970) introduced an element of realism into war films and the Pentagon declined to assist Apocalypse Now, about one officer in Vietnam sent to kill another, who has gone mad. In the post-Vietnam era, it also did not support films like Demi Moore’s G.I Jane, featuring a woman determined to join the all-male SEALs. Soon, however, the old pattern was largely reestablished. Each branch of the military now has a Los Angeles office, and the relationship between producers and Pentagon “project officers” sent on location to watch everything being filmed and offer advice is closer than ever.²⁷

A contemporary example of the direct ties between Hollywood and recruiting efforts was Disney Studio’s Pearl Harbor. The movie premiered on May 21, 2001, with a special showing on the flight deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Bleachers had been built, a huge screen installed, and the carrier moved (without its aircraft) from its home port in San Diego to Pearl Harbor specifically for this purpose. The navy and Disney invited more that 2,500 guests to the film’s premiere. As the credits reveal, numerous U.S. military commands helped make the movie and in turn extracted changes in the scenario in order to portray the military in a favorable light and promote the idea that service in the armed forces is romantic, patriotic, and fun. According to the Chicago Tribune, military recruiters even set up tables in the lobbies of theaters where Pearl Harbor was being shown in hopes of catching a few youths on their way out of this three-hour recruiting pitch.²⁸

Disney and the Pentagon also worked closely with the media to promote the idea that Pearl Harbor recounted the achievements of what the NBC broadcaster Tom Brokaw has called “the Greatest Generation” in his book of that title—as distinct from the Vietnam generation, which the Pentagon would prefer the public to forget. On May 26, 2001, the day after the film opened in theaters, the Disney-owned ABC-TV network ran a one-hour special on the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by David Brinkley, and the next day rival NBC broadcast a two-hour National Geographic special on the subject, featuring Tom Brokaw himself. The NBC cable affiliate MSNBC then put on a two-hour program about the survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in the Gulf War.²⁹

After the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon introduced a short movie advertisement presumably meant to bolster civilian support for the armed forces and designed to be shown before numerous films. Entitled Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter, the trailer was created by Lieutenant Colonel James Kuhn at a cost of $1.2 million. “Operation Enduring Freedom” was, of course, the title of the military’s campaign against Afghanistan. Although some parents objected to attaching the film—which shows scenes of the airplanes ramming New York’s World Trade Center—to G-rated children’s movies, the public seemed to accept its running with films like The Four Feathers or Sweet Home Alabama. The military’s camera crews shot over 250 hours of footage in making the film—on location with an antiterrorist squad in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the marine base at Twentynine Palms, California, and in the Indian Ocean, Hawaii, Yuma, Arizona, and Norfolk, Virginia. The leftover footage will be made into recruiting commercials and DVDs. In a tie-in with Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest theater chain, the Pentagon also planned to show the short before all feature presentations on Regal’s 4,000 screens.³⁰

Closely related to the Pentagon’s film activities are its general public relations operations. These include helping the mass media portray the military in a favorable light, cultivating promilitary civilian groups at public expense, and suppressing information the military does not want Congress or the public to have. As with support for war movies, so the manipulation of the media to whip up pretexts for military action has a long history in the United States. Prowar and anticommunist propaganda has been a constant in public life since the country’s entry into World War II. In the 1970s, uniformed and civilian militarists’ obsession with closing the Vietnam “credibility gap” spurred a whole new effort. Official lies about military progress during that war and their subsequent exposure by the press caused Pentagon managers to professionalize news management and look for ways to suppress negative aspects of any American military campaign.

“Operation Urgent Fury,” the Reagan administration’s October 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, allegedly to rescue some American students, figures prominently in the history of the Pentagon’s manipulation of the press. With memories of Vietnam fresh in their minds, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the commander of the invasion forces, Vice Admiral Joseph W. Metcalf III, banned all reporters from the island. It was the first U.S. conflict from which the media were excluded at the start of military operations. After seizing the island, the military even took a journalist who had been on the island prior to the invasion into custody and transported him to the navy’s flagship. More significantly, reporters who tried to get to Grenada independently accused navy aircraft of attacking their boats. The claim by critical reporters that press restraints were designed to hide military embarrassments was almost certainly true given the numerous instances of faulty intelligence, failed communications, and general incompetence during the taking of the largely undefended island.

The invasion force included some 5,000 marines, Army Rangers, and parts of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, plus a navy SEALs team, against an all but nonexistent resistance. On the third day of the five-day campaign, the military allowed a carefully chosen “pool” of reporters to visit Grenada. This was the first use of the pool system, in which a few reporters are grouped together and given an officially escorted tour of the battle area. Until Gulf War II, the pool was the standard way of ensuring that nothing disturbing to the military was reported.

In Afghanistan, the military actually issued laminated cards to all soldiers with instructions on how to deal with journalists. The cards included hypothetical questions and answers, such as “How do you feel about what you’re doing in Afghanistan?” Answer: “We’re united in our purpose and committed to achieving our goals.” “How long do you think that will take?” “We will stay here as long as it takes to get the job done, sir!” To give the feeling of spontaneity, some alternatives were provided. “How do you feel about being here?” “I’m proud to be serving my country, sir. We have a job to do and I’m glad to be part of it.” Conversations with reporters at Bagram Air Base near Kabul were so stilted that a BBC journalist finally became suspicious and two GIs showed him their prompt cards.³¹

In preparing for the assault on Iraq in the spring of 2003, the Pentagon invented a new ploy in its unending campaign to control what the public learns and to portray the military in a favorable light. It decided to “embed” (the military’s term) some 600 male and female reporters, photographers, and television crews into combat units and allow them to accompany the troops throughout what was expected to be—and largely was—a walkover of a war. All the journalists assigned were given inoculations against smallpox and anthrax, just like the fighting forces, and about half of them completed weeklong training programs—“camps”—at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and other domestic military bases to expose them to “combat conditions,” including wearing a gas mask. They were not allowed to carry or fire weapons or to drive their own vehicles. The Pentagon’s rules prohibited reporting a continuing action without the permission of the commanding officer or offering the date, time, place, and outcome of a military mission except in the most general terms. In the first Persian Gulf War, the military had relied on the pool system. In the second, it felt more confident that nothing would be on display it did not want reported and that there would be recruitment advantages to bringing one of America’s new, antiseptic wars into the nation’s living rooms.³²

In addition to massaging the media to get out its message, the Pentagon tries to cultivate civilian groups who are likely to support it politically or who have vested interests in defense spending. This lobbying went unnoticed until a fatal case of negligence aboard the submarine USS Greeneville brought it briefly into the open. On February 9, 2001, the 6,500-ton nuclear-powered attack submarine performed a simulated emergency surfacing off Honolulu, colliding with and sinking the Ehime Maru, a 190-foot Japanese high-school training ship, with a loss of nine young Japanese lives.

The Greeneville had put to sea solely to give sixteen rich civilian backers of the navy a joyride. It was missing about a third of its crew and was operating close to Waikiki Beach with several pieces of equipment out of commission. Its captain, Commander Scott D. Waddle, initially testified before a court of inquiry that he had not been distracted by the civilians or by a navy captain escort, even though all of them were crowded into the control room. Nonetheless, a collision between a surfacing submarine and another ship could only have been caused by inattention. On April 16, 2001, the Honolulu Advertiser reported that Waddle reversed himself. If he were court-martialed for negligence, he said, his main defense would be that he had been ordered to take the civilians on a cruise and that, as he told Time, “having them in the control room at least interfered with our concentration.”³³ A Texas oil company executive was actually at the controls when the submarine shot to the surface.

To prevent Waddle from repeating his comments for the official record, the navy’s court of inquiry did not call for testimony from any of the civilian guests, and Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, decided against court-martialing him, because it would, he argued, be detrimental to morale.³⁴ In a court-martial, Waddle would have been able to introduce a defense, which the navy obviously did not want. Instead, Commander Waddle was allowed to retire with full pension benefits. The Greeneville case revealed for the first time, however, the extent to which the navy was using its ships and aircraft as public relations props. During 2000, the Pacific Fleet alone welcomed 7,836 civilian visitors aboard its vessels. It embarked on twenty-one voyages using Los Angeles-dass nuclear attack submarines like the Greeneville for 307 civilian guests and another seventy-four with aircraft carriers for 1,478 visitors. No member of Congress was recorded as questioning or even taking an interest in this lobbying by the navy.

By far the most powerful tool of the Department of Defense in promoting its image and protecting its interests from public scrutiny is official secrecy—the so-called black programs paid for through the “black budget.” Reliance on a budget that systematically attempts to confuse and disinform the public started during World War II with the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. All funds allocated for nuclear weapons research and development were hidden in fake accounts of the War Department and never made public to Congress or the people. The president and the military made the decision entirely on their own to develop the first “weapons of mass destruction.”

With the onset of the Cold War, the Pentagon became addicted to a black-budget way of life. After passage in 1949 of the Central Intelligence Act, all funds for the CIA were (and still are) secretly contained in the Department of Defense’s published budget under camouflaged names. As the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA created new intelligence agencies, the black budget expanded exponentially. In 1952, President Truman signed a still-secret seven-page charter creating the National Security Agency, which is devoted to signals and communications espionage; in 1960, President Eisenhower set up the even more secret National Reconnaissance Office, which runs our spy satellites; in 1961, President Kennedy launched the Defense Intelligence Agency, the personal intelligence organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense; and in 1996, President Clinton combined several agencies into the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The budgets of these ever-proliferating intelligence organizations are all unpublished, but estimates of their size are possible. In August 1994, an internal Pentagon memorandum was accidentally leaked to and published in Defense Week, a weapons-trade magazine. According to this memo, the NSA at that time spent $3.5 billion per year, the DIA $621 million, and the NRO $122 million (the CIA was not included).³⁵

The official name for the black budget is “Special Access Programs” (SAPs), which are classified well above “top secret.” (“SAP” may be a subtle or unintentional bureaucratic reference to the taxpayer.) SAPs are divided into three basic types: weapons research and acquisition (AQSAP), operations and support, including much of the funds for the various Special Forces (OS-SAP), and intelligence (IN-SAP). Only a few members of Congress receive briefings on them, and this limited sharing of information itself came about only late in the Cold War, in the wake of the Watergate scandals. Moreover, at the discretion of the secretary of defense, the reporting requirement may be waived or transmitted orally to only eight designated members of Congress. These “waived SAPs” are the blackest of black holes. The General Accounting Office has identified at least 185 black programs and notes that they increased eightfold during the 1981-86 period. There is no authoritative total, but the GAO once estimated that $30 to $35 billion per year was devoted to secret military and intelligence spending. According to a report of the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, black programs requested in President Bush’s 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988.³⁶

Weapons and operations are identified in the published Pentagon budget by a series of fanciful names—“Grass Blade,” “Chalk Eagle,” “Dark Eyes, ” “Guardian Bear,” “Senior Citizen,” “Tractor Rose,” “Have Blue,” “Sea Nymph,” and many more. Independent analysts of the defense budgets have noticed that in these unclassified nicknames, “Have,” “Senior,” and “Constant” are frequently used as the first word in air force programs, “Tractor” in army programs, and “Chalk” in navy ones.³⁷ Black programs that have slowly, usually inadvertently, come to light include a secret flight-test base on the edge of the dry Groom Lake in the desert north of Las Vegas, Nevada, known as Area 51 and carried on the books as part of Edwards Air Force Base, California; three reconnaissance UAVs (unmanned air vehicles) first put on the drawing board in 1994-95—the Predator, Dark Star, and Global Hawk—of which the Predator saw extensive use in the Afghan invasion; and the USAF’s space maneuver vehicle (SMV), originated by Rockwell but today a Boeing project. Some of the more interesting black operations include the army’s 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which supplies helicopters for the Delta Force commando unit, and the air force’s 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, formally located at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Since the 1970s the 4477th has bought or stolen Soviet combat aircraft for flight testing at Area 51. In 1998, the air force announced that for the first time it had acquired a MiG-29 from the former Soviet republic of Moldava, but all further details remain classified.

The military’s extreme fetish for secrecy and disinformation—the dissemination of plausible but false data—makes a farce of congressional oversight. It is impossible for anyone without an extraordinarily high security clearance to make any sense at all of “defense” appropriations. Moreover, the whole system is so compartmentalized that black programs often duplicate one another without anyone’s appearing to know what is going on. In a lawsuit over the cancelation of the navy’s stealth fighter, the A-12 Avenger II, a black program, the McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics companies charged that technology developed in other black programs would have solved some of the problems that led to the project’s termination but that the people in the A-12 program were not informed about it.³⁸ Secrecy has been carried to such lengths that at Boeing’s aptly named Phantom Works at Palmdale, California, devoted to black projects, background music plays constantly to drown out conversations, which are assumed to be of a secret nature.

If anything, the situation today is worse than ever. A typical recent scandal involves contracts signed between the Defense Department, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing to design and build new rockets to lift heavy satellites into space. The DoD has classified the contracts themselves “to protect the business interests of two of America’s biggest defense contractors.”³⁹

As with the seemingly unstoppable growth of secrecy within the government, so too has there been implacable pressure from the Pentagon to expand its functions and seize bureaucratic turf from other agencies. There are many aspects to this problem, but perhaps the most important politically, and certainly one of the clearest signs of militarism in America, is the willingness of some senior officers and civilian militarists to meddle in domestic policing. The U.S. Constitution establishes a clear separation between the activities of the armed forces in the defense of the country and law enforcement under the penal codes of the various states. James Madison so feared military dominance that he wrote in The Federalist, No. 41, “a standing [military] force is a dangerous provision.” While this fear was rooted in the political preoccupations of the American Revolution, it did not become a pressing issue until the disputed presidential election of 1876, when troops were dispatched to polling stations in three southern states—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Rutherford B. Hayes, a northerner from Ohio, won by only one electoral vote in a situation comparable to the disputed Florida election of 2000, when the Supreme Court rather than the military interfered in state affairs.

The purpose of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was to prevent the military from ever again engaging in police activities without the consent of Congress or the president. Posse comitatus, Latin for “power of the country,” is a medieval term for the English practice of a sheriff summoning citizens to help him arrest a criminal or quell a civil disturbance. In nineteenth-century America, the phrase was shortened simply to “posse.” Although the act has been modified many times to allow the military to aid in drug interdiction and help patrol the Mexican border, it still is meant to ensure that the standing army will not have any role in policing American citizens in their own country.

However, the rise of militarism, aided by the attacks of September 11, 2001, has eroded these old distinctions. By expanding the meaning of national security to include counterterrorism and controlling immigration, areas in which it now actively participates, the Pentagon has moved into the domestic policy business. The Department of Defense has, for instance, drafted operational orders to respond to what it calls a CIDCON (“civilian disorder condition”). During the Republican Party’s convention in Philadelphia in August 2000, for example, the Pentagon placed on alert in case of a large-scale terrorist incident a “Joint Task Force-Civil Support” based at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and “Task Force 250.” Task Force 250 is actually the army’s Eighty-second Airborne Division, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.⁴⁰

The United States has obviously not proved immune to terrorist attacks—witness the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the blowing up of the Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City in May 1995, and the assaults on New York and Washington of September 2001. In one way or another—one of the Murrah terrorists was a Gulf War veteran—these incidents all suggest blowback from U.S. government activities in foreign countries. The United States has also seen instances of state terrorism, as in the federal agents’ attack on the white supremacist former Green Beret Randy Weaver and his family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and the FBI’s assault on religious dissidents at Waco, Texas, in 1993.⁴¹ It is conceivable that in the future such incidents will bring out the troops. But, more important, “terrorism” is an extremely flexible concept open to abuse by the leaders of an ambitious and unscrupulous military.

During the summer of 2002, the Bush administration directed lawyers in the Departments of Justice and Defense to review the Posse Comitatus Act and any other laws that might restrict the military’s ability to participate in domestic law enforcement. At the time, the Defense Department was creating a new regional command to defend North America, comparable to those for Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific. The Northern Command, based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, is intended to better position the military to respond to terrorism close to home and to prevent the introduction of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons into the United States. (Even during World War II, the federal government did not create a centralized command for the American mainland, because of concerns that it could become the basis for a military dictatorship.) The command’s jurisdiction includes the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Cuba. Neither the Mexicans, the Canadians, nor, of course, the Cubans were consulted. This new headquarters, like that of the other regional “CINCs” (commanders in chief), will exist largely outside either the civilian or the military chains of command. CINCs are, in fact, comparable to Roman proconsuls, except that the men assigned to that post in the Roman Republic had already held the highest office in the realm, that of consul, and were deeply trusted civilians and military veterans.

The first CINC of the Northern Command is General Ralph E. Eberhart of the air force, another former head of the Space Command. On his appointment, Eberhart said, “We should always be reviewing things like Posse Comitatus and other laws if we think it ties our hands in protecting the American people.”⁴² It seemed not to have occurred to Eberhart that the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to protect Americans from generals like himself. Several civilian agencies, including the FBI, the Public Health Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have expressed dismay at the growing role of the military in their spheres of responsibility. The new Department of Homeland Security, created in 2003, combines many formerly civilian agencies and works closely with the Pentagon and the Northern Command. Its first deputy director is Gordon R. England, a former secretary of the navy and a former executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas, the manufacturer of the military’s main fighter plane, the F-16.⁴³ It is not at all obvious which is a greater threat to the safety and integrity of the citizens of the United States: the possibility of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction or an out-of-control military intent on displacing elected officials who stand in their way.

In addition to setting up the Northern Command and trying to undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, the military establishment is expanding its functions and influence on many other fronts. It has, for instance, directly challenged the Treasury Department with a demand that all significant foreign acquisitions of American companies be subjected to a national security review. The Pentagon wants a much larger voice in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, including compulsory notification from the CFIUS of all takeovers by foreigners worth more than $100 million. Such a demand may be a thinly disguised form of protectionism, but, as the British Financial Times observed, “The Pentagon’s attempt to extend its influence over inward investment is emblematic of its growing power within the Bush administration.”⁴⁴

Equally to the point, during 2003, the administration tucked a surprise proposal into a broader intelligence authorization bill that would give the military (and the CIA) authority to issue subpoenas requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries, and a range of other organizations to produce on-demand materials like phone records, bank transactions, and e-mail logs. This would be a total break with the longstanding requirement that only the FBI can seek such information on American citizens within the United States and then only with judicial authorization, particularly if it plans to use such information in court. The new proposal would allow the military and the CIA to gather intelligence on citizens without ever being subject to judicial oversight.⁴⁵

Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has also been active in trying to exempt the military from various environmental protection laws. For example, the Marine Corps has complained that the 1973 Endangered Species Act interferes with its troops’ abilities to dig foxholes wherever they want on the 125,000-acre base at Camp Pendleton, California. The Fish and Wildlife Service wants to designate a small part of the base as “critical habitats” for endangered species of birds, including the Western snowy plover and the California least tern. There is already provision within the Endangered Species Act for a national security exemption, but the marines have never used it. They seem less interested in solving the problems of training marines while protecting the environment than in establishing the principle that the military is a law unto itself.⁴⁶

The Pentagon’s priority areas for expansion are the diplomatic functions of the State Department and the intelligence and covert-action functions of the CIA. Both the military’s Special Forces and the posts of regional commanders in chief have their roots in the disastrous attempt between April 24 and 26, 1980, to rescue American hostages captured in the Iranian seizure of our embassy in Teheran. That failure revealed that the Pentagon needed to be much more serious in training and equipping commandos for “low-intensity warfare” and in providing unified commands that could order up the needed resources without having to fight their way through a labyrinthine chain of command and the inevitable interservice rivalries. Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, the commander of the army’s Delta Force that was destroyed at Desert One, southeast of Teheran, through its own bungling, testified to Congress: “In Iran we had an ad hoc affair. We went out, found bits and pieces, people and equipment, brought them together occasionally and then asked them to perform a highly complex mission. The parts all performed, but they didn’t necessarily perform as a team. Nor did they have the same motivation. My recommendation is to put together an organization that contains everything it will ever need, an organization that would include Delta, the Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force pilots, its own staff, its own support people, its own aircraft and helicopters. Make this organization a permanent military unit. Give it a place to call home. Allocate sufficient funds to run it. And give it sufficient time to recruit, assess, and train its people. Otherwise, we are not serious about combatting terrorism.”⁴⁷

These recommendations slowly led to the empowerment of the regional commanders and the dramatic enlargement, during the 1990s, of the Special Forces, which were used for the “humanitarian interventions” favored by the Clinton administration. In 1997, responsibility for shaping key foreign political and military strategies was officially given to the regional commanders (called commanders in chief, or CINCs, until October 2002, when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, apparently feeling threatened by their growing power, rechristened them “combatant commanders”). These semiautonomous generals and admirals perform functions that until the 1990s had been handled primarily by civilian officials.

In the Middle East (CENTCOM), the Pacific (PACOM), Europe (EUCOM), and Latin America (SOUTHCOM), the CINCs oversee such things as intelligence, special operations, space assets, nuclear forces, arms sales, and military bases; and they produce what are called “theater engagement plans.” These are essentially mini-foreign policy statements for each region and include explicit programs to cultivate close relations with local military organizations.⁴⁸ This is done chiefly by deploying approximately 7,000 Special Forces soldiers in 150 countries to train local militaries in what is called “foreign internal defense” (FID)—in many cases merely a euphemism for the techniques of state terrorism. The training missions allow the United States to spy on these countries, sell them weapons, and encourage their armies to carry out policies the Pentagon favors. Everything is done very quietly and with virtually no political oversight.

Over time, the CINCs have become more influential in their regions than ambassadors. When General Anthony C. Zinni of the marines was head of CENTCOM, he had twenty ambassadors serving under him and a personal political adviser with ambassadorial rank. PACOM (also known as CINCPAC) supervises the affairs of forty-three countries. Each CINC has at his disposal virtually unlimited funds, his own airplanes and helicopters, and numerous staff officers. A CINC reports directly to the president and the secretary of defense, avoiding the service chiefs and the normal chain of command.

When, in October 1999, General Pervez Musharraf carried out a military coup d’état in Pakistan, President Clinton telephoned to protest and asked to be called back. Musharraf instead called General Zinni and reportedly began, “Tony, I want to tell you what I am doing.”⁴⁹ General Zinni ignored the congressional ban on foreign aid to a country that has undergone a military coup and emerged as one of Musharraf’s strongest supporters before 9/11. It was also Zinni, and not officials of the State Department, who made the decision to refuel warships in the Yemeni port of Aden, where, on October 12, 2000, suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS Cole, killing seventeen sailors.

The CINCs appear more interested in friendly relations with their foreign military colleagues than in a regime’s human rights abuses, regardless of U.S. foreign policy. As CINCPAC, Admiral Dennis Blair was determined to reopen ties with the Indonesian military despite its commanders’ having been involved in the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians as well as United Nations officials in East Timor. Although our ambassador to Jakarta explicitly objected to his illegal collaboration with Indonesia’s military, Blair became the first high-ranking American officer to visit Indonesia after Congress imposed sanctions. Thanks to military intelligence, Blair was well informed about conditions on Timor and the likelihood of violence if its citizens voted for independence, but at no time did he seek to restrain his Indonesian colleagues. Five Indonesian officers, all of them products of American military training, were subsequently charged with crimes against humanity. Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) commented, “For as long as I have been in the Senate, the Pentagon has said that U.S. engagement would professionalize the Indonesian army. That has been disproved time and time again, and the final straw was the debacle in East Timor.”⁵⁰

Blair’s CINCPAC was not exceptional. The head of CINCSOUTH has gone out of his way to reestablish close ties with the El Salvadoran army, which probably has the worst human rights record of any Latin American military. On October 15, 1979, the United States sponsored a coup by young Salvadoran military officers that led to a vicious war against largely unarmed civilians by army escuadrones de la muerte (death squads). They slaughtered some 38,000 people before the Reagan administration sent then Vice President Bush to tell them to stop. In mid-1986, one Pentagon official boasted, “Every soldier in [El Salvador’s] army has been trained by us in one way or another.”⁵¹ As late as 1989, army Special Forces were still “training” El Salvador’s Atlacatl Battalion, which during November of that year murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her young daughter for alleged guerrilla sympathies. It is the officers of El Salvador’s army “who have remained close to the U.S. military in the decade since their civil war ended,” and who are our allies today in that tiny nation.⁵² No country in the CINCSOUTH theater is threatened by a foreign enemy; therefore the purpose of our military presence is purely imperialist.

Leaving foreign policy in the hands of regional proconsuls advances militarism because they inevitably turn to military assets to achieve foreign policy objectives. Under these circumstances, it is hard to see why anyone would want to work for the State Department. The CIA is also being undercut, but here the assault comes not from the CINCs but directly from the Pentagon and the current darlings of the military—the “special forces.”

Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11—once it had been established that al-Qaeda was the probable terrorist organization responsible—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ordered Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith to set up a special intelligence unit within the Pentagon. Its specific purpose was to find links between al-Qaeda and the regime of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq even though the CIA did not believe such links existed. Feith, like his bosses, had held several defense positions in the Reagan administration, including special counsel to then Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, and was part of a group of officials strongly influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney, the former secretary of defense. From the moment the new Bush administration was formed, this group passionately wanted to go to war with Iraq. Feith had been, in the words of the New York Times, “data mining” to find an al-Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein that would justify an American war against him. Wolfowitz, Feith, and their associates were “intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views.”⁵³

It soon developed that the chief obstacle to these efforts was the Central Intelligence Agency. Its operatives and analysts could find no connection between Iraq and the attacks of September 11. The agency also believed that the secular regime in Iraq was unlikely to have anything to do with the militantly Islamicist al-Qaeda and doubted that Saddam Hussein would supply terrorists beyond his control with any kind of weaponry that could be traced back to him.⁵⁴ This difference of opinion soon developed into a full-blown bureaucratic turf war.

In March 2002, a presidential commission led by retired Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush’s national security adviser, recommended that three key Pentagon-financed intelligence agencies—the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency—be placed under the control of the director of the CIA. This was a serious challenge to Rumsfeld’s empire. On June 21, 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld responded with what U.S. News & World Report called a “brilliant stealth attack.” He quietly inserted in a Senate defense bill the authority to create a new undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “The new undersecretary position is a bureaucratic coup that accomplished many Pentagon goals in one fell swoop.... [Rumsfeld] is creating another DCI [director of central intelligence] for all practical purposes.”⁵⁵ The new undersecretary is Rumsfeld’s neocon crony Stephen Cambone. He has been given authority over the three nonmilitary intelligence agencies plus the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to Jay Farrar, a former employee in the Defense Department and National Security Council who works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative think tank, “It’s one more step in the Defense Department seeking to consolidate major control over the intelligence apparatus of the United States.” The New York Times adds, “Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn’t support their own preconceived conclusions. The CIA is enemy territory, as far as they are concerned.”⁵⁶

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has also reportedly been “eager to have U.S. special forces usurp the [Central Intelligence] agency’s traditional role” in conducting covert operations.⁵⁷ There are interlocking reasons for this. The secretary arrived in the Pentagon eager to wean the army away from its commitment to heavy armor and artillery of the sort once aimed at the tank forces of the former Soviet Union. He and other defense planners also believed covert operations were the most logical means of implementing the president’s new National Military Strategy of “preventive war.” Part of this strategy consists of infiltrating covert operatives into target countries to carry out provocative acts that would supposedly flush out terrorists and provide excuses for military intervention. Under the control of the army, such covert operations were would not have to be reported to Congress as do those conducted by the CIA. The United States would then be able to intervene more easily in targeted countries with even less civilian supervision than if such illegal operations were left to the official clandestine services agency. Above all, a stress on special operations expands the functions of the military into new, previously quasi-civilian-run jurisdictions.

Despite press glorification of special forces as an “elite secret army” and the fact that they received the biggest increase in spending in the 2003 defense budget—a rise of some 20 percent, to $3.8 billion—they do not have a good reputation.⁵⁸ In Vietnam, the army’s Green Berets were notorious for their brutality as well as their ineffectiveness, and the failure of the First Special Forces Detachment-Delta, as it was formally known, in the Teheran hostage rescue operation led to the first major expansion of special forces during the Reagan administration and the 1981 creation of the army’s supersecret Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). As Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Tim Weiner has observed, “[The ISA] set up shop all over Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama—to support the war against the Sandinistas and their left-wing allies. It created private companies to serve as fronts for espionage, including a butcher shop and a meat warehouse in Panama. It set up safe houses, secret airfields and caches for money and weapons, breaking a trail for future operations against the enemy [namely, the elected Sandinista government] in Nicaragua.”⁵⁹ Very soon, however, its officers also developed reputations for embezzlement, cocaine trafficking, and obstruction of justice. Although the ISA never went completely out of business, by the mid-1980s $324 million of its funds were missing and secret tribunals sentenced several of its officers to long sentences at Fort Leavenworth. During the same period, members of Delta Force were charged with $200,000 worth of double billings for expenses while traveling overseas to protect U.S. ambassadors.⁶⁰

To try to bring some order out of this chaos, Congress, in 1987, created a new Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. This umbrella organization, led by a four-star general, finally brought the competing special forces of the army, navy, and air force under a unified command even though intelligence rivalries still persist. The special forces, currently amounting to about 47,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen, include four army groups—Special Forces (Green Berets), headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; the Rangers, rapid-reaction units whose primary mission is combat behind enemy lines; Delta Force commandos for hostage rescue operations; and the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, the helicopter attack squadron that transports Delta operatives into action. The navy contributes the SEALs, reputedly the best trained of all special operations forces, and the air force commits a “special operations wing” with squadrons all over the world responsible for long-range infiltration of special operations forces and rescue missions. Some elements of the Marine Corps were scheduled to join this megagrouping in 2002. In June of that year, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld assigned to the special operations command the primary role in the hunt for al-Qaeda.⁶¹

In September 2002, the Defense Science Board, a highly respected panel of private industry executives that advises the Pentagon on technologies and policies, issued its report on “Special Operations and Joint Forces in Countering Terrorism.” It called for the creation of what it termed a “Proactive Preemptive Operations Group,” yet another special force that would devise ways to provoke terrorists into an overt response so they could be targeted and attacked. The report advocated numerous other projects, including assembling a special SWAT team to surreptitiously find and destroy chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons all over the world. The total price tag was an estimated $7 billion a year. Above all, the Defense Science Board advocated authorizing the military to carry out covert operations independent of (and unknown to) other intelligence and police agencies.⁶² The recommendations reflected the thinking of the Cheney-Rumsfeld group within the military establishment and would involve a remarkable expansion and centralization of clandestine military services in the hands of the secretary of defense. Some very mainstream observers have urged caution. Two prominent Council on Foreign Relations officials, Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, and Jonathan D. Tepperman, an analyst, in an article entitled “Soldiers Should Not Be Spying,” condemn the idea—implicit in the new covert operations planning in the Pentagon—of sending special forces into allied countries without informing their governments. They speculate on Germany’s probable reaction if Delta Force soldiers were caught raiding an alleged al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg without the approval of the German government.⁶³ Despite these warnings, the Pentagon has decided to go ahead. It plans to deploy hundreds of spies drawn from all four services under the control of the Defense Intelligence Agency.⁶⁴

These latest proposals threaten to institutionalize the acts behind the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s as a way of life. When Congress cut off funding for the CIA-run war in Central America, the military used Oliver North, a marine officer in civilian clothes based in the White House, to raise funds illegally in arms deals with Iran and secretly funnel the money to the Contras, a private army of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries. Given the advance of militarism since that time, it is not fanciful to think that this may become a normal method of operations in the future conduct of foreign policy.

The British had their Gurkhas, Sikhs, and sepoys; the French their Foreign Legion; the Dutch their Amboinese; the Russians their Cossacks; and the Japanese their puppet armies in Manchuria, China, Indonesia, and Burma. Among the traditions of imperialism, the hegemon recruiting foreigners to do his dirty work certainly stands near the top of the list. Replacing homeland soldiers with local cannon fodder and setting one indigenous ethnic or religious group against another have often made the policing of a subordinate people easier and less expensive.

The Americans tried their hand at it in Vietnam when, in 1962, they sent some 2,000 Green Berets into the southern highlands to train the Montagnards—mountain people, ethnically distinct from the Vietnamese—and organize them into a Civilian Irregular Defense Group. Generally speaking, the Montagnards contributed little to the war effort and their outposts were easily overrun by the Vietcong whenever it served their purposes.¹ Nonetheless, like virtually all imperialists before them, the Americans have never given up hope that they might discover the key to getting locals to do their fighting for them.

Particularly since the end of the Cold War, the military has developed close relations with myriad governments and officer corps in the Third World and has put immense effort into military-to-military training programs. During the 1990s, leaders in both political parties concluded that many foreign policy goals could best be fostered through such military-to-military contacts and weapons sales as opposed to traditional economic and diplomatic ties.² One program for implementing such policies, the State Department’s International Military Education and Training Program (IMET), has increased fourfold since 1994. In 1990, it was offering military instruction to the armies of 96 countries; by 2002, that already impressive number had risen to 133 countries. There are only 189 countries in the United Nations, which means that this single program “instructs” militaries in 70 percent of the world’s nations. In recent years we have been training approximately 100,000 foreign soldiers each year—and here we are ordinarily talking about officers who then can pass on American methods to their troops. In 2001, the military taught 15,030 officers and men in Latin America alone. The Pentagon either brings the trainees to about 150 different military educational institutions in the United States or sends military instructors, almost always army Special Forces, to the countries themselves. The war on terrorism only accelerated these trends. Funding for IMET rose from $58 million in fiscal year 2001 to $80 million for 2003, a jump of 38 percent.

The United States claims that it trains foreign armies as a way of teaching them American values and models of civil-military relations. Pentagon officials regularly assure congressional committees that educating foreign soldiers helps correct the civil rights records of sometimes abusive militaries. However, Lora Lumpe, the leading authority on the subject, concludes, “Most of the programs have had no discernible focus on human rights and have been carried out in a highly, if not completely, unaccountable manner.”³ The Special Forces are anything but impeccable models when it comes to adhering to high standards in the treatment of prisoners or civilians.⁴ Such close contact between American military instructors and foreign officers and soldiers also gives the United States an inside track in weapons sales, a form of commerce run directly out of the Pentagon, although private munitions companies can also sell weapons if licensed to do so by the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls. Since 1991, the United States has been by far the largest single seller of munitions on earth. From 1997 to 2001, it exported $44.82 billion in arms; the next-biggest supplier, Russia, sold $17.35 billion. Train and sell—it is a closely meshed system to enlist allies and make money from less developed countries.

The main public intent behind foreign military training today is the recruitment of more foot soldiers in the war on terrorism and their preparation for joint operations with American units. Among the hidden motives behind such programs is finding surrogates for American troops in order to avoid casualties that might roil the “homeland.” Ever since 1993, when the dragging of the body of Sergeant Randy Shughart through the streets of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, was televised, causing President Clinton to withdraw our forces from the country four days later, the Pentagon has tried to avoid anything that would turn the public against its plans. As President Bush said in a speech on March 11, 2002, “We will not send American troops to every battle, but America will actively prepare other nations for the battles ahead.”⁵

Troop trainers are often sent abroad—ostensibly to learn foreign languages and familiarize themselves with exotic cultures—in order to circumvent congressional bans on official contacts with countries that have bad human rights records. The Pentagon finds it convenient to train foreign military forces and police to carry out secret programs of state terrorism, including the assassination of foreign leaders, without being charged with war crimes and violations of the Geneva Conventions.⁶ Foreign military training is also a way to buy political influence. For example, the United States spends $12,000 a year training the military forces of the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. In return, Tuvalu was one of only four countries that joined the United States and Israel in voting against an October 2000 U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Israel for its indiscriminate use of force in Palestine.

The United States has two alternative ways of implementing its training programs, each with different unintended consequences. Both have long-standing precedents in the practices of the British Empire, of which the United States has become a dutiful if not particularly inspired pupil. I call these the “sepoy strategy” and the “private military companies strategy.” The word sepoy probably derives from the Urdu word for “horseman” or “soldier,” and the sepoy strategy once involved training “native” troops to serve in regiments commanded by British officers or in imperial Indian regiments thought to be loyal to the British crown, which were normally composed of Sikh and Gurkha mercenaries. In 1857, at the time of the Sepoy Mutiny—which Indian nationalists call their “first war of independence”—Britain deployed an army of 300,000 soldiers in India, 96 percent of whom were sepoys. The fact that, when push came to shove, they proved not to be loyal to Britain highlights one of the major potential pitfalls of this approach.

The classic American example of the employment of sepoys was in the “secret war” in Laos that stretched from 1960 to 1975. Army Green Berets and the CIA supplied clandestine aid to French-trained General Vang Pao of the Laotian army, who, in turn, recruited a 30,000-strong army of Hmong tribesmen to fight the Pathet Lao Communist forces allied with North Vietnam. Vang Pao became a hero to American strategists in Saigon and Washington—the best puppet we ever found in Indochina. Our most important form of aid to him was air power. We backed the Hmong fighters with bombing missions from our bases in Thailand. We also used the CIA’s private airline, Air America, to supply the scattered Hmong villages with arms, rice, and other supplies and then transported their main cash crop, opium, to Vang Pao’s headquarters in the Plain of Jars. From there the opium went on to supply American troops fighting in Vietnam and, via underworld traffickers, on to the international market.

When, after 1969, the Pathet Lao began to defeat the Hmong guerrillas, Air America evacuated thousands of them to refugee camps under Vang Pao’s control and carpet-bombed the Hmong villages that had been overrun. Ultimately, after the collapse of anti-Communist resistance throughout Indochina, the CIA evacuated Vang Pao and thousands of his supporters to the United States, where they now live. Unlike Britain’s sepoys, Vang Pao and the Hmong always remained loyal to the CIA. As Alfred McCoy, the leading authority on the opium trade that accompanied this secret war, notes, “While the U.S. military sent half a million troops to fight a conventional war in South Vietnam, this mountain warfare required only a handful of American personnel.”⁷

The private military companies strategy is typified by the Vinnell Corporation of Fairfax, Virginia, a subsidiary of the large defense conglomerate Northrop Grumman. Vinnell was created by retired American military officers and, since 1975, has been licensed by the government to train the Saudi National Guard, the 100,000-strong force that protects the monarchy and serves as a counterweight to any threat from the regular armed forces. Over the years Vinnell has constructed, run, written doctrine for, and staffed five Saudi military academies, seven shooting ranges, and a health care system, while training and equipping four Saudi mechanized brigades and five infantry brigades. Saudi Arabia has, in turn, funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into major defense corporations to equip these forces, which briefly saw action in the first Gulf War by recapturing the Saudi town of Khafji, on the Kuwait border, from the Iraqis.⁸

Vinnell is one of about thirty-five private rent-a-trainer, rent-amercenary, and rent-a-cop companies whose leaders and employees, mostly retired high-ranking officers and members of the Special Forces, hire themselves out to the government and its foreign allies to perform any number of military tasks, including troop training. Since these companies are private contractors, they are not subject to military discipline and their operations remain the proprietary secrets of the companies, not subject to any form of public oversight. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the British and South Africans created similar companies of mercenaries to train and sometimes fight alongside both governmental and insurgent forces in the Middle East, Angola, and Sierra Leone. The United States also hired private companies to train South Vietnamese military forces and police during the 1960s and 1970s, but to little avail. I will return to the American private companies below, but let us first consider our record with sepoys.

IMET was created in 1976 in the wake of the Nixon Doctrine, that forlorn attempt to “Vietnamize” the Vietnam War—that is, to shift to the principle that “Asian boys should fight Asian wars.” IMET’s primary mode of operation was—and remains—to pay foreign officers and soldiers to take courses at such places as the National Defense University in Washington, DC; the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; the Naval Special Warfare Center (headquarters of the SEALs) at Coronado, California; the Inter-American Air Force Academy at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas; the Air Force Special Operations Command’s school at Hurlburt Field, Fort Walton Beach, Florida; and the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

By far the most notorious of these institutions is the Spanish-language School of the Americas (SOA), which, to evade a congressional order that it be closed, in 2000 renamed itself the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). This ruse, which fooled no one, nonetheless formally stopped the movement to abolish SOA. Founded in 1946 and situated in the then American colony of the Canal Zone, it was evicted in 1984 by the Panamanian government, whose president, Jorge Illueca, termed it the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” SOA/WHISC is now located on the grounds of the army base at Fort Benning, Georgia. Over the years it has trained well over 60,000 Latin American military and police officers, significant numbers of whom have been implicated in cases of torture, rape, massacre, and assassination. Among them was Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the March 24, 1980, assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero (in which the CIA may have been implicated) and the December 1981 El Mozote massacre of 900 Salvadoran civilians. As of late 2002, civil war-torn Colombia’s army includes some 10,000 SOA/WHISC graduates.

In 1996, the American press discovered that between 1982 and 1991 the SOA adopted as textbooks seven different Spanish-language manuals based on a U.S. Army original that called for “neutralizing [i.e., killing] government officials, political leaders, and members of the infrastructure.” These manuals were distributed to thousands of military officers in eleven South and Central American countries. According to a Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Arne Owens, “The problem was discovered in 1992, properly reported, and fixed.”⁹ WHISC remains the focus of a widespread protest movement led by Father Roy Bourgeois, a former navy officer who is today a Maryknoll priest. He has been arrested many times at Fort Benning. Should he and his supporters ever succeed in closing down the school on U.S. soil, the Bush administration has announced backup plans for a successor in Costa Rica.

The rich rival of the State Department’s IMET program is the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF), which gives money to countries to buy American weapons and then supplies training in how to use them. Appropriations for IMET in fiscal year 2001 were $57,875,000, with proposed expenditures for 2003 of $80,000,000—whereas the FMF appropriations are in the billions and still rising. In 2001, the Pentagon received $3,576,240,000 and promptly put in a request of $4,107,200,000 for 2003. Such differences between the two programs reflect the fact that the Pentagon’s budget is almost twenty times larger than the State Department’s. A major portion of the Pentagon’s funds traditionally goes to Israel, but the biggest proposed recipients in the FMF 2003 budget were Jordan, at $198 million (plus IMET of $2.4 million); Colombia at $98 million (IMET of $1.2 million); India at $50 million (IMET of $1 million); Pakistan at $50 million (IMET of $1 million); Turkey at $17.5 million (IMET of $350,000); and Uzbekistan at $8.75 million (IMET of $1.2 million). These sums represented the first FMF payments to Colombia, India, and Pakistan in recent years. Uzbekistan, which has one of the worst human rights records anywhere, is a new recipient. The Department of Defense at first proposed that Azerbaijan also receive an IMET grant of $750,000 and a FMF grant of $3 million in 2003 as part of the war on terrorism but later admitted that the funds were actually intended to protect U.S. access to oil in and around the Caspian Sea.

One other Department of Defense training program was created primarily to deceive Congress. From 1950 until November 1991, when the Indonesian army opened fire on and killed 270 unarmed demonstrators in the city of Dili, the capital of East Timor, the government paid for the training of over 7,300 Indonesian officers. After it was discovered that American-trained troops firing American-supplied weapons had carried out the Dili massacre, Congress banned all further military funds to Indonesia. The following year the Pentagon set up a new program, Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET), which sends Special Forces to various countries allegedly to learn local languages and gain “familiarity” with the local military. It was, however, designed largely to keep military relationships with Indonesia on course. From 1992 to May 1998, without informing Congress, Special Forces units carried out thirty-six training exercises with Indonesian special forces units under cover of JCET.

In 1999, after East Timor gained its independence through a United Nations-sponsored referendum, militias under Indonesian military guidance pursued a relentless campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the island’s civilian population. This time the Clinton administration instituted a ban on all forms of military assistance to Indonesia, a ban still in effect at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In December 2001, the Pentagon inserted a clause into the Defense Appropriations Act establishing a new “Regional Counter-Terrorism Defense Fellowship Program,” worth $17.9 million. Completely independent of IMET, FMF, and JCET, this program now brings Indonesian military officers to the United States for training. The Pentagon uses several other practices to evade congressional restrictions on its relations with foreign militaries, evidence of a mind-set consistent with militarism.

Reminiscent as all this may be of British imperial practices, U.S. military officers may not recall the underside of such training programs—the Sepoy Mutiny. This massive rebellion lasted almost a year from the first outbreak at Meerut on May 10, 1857, until March 1858, when the siege of Lucknow was lifted. For a short period, the mutineers even captured the capital of the British Raj, Delhi. It was one of the few instances in modern history of a genuine clash of civilizations. The British in India had come to think of themselves as a master race and looked down on the native Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, serving in the British army. They even sent Christian missionaries among the troops to try to convert them. In 1857, when the British introduced one of the earliest versions of the Enfield rifle, the bullets came soaked in grease made from animal fat, including fat from cows and pigs. Cows are sacred to Hindus; pigs are repulsive to Muslims. One of the idiosyncrasies of the ammunition for this particular rifle was that a twist of paper attached at one end had to be bitten off before the gun could be used.¹⁰ Rumors quickly spread among the sepoys that the British were trying to humiliate them by forcing them to violate religious taboos. So when one British commander ordered his troops to bite the bullet, a soldier shot him.

The revolt spread like an eruption through the Indian army, and the British struck back with savage brutality. Captured sepoys were bayoneted or sewn into the hides of pigs or cows and fired from cannons. Much as when the Roman Republic suppressed the Spartacist revolt, the road from Kanpur to Allahabad was lined with the corpses of Indian soldiers who had been hanged. England ended the authority of the East India Company, which had employed the sepoys and their officers, and for the next ninety years ruled the country directly as a crown colony. The Indian regiments were abolished and their soldiers absorbed into larger formations that included Englishmen. The operation of artillery was restricted to British soldiers only. With these changes, the British in effect gave up their role as merchants in India and became the unwelcome occupiers of a hostile land.

Something similar happened to the Americans in Afghanistan. Between 1979 and 1989, the CIA supplied mujahideen (“freedom fighter”) groups with over $2 billion worth of light weapons, including Stinger antiaircraft missile launchers, and offered instruction in how to use them against the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan. The Americans were uninterested in the religious beliefs, political loyalties, or attitudes toward the West of those they were recruiting, training, and arming.¹¹ Once the Soviet Union was defeated, the Americans abandoned Afghanistan to its fate and the Afghan freedom fighters, mainly Islamic fundamentalists, turned against the United States. The deployment of thousands of American military forces to Saudi Arabia, site of Islam’s two most sacred sites, and support for Israel only increased their resentment. Muslim militants retaliated throughout the 1990s, attacking New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. military apartment towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the navy destroyer USS Cole in 2000. It is possible to think of the suicidal attacks of September 11 as a contemporary version of the Sepoy Mutiny—even though the Bush administration has done everything in its power to ensure that Americans do not think such things.

America’s military trains and equips its sepoys directly, but increasingly it also does so through private companies beyond the knowledge and control of Congress. The top thirty-five of these private military companies are among the most profitable businesses in the country today. The main ones are Vinnell Corporation; Military Professional Resources, Inc., best known by its acronym, MPRI, located in Alexandria, Virginia, and owned by L3 Communications; Kellogg Brown & Root, the legendary Texas company that bankrolled Lyndon Johnson’s political career and is today a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation; Dyn-Corp of Reston, Virginia, which became notorious during the late 1990s when it was discovered that some of its employees in Bosnia were keeping underaged women as sex slaves and then selling them elsewhere in Europe (DynCorp simply fired these employees); Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego, whose top five executives made between $825,000 and $1.8 million in salaries in 2001 and held more than $1.5 million worth of stock options each; BDM International of Fairfax, Virginia; Armor Holdings of Jacksonville, Florida; Cubic Applications, Inc., of San Diego; DFI International (originally Defense Forecasts, Inc.) of Washington, DC; and International Charter, Inc., of Oregon.¹²

Since the end of the Cold War, in addition to the money spent on IMET, FMF, and JCET, the Department of Defense has hired these and other companies to train the armed forces of more than forty-two countries. (Sometimes the foreign country hires the company, but this still requires an export license from the State Department and approval from the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency.) In 1995, for instance, a private company, MPRI, was given the job of training and equipping the armies of Croatia and Bosnia, which then went on to conduct systematic and bloody ethnic exterminations of Serbs, accompanied by many war crimes. MPRI also had a $6 million contract during 2001 to train the Colombian army and police. MPRI and Cubic run programs to prepare some of the former Soviet-bloc countries for membership in NATO. A number of different companies have been involved in the military education of about 120 African leaders and the training of more than 5,500 sub-Saharan African troops in modern military techniques.

DynCorp was hired to provide personal protection for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and will take over the training of the Afghan army once the Green Berets leave the country. After the United States intervened militarily in Haiti in 1994, DynCorp “trained” that country’s police. The company has been so successful that in early 2003 Computer Sciences Corporation of El Segundo, California, bought it. After the second Iraq war, DynCorp won the lucrative contract to provide a thousand advisers to help form Iraq’s new police department, judicial branch, and prison system. The Bush administration decided to take the money for the DynCorp contract from the funds allocated for antidrug operations in Afghanistan.

The people who do this sort of training are almost invariably retired military types—soldiers of fortune, war lovers, men who found themselves out of jobs at the end of the Cold War but wanted to keep on doing what they had been doing on active service. Most of the companies for which they now work originated as the brainchildren of recently retired high-ranking officers and Green Berets. The classic example is MPRI, founded by General Carl E. Vuono, the former army chief of staff during the first Gulf War; General Crosbie E. Saint, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe; General Ron Griffith, a former army vice chief of staff; and other senior generals and admirals. The company’s spokesman, Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is a mere lieutenant general. These men became millionaires in July 2000 when they and about thirty-five other stockholders sold the company to L3 Communications for $40 million cash.

These private military companies are not small organizations. DynCorp has 23,000 employees, Cubic some 4,500, and MPRI about 700 full-time staff members with a roster of 10,000 retired military personnel it can call on. One authority on these new mercenaries, Deborah Avant of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, estimates that the revenues of the private military companies, which were at $55.6 billion in 1990, will rise to $202 billion by 2010. The companies even have their own industry trade group, the International Peace Operations Association—a name George Orwell would have cherished.

It is not just foreigners these companies train. Until March 2002, MPRI held the contract to run the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs in some 217 American universities. ROTC offers college money to students in return for taking some military courses, wearing uniforms on campus, training during part of the summer at a military base, and accepting a commission in the army reserve upon graduation. When it lost its bid to continue running the ROTC programs, MPRI picked up a contract to operate the nation’s military recruiting stations. Both MPRI and Cubic are active in developing curricula, writing doctrine, and running educational programs for military officers as well as training military press attaches. Much of this privatization of our armed forces is actually deeply disliked by uniformed professionals. As Colonel Bruce Grant notes, “Privatization is a way of going around Congress and not telling the public. Foreign policy is made by default by private military consultants motivated by bottom-line profits.”¹³

Private military companies also provide contractor services to repair equipment so complex the military itself simply cannot maintain it. This is an old story. I well recall from my days of military service in the Korean War era—I was the operations officer on a navy amphibious vessel, the USS LST-883, in the western Pacific—that the navigational radar on the ship’s bridge was forever breaking down. Even our best electronics mates could not fix it and we invariably had to call in a civilian representative of the manufacturer to make repairs. Today, many complex weapons systems are heavily contractor-dependent, including Patriot missiles, Apache helicopters, Paladin artillery pieces, M1A1 Abrams tanks, and virtually all the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the military and the CIA. Some manufacturers even promise the military “factory to foxhole” support.¹⁴

It has been argued that specialized logistical and support activities diverge too far from the military’s main purposes and that the Department of Defense can impose better quality control over a private contractor than over regular military units. During the 1990s, the Pentagon began to contract out every conceivable kind of service except firing a rifle or flying an airplane, spawning a rapidly growing, extremely lucrative new sector of the military-industrial complex. Given the Pentagon’s penchant for cost-plus (read “open-ended”) contracts, many new so-called base-support contracting firms have come into being. Over time the military has gotten used to contracting out base construction, maintenance, and security. The World War II and Cold War days of KP (“kitchen police”), cleaning barracks and latrines, and guard duty are almost totally unknown to contemporary soldiers.

A notorious example of this change is the superluxurious Camp Bondsteel in the Balkans. Immediately following the end of the American bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in June 1999, the United States simply seized from private owners a thousand acres of farmland at Uresevic in southeast Kosovo, near the Macedonian border. Between July and October 1999, it then proceeded to build Camp Bondsteel in record time. The United States also constructed Camp Monteith, a smaller but similarly luxurious base nearby. Bondsteel was named after Army Staff Sergeant James L. Bondsteel, a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam; Monteith was named after First Lieutenant Jimmy W. Monteith Jr., a Medal of Honor winner in France during World War II. Bondsteel is the largest and most expensive base constructed since the Vietnam War, costing some $36.6 million to build and approximately $180 million annually to operate.¹⁵ Army wags say facetiously that there are only two man-made objects that can be seen from outer space—the Great Wall of China and the army’s Camp Bondsteel.

Kellogg Brown & Root, which built Camp Bondsteel under contract to the army, continues to do everything there except perform military duties. Under one of the costliest contracts in Pentagon history, Brown & Root, as it was originally known, maintains the barracks, cooks the food, mops the floors, transports all supplies, and operates the water and sewage systems. Employing about a thousand former U.S. military personnel and another 7,000 local Albanians, the company delivers 600,000 gallons of water daily, supplies enough electricity for a city of 25,000, washes 1,200 bags of laundry, and cooks and serves 18,000 meals per day. According to a September 2000 report by the congressional budget oversight agency, the General Accounting Office, Brown & Root bought $5.2 million worth of furniture for Bondsteel and Monteith that the army could not find enough space even to store, and the camp was so overstaffed that offices were cleaned four times a day and latrines a mere three times a day. Soldiers serving at Camp Bondsteel say the only patch missing on their camouflage fatigues is one that says, Sponsored by Brown & Root. The company provides similar services for many other military bases, including those in Kuwait and Turkey and the new American installation at Khanabad in Uzbekistan.¹⁶

Brown & Root, long known in Texas for its political connections, was acquired in 1962 by the oil-drilling and construction company Halliburton. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense when Brown & Root first began to supply logistical services to the army. According to an investigative report by Robert Bryce in the Austin Chronicle, Cheney is the author of the idea that the military’s logistical operations should be privatized. He was trying not so much to increase efficiency as to reward the private sector. He basically asked how private companies could assist the army in cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs. “In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney’s direction, paid Brown & Root $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies—like itself—could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the firm an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, the company won a five-year logistics contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.”¹⁷

After the 1992 election, Cheney left the Defense Department, and between 1995 and 2000 he was the chief executive officer of Halliburton. Under his leadership, Brown & Root took in $2.3 billion in government contracts, almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before Cheney arrived. Halliburton rebuilt Saddam Hussein’s war-damaged oil fields for some $23.8 million, even though Cheney, as secretary of defense during the first Gulf War, had been instrumental in destroying them. By 1999, Halliburton had become the biggest nonunion employer in the United States, although Wal-Mart soon replaced it. Cheney also appointed Dave Gibben, his chief of staff when he was at the Pentagon, as one of Halliburton’s leading lobbyists. In 2001, Cheney returned to Washington as vice president, and Brown & Root continued to build, maintain, and protect bases from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf.¹⁸

During Cheney’s term as Halliburton’s CEO, the company advanced from seventy-third to eighteenth on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors. Its number of subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens also increased from nine to forty-four. As a result, Halliburton went from paying $302 million in company taxes in 1998 to getting an $85 million tax refund in 1999. Following the second Gulf War, while Cheney was vice president, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded the company a no-bid contract to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq. The contract was open-ended, with no time or dollar limits, and was “cost-plus,” meaning that the company is guaranteed both to recover costs and then to make a profit on top of that. Such contracts are typical of Brown & Root’s operating methods and are worth tens of millions of dollars.¹⁹ On April 4, 2003, in honor of “Big Business Day 2003,” Citizen Works, a watchdog organization created by the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, gave Dick Cheney its “Daddy Warbucks” award for eminence in corporate war profiteering.

Kosovo’s Camp Bondsteel, a Brown & Root product, is a spooky place, surrounded by a 2.5-meter-high earthen berm and nine wooden guard towers. All trees in the area have been removed to provide open fields of fire. Dominated by a mass of communications antennae, satellite dishes, and hovering attack helicopters, it has a six-mile perimeter and seems too large and permanent an installation merely to meet the requirements of peacekeeping in southern Serbia, a mission that President Clinton asserted would last no longer than six months and that George Bush said in his election campaign he wished to eliminate. More likely, Camp Bondsteel is intended to play a role in a grand strategy to secure for us Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil supplies and to control oil going to other countries.

Camp Bondsteel is actually located astride the route of the proposed AMBO (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria Oil) Trans-Balkan pipeline. This $1.3 billion project, if built, will pump Caspian Basin oil brought by tanker from a pipeline terminus in Georgia across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian oil port at Burgas, where it will be piped through Macedonia to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. From there, supertankers would take it to Europe and the United States, thus bypassing the congested Bosporous Strait—as of now the only route out of the Black Sea by ship—where tankers are restricted to 150,000 tons. The initial feasibility study for the AMBO pipeline was done in 1995 by Brown & Root, which updated it in 1999.²⁰ Bondsteel appears to be a base camp for what the University of Texas political scientist James K. Galbraith has called the “military-petroleum complex,” of which Dick Cheney is assuredly a godfather.²¹

Not coincidentally, in February 2003, the United States also began to build two new military bases at Burgas. On November 14, 2001, the Bulgarian parliament ratified an agreement giving the United States overflight and transit rights for the war in Afghanistan; when Turkey withdrew its support of Washington’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States turned to Sofia for a permanent installation, to which the Bulgarians agreed. The air force took over much of Burgas International Airport, one of three commercial airports in Bulgaria, and flew in numerous construction crews to build a garrison at a nearby beach for American military personnel. It is called Camp Sarafovo. The large number of airmen who arrived seemingly overnight are the first foreign troops to commandeer the Burgas airport since the Luftwaffe seized it in 1943. During the second Iraq war, the United States flew KC-10 and KC-135 aerial refueling missions from Burgas to support air operations over Baghdad. The port of Burgas is home to the country’s largest oil refinery and, under the terms of the Bulgarian-American agreement, supplies all the fuel required by the air force. Just a few hundred miles up the Black Sea coast, at the Romanian port of Constanta, the air force is building a similar base complex. Constanta is the center of Romania’s large oil industry. The Afghan war and second Iraq war turned out to be splendid opportunities for the United States to consolidate its oil strategy for the Balkans, the first stage of which was Camp Bondsteel.²²

Private military companies and private contractors have become indispensable to the operations of our more than 700 military bases around the world. They supply—for profit—the logistics that keep the empire operating. Camp Doha is a good example of what they supply. It is the major army base in Kuwait and has been in continuous use since the Persian Gulf War of 1991. (Camp Doha, in Kuwait, should be distinguished from the city of Doha, which is the capital of the nation of Qatar.) Camp Doha is a huge complex of heavily defended warehouses some twenty miles into the desert from Kuwait City. It has grown from two small buildings at the time of the first Gulf War into a 500-acre depot. Since December 1994, it has been the headquarters for Army Forces Central Command-Kuwait (ARCENT-KU). In June 1991, four months after Operation Desert Storm had ended, the Pentagon deployed the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment from Germany to Camp Doha to serve as a rapid response force in case of renewed hostilities with Iraq. Since this unit was at the time the army’s only asset in the region, it was maintained at a maximum state of readiness, its tanks “combat loaded” with ammunition. Large numbers of vehicles and enormous backlogs of fuel and ammunition were stockpiled at the base to be used in case of an emergency.

Over the years, Camp Doha has become the army’s model ammunition depot, a prototype and paradigmatic example of a forward base for “prepositioning” the equipment, ammunition, and fuel needed for a brigade-sized armored task force. In theory, all the army needs to do is fly in the troops, who then climb into their warmed-up tanks and armored personnel carriers and head for the front lines in the oil lands of our planet. Doha was not, however, always a model base. On the morning of July 11, 1991, a defective heater in an ammunition carrier loaded with 155 mm artillery shells caught fire and exploded. The scattering shells landed on loaded vehicles and ammunition stockpiles, setting off fires and explosions that lasted the rest of the day. No one was killed, although forty-nine soldiers were injured. Among the estimated $14 million worth of ammunition and two dozen buildings destroyed were some 660 rounds of 120 mm depleted uranium shells.²³

As a result of this accident, the army decided to turn over all maintenance of the stockpiled vehicles and ammunition to private contractors. The company that received the contract to operate Camp Doha in 1991 was DynCorp of Reston, Virginia. By the year 2000, it was number twenty among the top two hundred military contractors. (Halliburton was number twenty-one.)²⁴ In 1994, the contract for maintaining the prepositioned equipment at Camp Doha passed from DynCorp to the ITT Corporation. The contractor just prior to the second American attack on Iraq was Combat Support Associates of Orange, California, a joint venture of three military suppliers located in California, Colorado, and Texas. The ten-year cost-plus-award fee for all maintenance and operating services on the tanks and other tracked vehicles at Camp Doha comes to an estimated cumulative total of $546,751,502, an amount the Kuwaiti government has pledged to reimburse the U.S. goverment. In late 2002, Combat Support Associates had 546 American civilians and 747 third-country nationals working for it at the base.²⁵ Camp Doha became the jumping-off point for the American assault forces in the second Iraq war.

Like Camp Doha, the other American military bases in the Persian Gulf region all depend on private contractors for their defenses, amenities, and operations. The significance of this development for military effectiveness as well as for the principle of accountable civilian government in the United States is a subject only rarely mentioned either in Congress or in the press. The use of private contractors is assumed to be more cost-effective, but even that is open to question when contracts go only to a few well-connected companies and the bidding is not particularly competitive.

In the long run, one wonders whether these private companies will be able to recruit employees successfully to work in countries where American bases are deeply resented. On January 21, 2003, at 9:15 in the morning, a gunman fired twenty-four bullets from a Kalashnikov at two American civilians sitting in a Toyota sport utility vehicle at a traffic signal three miles from Camp Doha. He killed Michael R. Pouliot, the executive vice president and cofounder of Tapestry Solutions Corporation, a small San Diego software development company that produces computerized modeling and simulation exercises for the military. Pouliot’s companion, David Caraway, was wounded six times but survived in critical condition. He is a senior software engineer for the company.

A few months later, on May 12, 2003, just after the end of fighting in the second Iraq war, terrorists blew up three foreign housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing thirty-four, including eight Americans. One of the main targets was an apartment building for some seventy Vinnell Corporation employees—military mercenaries hired to train the Saudi National Guard. Fortunately for Vinnell, fifty members of its staff were away on a “training exercise” at the time of the bombing. It was widely speculated that the attack was a response to the American conquest of Iraq. Vinnell has about 800 employees in Riyadh, of whom 300 are Americans.

A large number of military contractors work in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on various chores, including helping the army operate and maintain its equipment and training and equipping local militaries. After the Camp Doha killing, a spokesman for the army, Major Steve Stover, merely commented that “the world is a dangerous place, especially for Americans abroad.”²⁶

During the Cold War, standard military doctrine held that overseas bases had four missions. They were to project conventional military power into areas of concern to the United States; prepare, if necessary, for a nuclear war; serve as “tripwires” guaranteeing an American response to an attack (particularly in divided “hot spots” like Germany and South Korea); and function as symbols of American power.¹ Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been engaged in a continuous search for new justifications for its ever-expanding base structure—from “humanitarian intervention” to “disarming Iraq.”

I believe that today five post-Cold War missions have replaced the four older ones: maintaining absolute military preponderance over the rest of the world, a task that includes imperial policing to ensure that no part of the empire slips the leash; eavesdropping on the communications of citizens, allies, and enemies alike, often apparently just to demonstrate that no realm of privacy is impervious to the technological capabilities of our government; attempting to control as many sources of petroleum as possible, both to service America’s insatiable demand for fossil fuels and to use that control as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions; providing work and income for the military-industrial complex (as, for example, in the exorbitant profits Halliburton has extracted for building and operating Camps Bondsteel and Monteith); and ensuring that members of the military and their families live comfortably and are well entertained while serving abroad.

No one of these goals or even all of them together, however, can entirely explain our expanding empire of bases. There is something else at work, which I believe is the post-Cold War discovery of our immense power, rationalized by the self-glorifying conclusion that because we have it we deserve to have it. The only truly common elements in the totality of America’s foreign bases are imperialism and militarism—an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning that, in order to defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions they are in, we must expand the areas under our control with still more bases. To maintain its empire, the Pentagon must constantly invent new reasons for keeping in our hands as many bases as possible long after the wars and crises that led to their creation have evaporated. As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee observed as long ago as 1970, “Once an American overseas base is established it takes on a life of its own. Original missions may become outdated but new missions are developed, not only with the intention of keeping the facility going, but often to actually enlarge it. Within the government departments most directly concerned—State and Defense—we found little initiative to reduce or eliminate any of these overseas facilities.”² The Pentagon tries to prevent local populations from reclaiming or otherwise exerting their rights over these long-established bases (as in the cases of the Puerto Rican movement to get the navy off Vieques Island, which it used largely for target practice, and of the Okinawan movement to get the marines and air force to go home—or at least go elsewhere). It also works hard to think of ways to reestablish the right to bases from which the United States has withdrawn or been expelled (in places like the Philippines, Taiwan, Greece, and Spain).

Given that many of our bases around the world are secret, that some are camouflaged by flags of convenience, and that many consist of multiple distinct installations, how can anyone assess accurately the scope and value of our military empire? It is not easy. If the Secretary of Defense were to ask his closest aides with the highest security clearances how many bases abroad he had under his control, they would have to reply, using an old naval officers’ cop-out, “I don’t know, sir, but I’ll find out.”

To begin to answer this question two official sources of data must be explored; both are of major importance although they differ in their standards of compilation. The Department of Defense’s Base Structure Report (BSR) details the physical property owned by the Pentagon, while the report on Worldwide Manpower Distribution by Geographical Area (Manpower Report) gives the numbers of military personnel at each base, broken down by army, navy, marines, and air force, plus civilians working for the Defense Department, locally hired civilians, and dependents of military personnel.³

Both reports are supposed to be issued quarterly but actually appear intermittently. Neither report is inclusive, since many bases are cloaked in secrecy. For example, Charles Glass, the chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News from 1983 to 1993 and an authority on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writes, “Israel has provided the U.S. with sites in the Negev [desert] for military bases, now under construction, which will be far less vulnerable to Muslim fundamentalists than those in Saudi Arabia.”⁴ These are officially nonexistent sites. There have been press reports of aircraft from the carrier battle group USS Eisenhower operating from Nevatim Airfield in Israel, and a specialist on the military, William M. Arkin, adds, “The United States has ‘prepositioned’ vehicles, military equipment, even a 500-bed hospital, for U.S. Marines, Special Forces, and Air Force fighter and bomber aircraft at at least six sites in Israel, all part of what is antiseptically described as ‘U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation.’”⁵ These bases in Israel are known simply as Sites 51, 53, and 54. Their specific locations are classified and highly sensitive. There is no mention of American bases in Israel in any of the Department of Defense’s official compilations.

The Manpower Report is the more complete of the two in its worldwide coverage, but the BSR is critically important for two reasons. First, for every listed site it gives an estimated “plant replacement value” (PRV) in millions of dollars. Second, it gives details on some 725 foreign bases in thirty-eight countries, of which it defines 17 as “large installations” (having a PRV greater than $1.5 billion), 18 as “medium installations” (having a PRV between $800 million and $1.5 billion), and 690 as “small installations” (having a PRV of less than $800 million). According to the Department of Defense, “The PRV represents the reported cost of replacing the facility and its supporting infrastructure using today’s costs (labor and material) and standards (methods and codes).”

Although one must doubt the accuracy of any such estimates, particularly given the Pentagon’s record of incompetent accounting, they are nonetheless useful for making comparisons. Thus, according to Pentagon specialists, Ramstein Air Force Base near Kaiserslautern, Germany, the largest NATO air base in Europe, has a PRV of $2,458.8 million; whereas Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, the largest U.S. facility in East Asia, has a PRV nearly twice as large, at $4,758.5 million (and its adjoining Kadena Ammunition Storage Annex adds another $964.3 million). These are astronomical sums even though they probably underestimate real replacement values. In its detailed reports by country, the BSR lists foreign bases only if they are larger than ten acres and have a PRV greater than $10 million. Sites that do not meet these criteria are aggregated for each country as “other.” Only places with null or zero PRVs are not counted at all. These include small sites such as single, unmanned navigational aids or air force strategic missile emplacements. The 725 foreign bases, including the installations listed as “other,” have a total replacement value, according to the Pentagon, of $118 billion. This is a mind-boggling aggregation of foreign real estate and buildings possessed by the United States.

By contrast, the DoD’s Manpower Report does not list individual bases, only countries. It found that in September 2001, the United States was deploying a total of 254,788 military personnel in 153 countries. When civilians and dependents are included, the number doubles to 531,227. Since the Manpower Report does not say what the assignments are within a particular foreign country, one cannot distinguish between a country with American bases and a country with merely some embassy guards, a few special forces on a training mission, and perhaps some communications clerks. Therefore, it seems useful to consider only those countries with at least a hundred active-duty military personnel. These are likely to be assigned to bases. The total then, according to the DoD’s Manpower Report, is thirty-three, which comes close to the BSR’s list of significant bases in thirty-eight countries.

There are some major discrepancies between the BSR and the Manpower Report that are not easily explained. To give one important example, the BSR for September 2001 does not have any entries for Bosnia-Herzegovina or for Yugoslavia, Serbia, or Kosovo. The Manpower Report for the same month gives 3,100 for the number of army troops in Bosnia and 5, 675 for the number of army troops in the Serbian province of Kosovo. It is possible that Camp Eagle in Bosnia (built in 1995-96) and Camps Bondsteel and Monteith in Kosovo (both of which went up in 1999) were omitted intentionally in order to disguise their purpose—of protecting oil pipelines rather than contributing to international peacekeeping operations.

With such caveats, the table on pages 156-160 offers a snapshot of the American empire in terms of military personnel deployed overseas just before September 11, 2001. In the months following, the United States radically expanded its deployments everywhere but particularly in Afghanistan, elsewhere in Central Asia, and in the Persian Gulf.

Numerous bases are “secret” or else disguised in ways designed to keep them off the official books, but we know with certainty that they exist, where many of them are, and more or less what they do. They are either DoD-operated listening posts of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), both among the most secretive of our intelligence organizations, or covert outposts of the military-petroleum complex. Officials never discuss either of these subjects with any degree of candor, but that does not alter the point that spying and oil are obsessive interests of theirs.

The United States operates so many overseas espionage bases that Michael Moran of NBC News once suggested, “Today, one could throw a dart at a map of the world and it would likely land within a few hundred miles of a quietly established U.S. intelligence-gathering operation....

FOREIGN DEPLOYMENTS OF U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL AT THE TIME OF THE

Wars and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. They cannot be separated. Imperialism is the single-greatest cause of war, and war is the midwife of new imperialist acquisitions. Wars usually begin because political leaders convince a people that the use of armed force is necessary to defend the country or pursue some abstract goal—Cuban independence from Spain, preventing a Communist victory in a Korean civil war, keeping the banana republics of Central America in the “free world,” or even bringing democracy to Iraq. For a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the “homeland” usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so. Commonly, preparedness for a possible resumption of hostilities will be invoked. Over time, if a nation’s aims become imperial, the bases form the skeleton of an empire. In recent centuries, wars launched from such bases have been the primary means through which imperialism has prospered and expanded, although an induced economic dependence can sometimes achieve the same effect. Since the end of World War II, American governments have offered many rationales for the bases they were collecting around the world, including containing Communism, warding off the “domino theory,” fighting “ethnic cleansing,” and preventing the spread of “weapons of mass destruction.”

From the time of the Romans and the Han dynasty Chinese to the present, all empires have had permanent military encampments, forts, or bases of some sort. These were meant to garrison conquered territory, keeping restless populations under control, and to serve as launching points for further imperial conquests. What is most fascinating and curious about the developing American form of empire, however, is that, in its modern phase, it is solely an empire of bases, not of territories, and these bases now encircle the earth in a way that, despite centuries-old dreams of global domination, would previously have been inconceivable.

Yet, although our own nation is filled with military installations—there are 969 separate bases in the fifty states—ours has, oddly enough, never been a warrior culture.¹ Our people are largely not in uniform, nor (until the recent “war on terrorism”) were military uniforms common in our cities and airports; our streets seldom see a military parade; our concerts are rarely filled with martial music; and yet ours is also a thoroughly militarized empire—though our model of a warrior seems most likely to be a military bureaucrat. The modern American empire can only be perceived, and understood, by a close look at our basing policies, the specific way we garrison the earth. To trace the historical patterns of base acquisition and to explore our basing systems worldwide is to reveal the sinews of what has until very recently, for most Americans, been a largely hidden empire.

Our imperial history is littered with bases on foreign soil. Our foreign policy is now largely made in the Pentagon and implemented by commanders who spend their lives cloistered in our myriad outposts, which constitute a deeply interconnected world with its own customs, habits, and ways of living as well as its own hierarchies and professional classes who are increasingly detached from the rest of us. It is hard even to remember that on the eve of World War II our regular army was a mere 186,000 men. Now, the 1.4 million-strong “peacetime” military, funded by a defense budget larger than most national budgets, is made up of both men and women living in a closed-off, self-contained base world serviced by their own airline—the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales—that links outposts from Greenland to Australia. Starting with our turn-of-the-century imperial beginnings, I want to explore here how that world of bases was assembled to become an imperial motor driving the United States on to ever more wars.

Though, as I said earlier, we were already a great continental empire by 1898, the Spanish-American War first set us on our modern path of imperialism. Some of the bases we acquired at that time—Guantánamo Bay, Pearl Harbor, Guam—are still overseas military outposts or are on territories that we later directly annexed. Under the influence of Wilsonian idealism, we did not follow our British, French, and Japanese allies in exploiting victory in World War I to acquire new colonies. It was not until World War II that our empire of bases achieved its global reach, and the United States still seems to regard its continuing occupation of the territory of its former Axis foes as something akin to a natural birthright. The Korean War, though ended in stalemate, nonetheless projected us onto the Asian mainland. After Vietnam, our base numbers were cut—not just in Southeast Asia but in other places where our defeat emboldened governments or peoples to oppose our military presence in their countries; the three most important such cases were Spain, Greece, and the Philippines. With the end of the Cold War, we resumed our march toward empire. Our 1999 war against Serbia, our two wars with Iraq, and our war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan allowed us to expand our empire of overseas bases into the broad southern Eurasian region stretching from the Balkans in the west to the Chinese border in the east, an oil-rich area that opened up to our imperial dreams after the demise of the Soviet Union. Iran is now the only serious obstacle to our military domination of the whole region.

As mentioned in the last chapter, the Pentagon calculates “plant replacement values” in U.S. dollars for all the overseas bases whose existence it publicly acknowledges. The total value of these 725 recognized overseas military bases as of September 11, 2001, was $117,838.5 million (c. $118 billion). Of this $118 billion, the bases acquired from the vanquished of World War II and still in our possession were said to be worth $78 billion—$38 billion in Germany and $40 billion in Japan, or 66 percent of the total. The Pentagon prices the garrisons it established in Korea as a result of the Korean War at $11.5 billion. In other words, according to the Department of Defense’s calculations, in “value” terms World War II and Korea accounted for three-quarters of our contemporary empire of bases. The Pentagon does not, however, include in its calculations any of our recent bases in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, or Central Asia. Plant replacement values have not been published for these areas because our government is reluctant to admit that they are actually imperial outposts. (In some cases, too, Islamic governments in the Persian Gulf do not want to publicize our “footprint” there.) But the fact is, we vastly enlarged and consolidated our Persian Gulf bases in preparation for the renewed war against Iraq, a development discussed in the next chapter. But first some groundwork.

The Persian Gulf, a 600-mile-long extension of the Indian Ocean, separates the Arabian Peninsula on the west from Iran on the east. At the head of the gulf is Iraq, whose access to the waterway is largely blocked by Kuwait. Along the gulf’s western coast, from Kuwait to Oman, lie what in the nineteenth century were known as the “trucial states,” tribal fiefdoms that then lived by piracy and with whom Britain signed “truces” that turned them into British protectorates. The British were chiefly interested in protecting the shipping routes to their empire in India and so were ready to trade promises from local tribal leaders to suppress piracy for British guarantees to defend them from their neighbors. In this way, Britain became the supervisor of all relations among the trucial states as well as all their relations with the world outside the Persian Gulf.

Prior to World War II, the gulf area was thus a focus for British imperialism. Only in Saudi Arabia did events take a different turn when, in May 1933, the Standard Oil Company of California obtained the right to drill in that country’s fabulously oil-rich eastern provinces. In return for a payment of 35,000 British pounds, Standard of California (SoCal), known today as Chevron, obtained a sixty-year concession from King Ibn Saud to develop and export oil. Since British influence in the region was paramount, the Americans surely would not have gained a foothold had it not been for one of history’s most unusual figures, H. St. John Philby, Ibn Saud’s adviser and a specialist in Arabian matters. (He was also the father of Kim Philby, the British intelligence official who secretly went to work for the Soviet Union and became, after his defection to that country, the most notorious spy of the Cold War era.) Disturbed by the grossly imperialist practices of British oil companies in Iran, Philby persuaded King Ibn Saud to throw in his lot with the Americans. SoCal started oil production in Saudi Arabia in 1938. Shortly thereafter, the company and the monarchy formalized their partnership by creating a new entity, the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), and brought in other partners—Texaco, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), and Socony-Vacuum (Mobil). Aramco has been described as “the largest and richest consortium in the history of commerce.”¹ Its corporate headquarters are still located at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

From the beginning, Aramco did everything in its power to avoid the arrogance associated with British imperialism in the Middle East. Its employees enjoyed no immunity from strict Saudi laws, and the company worked hard to bring benefits to the underpopulated country, including roads, power plants, and badly needed water wells. It responded quickly when Saudi rulers asked for more money or cooperation on projects of primary interest to them. The United States has always been exceedingly careful about its Saudi Arabian connection. In February 1943, in a letter to Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote, “I hereby find the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”² From World War II on, Aramco also collaborated informally with the Office of Strategic Services—the CIA’s predecessor—and later with the CIA itself. Washington was always kept well informed about Aramco’s view of the Middle East and the world beyond. So long as the CIA had a Board of National Estimates, a retired high-ranking Aramco executive was always a member.

Approximately thirty years ago, Saudi Arabia began to loosen some of these ties. In 1972, it bought a 20 percent stake in Aramco and, in 1980, acquired 100 percent of Aramco’s shares. At the same time, it authorized the Aramco partners to continue to operate and manage the Saudi oil fields. Finally, in 1988, by royal decree and in a remarkably friendly act of expropriation, Saudi Arabia took over the management and operation of all its oil and gas resources. Aramco became Saudi Aramco.

On the basis of this long and extremely lucrative relationship, the United States built the first pillar of its Persian Gulf policy—close ties with Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the high point of American policy in the region, from the Arab point of view, was reached in 1956, when the United States sided with Egypt against Britain, France, and Israel, who had gone to war to stop Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, from nationalizing the Suez Canal. This crisis marked the beginning of British decline east of Suez and earned the United States praise throughout the Middle East.³ In 1968, the British made the decision to withdraw over time from all their outposts east of Suez. The true arbiters of policy in the region during these years were, in fact, the multinational oil companies, which, prior to the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960, exerted great influence over both the British and the American governments.

One of our prime political and military concerns has always been to ensure that no other power, friendly or not, interferes with Saudi oil resources. In August 1945, the Army Corps of Engineers began work on an airfield at Dhahran, next door to Aramco’s headquarters. From 1952 to 1963, the United States leased this airfield from the Saudis and based a Strategic Air Command squadron of nuclear-armed bombers there. In 1963, becoming concerned about the size of the American presence in his country, King Faisal ordered the air force to leave Dhahran, which was promptly renamed King Abdul Aziz Air Base of the Saudi Arabian Air Force. The Saudis, however, allowed the U.S. military to use it on a case-by-case basis until the Gulf War, when it was again turned over for operations to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Dhahran proved by far the most important Allied airfield in the American-led 1991 blitzkrieg against Iraq. Of some 7,248 aircraft arriving in Saudi Arabia between August 7, 1990, and March 26,1991,6,755 landed at Dhahran.⁴

From 1953 to 1979, the second great pillar of America’s Persian Gulf policy was Iran, then the second-largest exporter of crude petroleum and possessor of the world’s third-largest oil reserves. The British, who had been pumping oil from Iran since 1908, operated the world’s largest refinery there. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (after 1935, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) had provided the British treasury with 24 million pounds sterling in taxes and 92 million pounds in foreign exchange. The British had no intention of seeing their lucrative oil company nationalized, and the American oil majors sympathized with them. So, in 1953, the British gained the cooperation of the new Eisenhower administration in a blatantly illegal plan to overthrow an Iranian government that wanted a fairer share of the country’s oil revenues.

Eisenhower ordered the CIA to help the British protect their assets, and the Americans in turn redefined the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis as a case of “free world” resistance to the threat of Communism in the Middle East. CIA operatives guided Iranian army officers in ousting Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, a patrician politician known for his incorruptible defense of the country’s national interests, and replaced him with the young shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose reign Mossadeq had interrupted. Although the shah claimed to be a nationalist, he was much more willing than Mossadeq to cooperate with Britain and the United States, seeing them as counterweights to the influence of the Soviet Union on Iran’s northern border. After the successful coup, the new Iranian government awarded concessions to a consortium of major Western oil companies. In this consortium, 40 percent of the shares went to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, renamed British Petroleum, and 14 percent to its ally Royal Dutch Shell, thereby ensuring that Britain retained a majority vote. A group of American firms received 40 percent, a reward for American participation in the coup, and the French state company 6 percent.⁵

America’s position in the world’s richest oil region thus depended on its close relations with the Persian Gulf’s two largest countries. So long as British military forces were still in place and effective, our government sought bases in the area only for its navy. In 1948, the United States had negotiated an informal agreement with Britain to use harbor facilities of the long-established British naval base (and airfield) at Manama on the island of Bahrain, the largest of the thirty-three islands in its colony Bahrain; in 1949, the U.S. Middle East Force was established there under a navy captain, upgraded in 1951 to a rear admiral. On August 15,1971, Bahrain obtained its independence from Britain, and the United States concluded an executive agreement to retain its naval access in return for a payment of $4 million a year.⁶

Before the 1991 Gulf War, the only other territory in the region securely in American military hands was the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. Along with Mauritius, Diego Garcia had been a British possession since England seized it from France during the Napoleonic Wars. The United States wanted to build a naval communications facility there, as Cold War radio and espionage bases in western Australia could not cover the full ocean. In 1965, Britain split Diego Garcia off from Mauritius, setting it up as the “British Indian Ocean Territory” and then “loaning” it to the United States rent-free for fifty years, although it was understood that the Americans would simultaneously waive payment on $14 million worth of Polaris submarine missiles heading for England.

American officials like to brag that Diego Garcia is “immune to local political developments”—for a very good reason. The British deported the island’s entire population to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they continue to live in conditions of poverty and racial discrimination. London paid Mauritius £650,000 to take the Diego Garcians, but decades later the refugees are still challenging their resettlement before London courts, which have already ruled the deportation illegal. Meanwhile, in 1974, the United States converted its communications station into a fullblown naval base, extended the airport runway to 12,000 feet, deepened the lagoon to accommodate a carrier task force, and stored a thirty-days’ supply of fuel there for ships and aircraft. In 2001, the Department of Defense said that there were more buildings on Diego Garcia than military personnel—654 to be exact—and that the facility had a plant replacement value of $1,917.8 million.⁷ It served as the main platform for the B-52s that bombed Afghanistan during 2001-02. Late in 2002, the Pentagon built four maintenance hangars at a cost of $2.5 million designed to house as many as sixteen out of the total fleet of twenty-one B-2 stealth bombers. Along with B-52s and B-1s, Diego Garcia’s B-2s led the “shock and awe” bombing attacks on Baghdad on March 22, 2003, dropping 4,200 pound “bunker busters” on the essentially undefended city. It was the first time in history that all three types of American long-range strategic bombers targeted the same place at the same time—an experiment comparable to Hitler’s 1937 bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica. Diego Garcia is 3,340 miles from Baghdad, the farthest away of any of the American bases in South Asia.

During the 1970s, Britain’s departure from the region threatened to leave the area without imperialist supervision, a growing concern of the United States. Kuwait had been independent since 1961; Bahrain and Qatar both gained their independence in 1971. On December 2, 1971, one day after the British officially withdrew from the area, the six remaining sheikdoms, including the two richest, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, created a sovereign confederation known as the United Arab Emirates. Britain delayed its withdrawal from Oman until 1977 because of serious internal disunity there. The United States now had to deal with these new entities on its own and without the century and a half of experience of the British. It did not attempt to acquire American bases from any of them until the Gulf War provided a splendid opportunity.

Before that happened, however, the placid world of the Persian Gulf changed radically in 1979, a year almost as momentous for American foreign policy as 1949, when the Communists came to power in China, the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb, and the NATO alliance was formed. In 1979, one of the twin pillars of American policy collapsed. In January, a popular revolution against the shah’s repressive rule forced him into exile and brought to power a fundamentalist Islamic regime under the Ayatollah Khomeini; in November, the revolutionaries seized the American embassy, taking all its employees hostage and holding them until January 1981. Complicating things even further, in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Iran’s neighbor, Afghanistan, in an attempt to protect a leftist regime there. This elicited a huge CIA operation in Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world to recruit and arm Muslim “freedom fighters” to join the anti-Soviet guerrilla resistance.

In this context, in October 1979, the Carter administration set up what it called a Rapid Deployment Force to protect American interests in the Persian Gulf. Having no bases in the area, it located the force’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. On January 23, 1980, just before leaving office, President Carter proclaimed the Carter Doctrine: “Any attempts by any outside force to gain control of the Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” This was at the time far easier to say than to do, and the United States set out to find a replacement for the Iranian pillar. On January 1, 1983, the Reagan administration converted the Rapid Deployment Force (still based in Florida) into the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the first regional command created in thirty-five years.

In July 1979, Iraq also acquired a new leader, Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti of the Ba’ath Party. Slightly more than twenty years earlier, in 1958, Iraqi military officers, inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolt in 1952 against the British-backed monarchy in Egypt, had seized power and taken the country in a Soviet-leaning direction. The leader of the coup, General Abdel-Karim Kassem, proclaimed a republic, withdrew from the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact, legalized the Communist Party, decreed wide-ranging land reform, and even granted autonomy to the Kurds in the north. These shifts, coming at the height of the Cold War, were too much for the United States—CIA director Allan Dulles publicly called Iraq “the most dangerous spot in the world”—and in 1963, the CIA supported the anti-Communist Ba’ath Party’s efforts to bring Kassem’s republic to an end. Ba’ath activists, including a youthful Saddam Hussein, gunned down Kassem and many others on a list the CIA supplied. The plotters were able, however, only to create a coalition government. In 1968, the CIA again fomented a palace revolt in which the Ba’athists eliminated their coalition partners and assumed direct control. According to Roger Morris, a staff member of the National Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, “It was a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States and the CIA’s involvement there was really primary.”⁸ In July 1979, the same year as the anti-American revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein replaced his mentor, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, as president, a position he held until 2003. He was, like many other famous beneficiaries of American political intrigue before and since, a CIA “asset.”

In September 1980, Saddam, fearing Iranian influence among Iraq’s majority Shi’ites, invaded Iran. When, in early 1982, Iranian forces gained the upper hand on the battlefield, the United States launched another covert operation to arm and aid Saddam. NSDD (National Security Decision Directive) 114 of November 26,1983, is one of the few important Reagan-era foreign policy decisions that still remain classified. The only line from the text that has ever been leaked said that the United States would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing the war. The Reagan administration soon abandoned its scruples about what was legal.⁹ It began clandestinely to supply Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iran’s deployments. As much as $5.5 billion in fraudulent loans to help Iraq buy arms was channeled through the Atlanta branch of an Italian Bank (Banca Nazionale del Lavoro), all of it guaranteed by the Commodity Credit Corporation “to promote American farm exports.” Weapons were also sent via CIA fronts in Chile and Saudi Arabia directly to Baghdad. Between 1986 and 1989, some seventy-three transactions took place that included bacterial cultures to make weapons-grade anthrax, advanced computers, and equipment to repair jet engines and rockets. In December 2002, when Iraq was forced to deliver to the U.N. Security Council an 11,800-page dossier on the history of its weapons programs in accordance with resolution 1441, officials of the Bush administration hurried to New York to take possession of it before any other member could have a look. They then excised and suppressed 8,000 pages that detailed the weapons and dual-use technologies American and other Western companies had sold to Iraq prior to 1991. The American companies included Honeywell, Unisys, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and many others.¹⁰

The United States had not had diplomatic relations with Iraq since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In December 1983, however, President Reagan sent his personal envoy, former secretary of defense in the Ford administration Donald Rumsfeld, to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld returned to Iraq in March 1984, precisely when both Iran and the United Nations were accusing Saddam’s regime of using chemical weapons in an increasingly brutal war. Rumsfeld, however, made no reference to the Iraqi gas attacks. Instead, he declared that “the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be contrary to U.S. interests.”¹¹ In November 1984, Washington restored full diplomatic relations with Baghdad and stepped up the sales to Saddam of a range of munitions, including helicopters used in subsequent gas attacks. One of these assaults was the March 1988 gassing of Kurds in the village of Halabja that killed some 5,000 people. The United States maintained friendly relations with Iraq right up until the moment that Saddam revived Iraq’s old territorial claims on Kuwait and on August 2, 1990, carried out his surprise attack against that country. It was barely two years since the end of Iraq’s bloody war with Iran.

In response, the United States at first seemed indecisive. President Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain were attending a conference in Colorado shortly after the attack. According to those in attendance, Bush muttered something like, “It’s all right going in, but how are we going to get out?” and commented that most Americans couldn’t find Kuwait on the map. At this point, Thatcher allegedly took the microphone and said, “Look, George, this is no time to go wobbly. We can’t fall at the first fence.” Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the administration allowed Saddam to invade and then rebuffed all efforts by other Middle Eastern nations and the United Nations to resolve the issue peacefully. Bush contended that it was his responsibility to maintain human rights in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Middle East, despite the fact that Kuwait’s record on human rights is hardly admirable.

The United States assembled a coalition force of more than 600,000 ground, sea, and air force personnel (573,000 of whom were American) in Saudi Arabia and on January 16, 1991, launched Operation Desert Storm to “liberate” Kuwait. By February 28, 1991, the operation was declared over. The United States had flown some 110,000 sorties against Iraq, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs, including cluster bombs and depleted uranium devices. It destroyed water-purification plants, food-processing plants, electric power stations, hospitals, schools, telephone exchanges, bridges, and roads throughout the country. Iraqi forces were definitively expelled from Kuwait and decimated in the field (thousands of retreating soldiers were slaughtered in what American pilots referred to as a “turkey shoot”), but the coalition did not press on to Baghdad and attempt to capture or oust Saddam Hussein.

Instead, the period between the two Iraq wars—from January 16, 1991, when General Norman Schwarzkopf launched his assault, to March 19, 2003, when General Tommy Franks ordered the start of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq—saw a vast expansion of our empire of military bases in the Persian Gulf region. After the truce following the first war, we consolidated the bases we had acquired in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and prepositioned the tanks and ammunition that would be needed if we reopened hostilities. In the middle of this period, around 1995, a series of terrorist incidents led us to move much of our armor, aircraft, and troops into hardened or extremely remote sites, such as Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. In the late 1990s, during the second Clinton administration, the Pentagon began seriously to prepare for a renewed war with Iraq. The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Strategic Assessment 1999 specifically said that an “oil war” in the Persian Gulf was a serious contingency and that “U.S. forces might be used to ensure adequate supplies.”¹² It was reasoned that a new war would eliminate once and for all the influence of Saddam Hussein, gain control of his oil, and extend our influence into the vacuum created in the oil-rich lands of southern Eurasia by the demise of the Soviet Union.

As we have already seen, this renewed interest in Central, South, and Southwest Asia included the opening of military-to-military ties with the independent Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and support for a Taliban government in Afghanistan as a way to obtain gas and oil pipeline rights for an American-led consortium. But the jewel in the crown of this grand strategy was a plan to replace the Ba’ath regime in Iraq with a pro-American puppet government and build permanent military bases there. In preparation for the military campaign, the Pentagon made huge efforts in all its client states surrounding the Persian Gulf to isolate our bases from the predominantly anti-American peoples living there and get them ready to support an expeditionary force for the conquest of Iraq. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war against the Taliban, and Bush’s “war on terror” merely provided further impetus for a plan that had been in the works for at least a decade.

In the hours following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked for an immediate assault on Iraq. The following day, in a cabinet meeting at the White House, Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism.”¹³ The president reportedly was advised that “public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible” and instead chose Afghanistan as a much softer target.

These statements and their timing are noteworthy because at that point the United States had not even determined that the suicide bombers came from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and, though the president would later damn Saddam Hussein as an “ally” of al-Qaeda, the Bush administration never provided any evidence substantiating that connection. In fact, the 2001 edition of the Department of State’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism listed no acts of global terrorism linked to the government of Iraq. On September 22, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to release proof that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were guilty of planning and executing the attacks on New York and Washington, and only after that did national security adviser Condoleezza Rice tell CNN, “Clearly, we do have evidence, historical and otherwise, about the relationship of the al-Qaeda network to what happened on September 11.” Such evidence has never actually been forthcoming. Until passenger manifests revealed that the airliner hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia, I myself thought that the attacks could be blowback from American policies in any number of places, including Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Greece, all of Central America, or Okinawa, not to mention Palestine and Iran. Rumsfeld’s early targeting of Iraq therefore suggests that the Bush administration and the Pentagon had long had a hidden agenda involving a “regime change” there.

Ever since the first American war against Iraq, the Gulf War of 1991, a number of the key people who planned and executed it in the White House and the Pentagon have wanted to go back and finish what they started. They said so in reports written for then Secretary of Defense Cheney in the last years of the first Bush administration; and during the period from 1992 to 2000, when they were out of power, they drafted extensive plans for what should be done if the Republicans retook the White House. In the spring of 1997, they organized themselves as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and began to lobby vigorously for aggression against Iraq and the remaking of the Middle East.

In a letter to President Clinton dated January 26,1998, they called for “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power,” and in a letter dated May 29, 1998, to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, complaining that Clinton had not listened to them, they reiterated their recommendation that Saddam be overthrown. As they put the matter, “We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the [Persian] Gulf—and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power.” These letters were signed by Donald Rumsfeld; William Kristol, editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard magazine and chairman of PNAC; Elliott Abrams, a convicted Iran-Contra conspirator who would be named in 2002 as director of Middle Eastern policy on the National Security Council; Paul Wolfowitz, who would become Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon; John Bolton, who would become undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush fils administration; Richard Perle, who would become chairman of the Defense Science Board; William J. Bennett, President Reagan’s education secretary; Richard Armitage, who would become Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department; Zalmay Khalilzad, a former Unocal consultant who would become Bush’s “ambassador” to Afghanistan and later the chief liaison with the Kurds and anti-Saddam exiles in Iraq; and several other prominent American militarists. In addition to the letter signatories, PNAC included Vice President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; and Stephen Cambone, a Pentagon bureaucrat in both Bush administrations. They have made their ideas readily available in a report issued in September 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century and in a book edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy.¹⁴

After George W. Bush became president, ten of the eighteen signers of the letters to Clinton and Republican congressional leaders became members of the administration. They bided their time for nine months. In the words of the PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, they were waiting for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” that would mobilize the public and allow them to put their theories and plans into action. September 11 was, of course, precisely what they were looking for. Within days, Condoleezza Rice called together members of the National Security Council and asked them “to think about ‘how do you capitalize on these opportunities’ to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th.” She said, “I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947,” referring to the years when fear and paranoia led the United States into its cold war with the USSR.¹⁵

Still, the Bush administration could not just go to war with Iraq without tying Saddam Hussein’s regime in some way to the 9/11 attacks. It therefore first launched an easy war against Afghanistan because there was a connection between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime, even though the United States had contributed more to Osama’s development as a terrorist than the extremist Afghan group ever did. The strategy of that war was to rely on massive American bombing and, using suitcases full of money, to recruit the forces of the Northern Alliance warlords, whom the Taliban had defeated, to do the actual fighting as our sepoys. Meanwhile, the White House launched one of the most extraordinary propaganda campaigns of modern times to convince the public that an attack on Saddam Hussein should be an essential part of America’s “war on terrorism.” This calculated attempt to whip up war fever, in turn, elicited an outpouring of speculation around the world on the true motives of the American president and his evident obsession with Iraq.

The first and most obvious ploy of the warhawks was to claim, in the words of President Bush, that “[Saddam] possesses the most deadly arms of our age.” The only problem with this argument was that it probably was not true. Iraq certainly had such weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) at one time, but between 1991 and 1998 a combination of the first Gulf War, U.N. sanctions, and the U.N. inspectors appears to have destroyed most or all of them as well as Iraq’s capability to produce more. As Scott Ritter put it, “I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of U.N. weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.”¹⁶ Never one to give up on any ploy that might help his cause, Rumsfeld replied that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This issue led to the return of U.N. weapons inspectors, but not, as it turned out, to international support for the White House’s war plans. PNAC was, in any case, never much interested in Saddam’s WMDs except as a convenient excuse. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,” wrote the authors of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”¹⁷ Bush did not hedge his bets. As late as a March 6,2003, press conference in the East Room of the White House, he exclaimed, “Saddam Hussein is not disarming. This is a fact. It cannot be denied.”

The administration’s harping on the danger that Saddam might give unconventional weapons to “evildoers” rang a familiar bell for those who remember the propaganda that accompanied the prologue to the first Iraq war. Then, the mobilizing tale of the administration of Bush Senior was that Iraqi soldiers had pulled babies from Kuwait’s hospital incubators and, in Bush’s words, “scattered them across the floor like firewood.” The president repeatedly referred to “312 premature babies at Kuwait City’s maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor.” According to Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait’s primary care system, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the maternity hospital, there were only a handful of incubators in all of Kuwait and few if any babies in them at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Bush made these comments a few days before the United Nations, on November 29, 1990, authorized the use of “all means necessary” to eject Iraq from Kuwait. After the war it was revealed that Kuwait had hired the big Washington public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton to peddle this story, and on October 10, 1990, arranged for an “eyewitness” to testify before Congress that it had indeed happened. That witness, who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, had not been anywhere near a hospital in Kuwait City in August 1990. Other “witnesses” who claimed to have seen Iraqi atrocities later acknowledged that they had all been coached by Hill & Knowlton.¹⁸

On October 7, 2002, President Bush fils contributed what was surely the weirdest of his homicidal-dictator-with-WMDs rationales for a war with Iraq. In a speech in Cincinnati, after noting that “Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction,” he warned that “Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States.” Presumably Bush was here referring to the Czech L-29 jet training aircraft, 169 of which Iraq had bought in the 1960s and 1980s. The L-29 is a single-engine, dual-seat plane intended as a basic flight trainer for novices. It was the Soviet bloc’s version of America’s Cessna, with a range of about 840 miles and a top speed of around 145 miles per hour. There is some evidence that before the Gulf War Iraq had experimented with converting these aircraft into unmanned aerial vehicles—but they may have only been intending to use them as crop dusters.¹⁹ In any case, the president did not explain how these slow-moving aircraft could reach Maine, the nearest point on the U.S. mainland to Iraq, some 5,500 miles away, or why they would not be shot down the moment they crossed Iraq’s borders.

Another major claim in the Bush administration’s march to war was that Saddam had backed the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11. In August 2002, Rumsfeld told Tom Brokaw on NBC News that “there are al-Qaeda in Iraq.” On September 26, 2002, he said that the government had “bulletproof” confirmation of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda members, including “solid evidence” that members of the terrorist network maintained a presence in Iraq (but not in Pakistan, our soon-to-be ally). Rumsfeld went on to suggest that Iraq had offered safe haven to bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. In an October 11, 2002, speech, President Bush said, “Some al-Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq.” Since the “solid evidence” was never released, one must assume that Rumsfeld and Bush were referring to about 150 members of a group called Ansar al Islam (“Supporters of Islam”) who took refuge in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. The problem is that America’s would-be Kurdish allies controlled this area, not Saddam. There was no evidence of actual links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, a point often made by the CIA, and such cooperation would in any case have been implausible given Osama’s religious commitments and Saddam’s ruthlessly secular regime.

The only instance of Saddam’s support for anti-American terrorism was his alleged attempt to assassinate George H. W. Bush during the former president’s victory tour of Kuwait in mid-April 1993—the origin of his son’s comment in a 2002 campaign speech that Saddam “tried to kill my dad.” On June 26,1993, two and a half months after the attempt, President Clinton retaliated by firing cruise missiles into Baghdad, killing several innocent bystanders. The evidence strongly indicates, however, that not only did the assassination attempt never occur but Kuwaiti intelligence probably was covering up its discovery of a smuggling ring working on the Iraq-Kuwait border by claiming that they were after W’s daddy.²⁰

Perhaps the least convincing of the official reasons for wanting to get rid of Saddam was the contention that he had no respect for U.N. resolutions. On September 30, 2002, Rumsfeld staged a show at the Pentagon featuring gun-camera footage of Iraqi antiaircraft artillery firing at American and British warplanes patrolling the “no-fly zones” of northern and southern Iraq. “With each missile launched at our air crews,” he claimed, “Iraq expresses its contempt for the U.N. resolutions—a fact that must be kept in mind as their latest inspection offers are evaluated.” But Secretary Rumsfeld certainly knew that no U.N. resolution (or other international authority) existed to legitimate the no-fly zones. The United States, Britain, and France created them unilaterally in March 1991, theoretically to protect rebellious Kurds in the north and Shi’ites in the south who had risen in revolt against Saddam after the first Gulf War. Although they did indeed stop Saddam from using his air power, the first Bush administration had already stood idly by as he crushed the uprisings—undoubtedly fearing a radically Islamic Iraq and a Kurdish bid for independence that would destabilize an American ally, Turkey, which had long engaged in a ruthless suppression of its own Kurdish minority. France soon dropped out of the no-fly zone enforcement, but the United States and Britain continued, slowly escalating their air attacks right up to the eve of the second Iraq war, even though these were clearly illegal under international law.²¹

Then there was the administration’s assertion that overthrowing Saddam would bring democracy to Iraq and other countries around the Persian Gulf. In an interview with the Financial Times of London, Condoleezza Rice commented that freedom, democracy, and free enterprise did not “stop at the edge of Islam” and that, after toppling Saddam through the use of military force, the United States would be “completely devoted” to the reconstruction of Iraq as a unified, democratic state.²² Even then, this sounded a bit like the military’s claim, after pulverizing Afghanistan through high-altitude bombing, that it had really arrived to liberate Afghan women from the Taliban. Of course, had the United States truly been interested in democracy in the gulf states, it might have begun long ago in Saudi Arabia or any of the feudal monarchies like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman in which it has built major military garrisons.

Since none of the administration’s rationales for its belligerence toward Iraq made much sense, some observers around the world looked elsewhere for its true motives. One prominent theory concerned Iraq’s oil. Its reserves are the second largest on earth, after those of Saudi Arabia. Given that both the president and the vice president were former oil company executives and that the president’s father, also a former president, was the founder, in 1954, of the Zapata Offshore Oil Company, it was reasonable to assume that they were at least very familiar with Iraq’s oil wealth. The Zapata Company drilled the first well off Kuwait. In 1963, Bush Senior merged Zapata with another firm to create the oil giant Pennzoil, and in 1966, he sold off his shares, becoming a multimillionaire in the process. As late as 1998 and 1999, when Dick Cheney was still president of the Halliburton Company of Houston, it sold Saddam some $23.8 million of oil-field equipment. Perhaps Bush Junior’s obsession with Iraq, according to this line of thought, was his desire to seize its oil.

The United States needs a lot of oil for its huge and, in the case of SUVs and Humvees, ever more gas-guzzling automotive sector. It also would like strategically to control the oil lands of the Middle East and Central Asia in order to oversee the shipments to regions increasingly dependent on imported petroleum, which might someday challenge American global predominance. Europe and China are the obvious potential challengers. As Anthony Sampson, an oil expert and the author of the classic book on the major oil companies, The Seven Sisters, observes, “Western oil interests closely influence military and diplomatic policies, and it is no accident that while American companies are competing for access to oil in Central Asia, the U.S. is building up military bases across the region.”²³

The strongest evidence that oil was a prime motive was the behavior of the American troops in Baghdad after they entered the city on April 9, 2003. They very effectively protected the headquarters of Iraq’s Ministry of Oil but were indifferent to looters who spent two days ransacking the National Museum of its priceless antiquities and burning the National Archives and the city’s famed Quranic Library. The same thing happened to the National Museum in Mosul. While the marines defaced some of the world’s most ancient walls at the site of the Sumerian city of Ur, near Nasiriya, the army was already busy building a permanent garrison at the adjacent Tallil Air Base to protect the southern oil fields.²⁴

Another popular theory has been that the Likud Party of Israel was and continues to be the primary influence on the Bush administration’s thinking about the Middle East and that the desire to oust Saddam reflected the long-range interests of Israeli rightists who want to ensure their country’s continuing regional military superiority. Many of the key figures in the second Bush administration and in PNAC have intimate connections with Ariel Sharon and Likud. Among these are chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, special assistant to a PNAC founder, John Bolton, who is undersecretary of state for arms control. Michael Ledeen, a former Iran-Contra conspirator and a member of the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs of Washington, DC, cooperates closely with his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute to promote Israeli causes. All these men have long records of opposing peace initiatives and accords between Israel and the Palestinians and of calling for American wars not just against Iraq but also against Syria, Lebanon, and Iran—indeed, for a remaking of the whole region that would only benefit Israel.

Perle is a member of the board of the conservative Jerusalem Post and author of the chapter “Iraq: Saddam Unbound” in the PNAC book Present Dangers. In private life, Feith is a partner in a small Washington law firm that specializes in representing Israeli munitions makers seeking ties with American weapons industries. Before going to the State Department, Wurmser was head of Middle Eastern projects at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of the AEI-published book Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein (1999), whose foreword is by Perle. During the Reagan administration, Feith served as special counsel to Perle, who was then assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Another influential figure, Meyrav Wurmser, David Wurmser’s wife and cofounder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), translates and distributes stories from the Arab press that invariably portray Arabs in a bad light.

In July 1996, these four wrote a position paper for Israel’s incoming prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” It called on Israel to repudiate the Oslo Accords and the underlying concept of “land for peace” and to permanently annex the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. It also recommended that Israel advocate the elimination of Saddam Hussein as a first step toward regime changes in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In November 2002, Prime Minister Sharon echoed these ideas when he urged the United States to turn to Iran as soon as it finished with Saddam. Many other officials and hangers-on of the second Bush administration hold these or similar views. Given their well-known sympathies, it is not implausible to think that they have been attempting to implement them under cover of the “war on terror.”²⁵

Still another reasonable theory was that America’s war fever was stoked by shrewd political operators in the White House and that the campaign against Saddam Hussein was mainly meant to influence domestic politics—both the 2002 midterm election and the 2004 presidential one. Several commentators called this the use of “weapons of mass distraction.”²⁶ Among its goals were to bolster George W. Bush’s dubious legitimacy as president and to divert voters’ attention from his less than sterling domestic achievements in his first two years in office. Faced with 2002 midterm elections, the leaders of the Republican Party were desperate to keep discussion away from issues such as the president’s and vice president’s close ties to the corrupt Enron Corporation, the huge and growing federal budget deficit, the looting of workers’ pension funds by highly paid CEOs, vast tax cuts that favored the rich, a severe loss of civil liberties under Bush’s attorney general, and, in the foreign sphere, the embarrassing fact that, despite the war in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden evidently remained at large and potent.

In this view, key political advisers in the White House such as Karl Rove and Chief of Staff Andrew Card had far more influence with the president than either Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld or Secretary of State Powell. Just as, during the Vietnam War, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had to a surprising degree based key foreign policy decisions on domestic political considerations rather than on grand strategy or intelligence estimates, the evidence suggests that it was Rove who overruled the unilateralist hawks in the Pentagon and sent the president to the United Nations for his September 12,2002, speech in which he called for renewed inspections in Iraq. Rove had discovered that domestic opinion was lukewarm on waging a war in the Middle East without allies.²⁷ For George W. Bush, the strategy worked. After two years in office, the party holding the White House increased its strength in Congress, gaining control of both houses, a genuine rarity in modern political history.

It would be hard to deny that oil, Israel, and domestic politics all played crucial roles in the Bush administration’s war against Iraq, but I believe the more encompassing explanation for our second war with Iraq is no different from that for our wars in the Balkans in 1999 or in Afghanistan in 2001-02: the inexorable pressures of imperialism and militarism. Jay Bookman, a columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, asked the relevant question months before the war began: “Why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled? Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.”²⁸

Already, between the defeat of Iraq in 1991 and the renewal of hostilities in March 2003, the United States began to acquire and build bases in the area, first by consolidating and enlarging the facilities it had used, especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, during the war. The decision to stay on in Saudi Arabia turned out to have serious unintended consequences, particularly for New York City. A number of influential young Saudis resented what they saw as the highlighting of the U.S.-led coalition and its commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, to the detriment of his Saudi counterpart, Lieutenant General Khalid Al Saud, who commanded units from twenty-four non-Western countries and yet was generally ignored by the Western allies. These Saudis felt that it would have been better if Arab and Persian Gulf countries had been entrusted with the leading role in disciplining Saddam Hussein instead of having to rely on Americans and Europeans, even though the capability of Saudi Arabia and its allies to assume that role was probably a fantasy. Far more important, some of them also came to believe that the Saudi monarchy wanted the American military forces to remain in Saudi Arabia primarily to safeguard it in the face of growing demands for a more modern, less repressive regime. Since the Saudi monarchy is entrusted with the defense of Mecca and Medina, the most sacred sites in the Muslim world, other Saudi dissidents (but hardly democrats) argued that the presence of so many infidels in the country was an affront not just to Saudi nationalism but to Islam itself.

At first, there were only a few anti-American incidents. In February and March 1991, shots were fired at U.S. military vehicles and an attempt was made to burn a bus. Matters became more serious in 1994, with increasing reports of terrorist threats. On November 13,1995, dissidents exploded a 220-pound car bomb in the capital city of Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indians. Its target was the U.S. Military Training Mission to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was under the direct control of the Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, but was actually subcontracted to the Vinnell Corporation, a firm of military mercenaries. In May 1996, the Saudi government convicted and beheaded four Muslim militants for the crime.

During the first Gulf War, the Saudis installed several hundred American, British, and French military commanders and their staffs in the Khobar Towers, a group of eight-story apartment buildings at Dhahran on the periphery of King Abdul Aziz Air Base. The Americans instantly placed Patriot air defense missile batteries around the compound and neighboring Dhahran airfield. In July 1992, after the war was over and the Saudis agreed to allow American military forces to remain, the Army Forces Central Command-Saudi Arabia (ARCENT-SA) established its headquarters in the Khobar Towers. On June 25, 1996, just outside a chain-link fence surrounding the apartment buildings, anti-American terrorists detonated a powerful truck bomb that killed nineteen American airmen and injured hundreds more. Despite the carnage, rather than pull back from Saudi Arabia, now seen as key to our whole Persian Gulf strategy, the White House and the Pentagon decided to dig in deeper but isolate themselves as much as possible from Saudi society.

In the wake of the Khobar Towers attack, the Pentagon relocated some 6,000 military personnel to distant and more easily protected locations. All the senior command units—ARCENT-SA, the Military Training Mission, and other operations—were ordered to move their offices and living quarters from Dhahran and downtown Riyadh to Eskan Village, a compound about fifteen miles outside the capital, surrounded by Patriot missile batteries. The air force transferred its personnel and equipment to Prince Sultan Air Base, located at al Kharj on an unmarked road seventy miles southeast of Riyadh in the open desert. It is a sprawling 230-squaremile compound the size of metropolitan Chicago but not marked on any map. Under Saudi-imposed rules, no photos can depict anything that reveals the presence of American troops at Prince Sultan—no landmarks, no signs, no Saudis walking in the background to show that what’s depicted is even in Saudi Arabia, no vehicles with Saudi license plates. All snapshots are reviewed and those that contain anything more than a bland background are confiscated.²⁹

The Saudi government built Eskan Village in 1983 to provide housing for one of Saudi Arabia’s many nomadic Bedouin tribes, who decided that they preferred living in their traditional tents in the desert. The housing complex was never occupied. It is actually a small, self-contained town consisting of 836 “villas” and thirty-seven high-rise towers. From the Gulf War to the Khobar Towers bombing, Eskan Village was strictly a housing estate for American military personnel working in the Saudi capital or at Riyadh Air Force Base. From 1996 through Gulf War II, it became home and work all wrapped in one. The average villa—five bedrooms, three baths, a living room, and a kitchen—comes fully equipped with a stove, TV, and washing machine. Only villas housing female personnel have clothes driers (in deference to Saudi sensitivities about seeing female underwear flapping on an outdoor clothesline). Eskan Village has become a completely American community, with dining halls, medical and dental clinics, a basketball court, volleyball courts, a miniature golf course, a “Pizza Inn,” a Chinese fast-food restaurant, and a “club” with swimming pool.³⁰ Liquor of any sort, however, is prohibited.

The amenities and scope of Eskan Village paled in comparison with those of Prince Sultan Air Base, for over a decade the largest military facility used by the United States in the Persian Gulf area, approximately the same size as the entire country of Bahrain and a mere 620 miles from Baghdad. The government of Saudi Arabia planned Prince Sultan prior to the first Gulf War but had built only the massive 15,000-feet-long runway plus taxiways and parking aprons. There were as yet no buildings in October 1990, when the U.S. Air Force dispatched one of its 435-person Red Horse squadrons (“Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers”) from Aviano Air Force Base in Italy to make the place operational. Created during the Vietnam War, Red Horse squadrons, sometimes used to disable enemy airfields, as they did in Iraq during the Gulf War, specialize in making repairs to airfields during combat. They are fully armed. At Prince Sultan they worked throughout the winter of 1990 on more than twenty-five major projects, at a cost of more than $14.6 million. By January 1991, Prince Sultan Air Base started to receive aircraft, and by the beginning of the Gulf War it held some 4,900 air force personnel and was capable of housing, servicing, and arming five fighter squadrons of aircraft and their supporting personnel (a typical American squadron consists of twenty-four aircraft). With the end of the fighting in 1991, it was allowed to go fallow until the Khobar Towers bombing put it back on the map.

Prince Sultan, surrounded by flat desert with open lines of fire, was a perfect spot to “hide” the American presence. In addition, the air force assigned 10 percent of the 6,000 troops based there after 1996 to “perimeter security.” Even so, F-15s and F-16s on takeoff were under orders to climb as fast as possible to avoid potential attack by surface-to-air missiles. The American troops who served on ninety-day tours almost never left the base. The transfer of U.S. operations to Prince Sultan cost some $500 million. Both before and during the second Iraq war, it was the main base for American surveillance operations using AWACs (airborne warning and control) aircraft and U-2 spy planes.

From the summer of 1996 to 2002, construction at Prince Sultan was continuous. In 1997, the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation awarded Northrop Aviation’s Electronic Sensors and Systems Division a contract worth $60.7 million to set up and integrate new air traffic control, navigation, meteorological, and communications systems. In early 1999, the troops, who had been living in air-conditioned tents, moved into a new 4,257-bed housing facility two miles from the base. The Saudi government paid $112 million for it; hence it remained Saudi government property even when run and maintained by the U.S. Air Force. Facilities included community dining halls with names like Camel Lot and Mirage, a base theater, a gymnasium, a recreation center, an outdoor swimming pool permanently cooled to 82 degrees (the air temperature at Prince Sultan is normally in the range of 110 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit), and the Prince Sultan Health Center (cost $5.87 million), which Prince Sultan himself dedicated on June 22, 1999. The total cost of the air base, from its inception in the late 1980s, has been estimated at around $1.07 billion. In the years leading up to the second Iraq war, the air force flew a total of 286,000 missions from Prince Sultan and other Persian Gulf bases to enforce the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. The same operations for northern Iraq were launched from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

The major new military construction at Prince Sultan, completed just prior to the war in Afghanistan, was a Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) with state-of-the-art command and control systems and a Joint Intelligence Center, including three different Internet networks—for unclassified, secret, and allied forces traffic. The air force dedicated the center in June 2001, and in October the Saudi government permitted its use in coordinating air operations against targets in Afghanistan. The hypersecret Air Force Communications Agency supervised its design and installation. The new CAOC at Prince Sultan coordinated air operations with new air bases the United States was just then building in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. But as the second Iraq war approached, it became unclear whether and for what functions the Saudi government would allow the Americans to use Prince Sultan, so the Pentagon promptly built an elaborate alternative air command center at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.³¹

Typical of life in the spreading empire of bases in the oil lands, days at Prince Sultan were often spent swimming and watching football on TV when not working. Still, the isolation did not necessarily go down well with the troops. In one notorious instance, Lieutenant Colonel Martha McSally, the highest-ranking female pilot in the air force, took the Defense Department to court for requiring her to put on an abaya —the total body covering devout Saudi women wear in public—when off the base. This, she claimed, was an unconstitutional infringement of the rights of American women. She won (in Washington, DC), and Central Command withdrew the requirement.³²

The U.S. government has always understood that the presence of our forces in Saudi Arabia was a root cause of al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities against both the monarchy and American targets within and outside the country. Rather than move those forces promptly after 9/11, however, the Bush administration waited until it could disguise what it was doing under cover of normal military redeployments. On April 29, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, finally announced in Riyadh that the fall of Saddam Hussein meant that America’s military mission in the country was over and that “all combat forces” would be withdrawn. Even so, the Bush administration seemed to have delayed too long. On May 12,2003, terrorists attacked four walled and guarded compounds for foreigners in Riyadh, killing over thirty Americans and Saudis. Moreover, the United States is not actually leaving Prince Sultan or the country—it has retained a small maintenance unit at the air base and the Vinnell Corporation’s training of the Saudi National Guard continues. The U.S. withdrawal was announced with great fanfare on Saudi television, but it is unlikely that anyone believed that American imperialists had actually lost interest in the world’s richest oil-producing nation. As the English historian of imperialism Niall Ferguson observed in an interview with the New York Times, “From 1882 until 1922, the British promised the international community sixty-six times that they would leave Egypt, but they never did.”³³

Prince Sultan was for some years the base of bases in the Middle East, but the United States had built such a military overcapacity in the gulf region that the post-Iraq war decision to withdraw almost all military personnel from Saudi Arabia had little effect on America’s war-making capability. The proliferation of bases in neighboring Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar alone exceeds any military need the United States might face. And there are still more bases in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Djibouti, plus those recently acquired in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Before 2003 is over, there will probably be four new American bases in Iraq. The navy also can deploy up to five carrier battle groups, each with approximately seventy-five aircraft, cruise missiles, and atomic weapons, in the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. A carrier battle group is composed of the aircraft carrier itself, two cruisers, two to three destroyers, a frigate, an attack submarine, and a combat support ship and is, in essence, a floating base.

On the eve of the second Iraq war, Camp Doha, the army’s major base in Kuwait, was the jumping-off point for a huge ground force waiting for orders to surge across the Iraq border, including the army’s V Corps from Heidelberg, Germany; the First Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton, California; the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Stewart, Georgia; three squadrons of Apache attack helicopters; a Special Forces unit; and an advance party of the British First Armored Division. The principal weaponry of these units were 230 Abrams main battle tanks, 120 Bradley fighting vehicles, and 40 Paladin self-propelled 155 mm artillery pieces. General Dynamics manufactures the Abrams tank, which weighs 68.7 tons and costs $4.3 million each. The Bradley vehicle is a 50,000-pound armored “battle taxi” equipped with modern machine guns, antitank rockets, and smoke grenades that is used to ferry troops into combat behind the tanks. The Paladin is the most advanced gun in the army’s arsenal, weighing some 32 tons.

Since the Khobar Towers bombing, one of the army’s main goals has been to replace Camp Doha, which is too close to the capital, Kuwait City, with a more modern prepositioning facility fully protected from possible terrorist attacks. In July 1999, the government of Kuwait began work on that new base, a $200 million facility named Camp Arifjan, located in the desert south of the capital. During 2002, about 10,000 noncombat army personnel were transferred there from Camp Doha. At Arifjan, virtually all the prepositioned equipment for a full army brigade is stored in large warehouses rather than exposed to the desert environment, as at Camp Doha. The Army Corps of Engineers designed the base, which includes modern barracks with shatterproof Mylar glass on all windows and special maintenance bays for tanks. Most of Camp Arifjan was completed during 2002, with only some roads and utilities still to be built. Camp Doha, continuously in use since the first Gulf War, was always understood to be a temporary facility, but Arifjan is evidence that the Americans intend to stay a long time.

Throughout the late 1990s, the army flew a new brigade from the United States or Europe into Kuwait every four months for training. The airfield it used was Ahmed al Jaber Air Base, located just seventy-five miles south of the Iraq border; although the base belongs to the Kuwait air force, it has an area set aside only for U.S. Air Force operations. Until late 1996, our air force deployed its F-15 and F-16 fighters at Kuwait City’s international airport, but after the terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Dhahran, it moved everything to what the troops inevitably call “the Jab.” According to the Global Security Organization, “Ahmed al Jaber Air Base is one hard target. The Air Force uses every means available, from physical barriers to high-tech sensors and infrared cameras, to keep people deployed to al Jaber safe. And an alert and overwhelming security force subjects even the most innocuous happenings to stern scrutiny.”³⁴ The air force contracts out almost all services for the several thousand U.S. troops at al Jaber.

Another American military facility in Kuwait, the Ali al Salem Air Base, only thirty-nine miles from the Iraqi border, was until recently a hard-duty post, devoted to radar surveillance of Iraqi air space. One description of Ali al Salem notes that “the weather is about as hot here as any place you’ve ever been in your life.”³⁵ During mid-2000, work began on new buildings and security devices to make Ali al Salem a permanent base. Services here, too, are provided under contract.

Americans like to think that Kuwait is indebted to the United States because we came to its aid in 1991 and therefore welcomes permanent military bases on its soil. This is a mistake. Kuwait has not proved a particularly friendly ally. As an Arab nation, Kuwait opposes American support for Israeli expansionism and its double standard for Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers, both of whom kill defenseless civilians. The Kuwaitis are also no more happy with foreign troops living among them than any other nation might be, particularly foreigners who are disrespectful toward their religion. Nonetheless, Kuwait has accepted American protection and pays for it.

The situation is more complex in the other gulf states. Qatar and Oman are small nations, scared to death of their larger neighbors, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. They have invited the Americans into their countries as a form of protection, much as their ancestors accepted the British. In return, the Americans demand military bases, preferably in highly secure areas away from population centers. The Pentagon knows that it is not particularly welcome in the area and that the gulf governments prefer not to talk about American bases or acknowledge their presence more than absolutely necessary. Oman is probably the most tolerant of the gulf states toward the Americans, the United Arab Emirates the least. Each risks the wrath of its own people for collaborating with the United States.

Bahrain is a good example. It remained a rather quiet place until July 1995, when the navy moved the headquarters of its Fifth Fleet there, together with some 4,200 military personnel. As the Global Security Organization notes, “The current ASU [naval administrative support unit] bears little resemblance to the small, 10-acre compound it was as recently as 1991. In the past seven years, this ‘sleepy hollow’ has expanded to 62 acres with $36.5 million worth of new construction, including new transient bachelor quarters, a medical and dental clinic, a racquetball court, a chapel, a post office and several multi-purpose sports fields.”³⁶ Many American servicemen regard duty in Bahrain as the best posting in the gulf. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, which is connected to Bahrain by the King Fahd causeway, Americans can drink alcohol in Bahrain. But even though Manama, Bahrain’s capital, is a city made up primarily of foreigners—and not just American foreigners—and the kingdom has a population of only about 660,000, the navy has placed many hotels and bars off-limits to its personnel as a precaution against terrorist attacks.

Bahrain goes out of its way not to appear subservient to the Americans. The Bahrainis are rich and lead comfortable lives, but they nonetheless demonstrate against the United States at the slightest provocation. To keep political matters in balance, during August 2002, King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa of Bahrain crossed the gulf and paid a formal visit to Iran, where he was welcomed by President Mohammad Khatami. His visit was the first to Teheran by a Bahraini head of state since the Iranian revolution of 1979.³⁷ Fifth Fleet or no Fifth Fleet, Bahrain was clearly unimpressed by President George Bush’s statement of January 2002 naming Iran as part of an “axis of evil.”

The navy inherited the British base at Manama, and military ships are therefore a familiar presence. The air force is another matter. In 1987, the Bahrain air force began to build a massive air base on Bahrain Island, about twenty miles from Manama. The Shaikh Isa Air Base was intended for its one and only fighter wing. The base was still unfinished four years later at the time of the first Gulf War, when the marines took it over, and Navy SeaBees completed it. During the mid-1990s, the air force further enlarged the base, and, in 1997, it flew in the 366th Air Expeditionary Wing from Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, with 1,200 personnel and such advanced aircraft as B-1B bombers, F-15 and F-16 fighters, and KC-135 aerial-refueling tankers. To protect the wing’s forty-four aircraft, the Pentagon also transferred in elements of a Patriot antimissile battalion from Fort Bliss, Texas. By 2000, both the marines and the air force were permanent fixtures at Shaikh Isa Air Base, even though their presence was a subject the government of Bahrain had no desire to talk about.

Just south of Bahrain is the rich country of Qatar, about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The head of state, the emir, is directly accountable to no one. He is constrained only by tribal tradition and Islamic law and works primarily to preserve the feudal and financial interests of his family. This is not easy, however, given the contemporary pressures on Qatar, which has a population of slightly over 800,000, 80 percent of whom are foreign workers, mostly highly literate Arabs, Pakistanis, Indians, and Iranians. Thanks to great oil wealth and stupendous reserves of natural gas, Qataris in the year 2000 enjoyed a per capita income of about $20,300, equal to that of the most developed countries. The high standard of living among a general population that lacks any firm ties to Qatar or its ruling family means there is constant agitation from below to end autocracy and open up the political system to social change.

Qatar was part of the anti-Iraqi coalition during both Gulf Wars. In June 1992, it granted the United States basing and weapons-prepositioning rights in return for an implicit guarantee of aid if Qatar were attacked. Qatar’s fears are not abstract. Although the country is several times larger and much richer than Bahrain, genuine Qataris constitute such a small minority that the country has been ripe for an external takeover, internal revolution, or both. It shares a disputed land border with Saudi Arabia, fought Baghdad during both Gulf Wars, and often feuds with Iran. It hopes that by unobtrusively supporting the United States while publicly criticizing it and denouncing Israel while publicizing its large monetary donations to the Palestinians, it can contain popular indignation. The goal is to keep the dictatorial powers of its small ruling elite intact as long as possible.

After the young emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani deposed his conservative father in a bloodless coup in June 1995, he made one significant gesture toward openness, if not democracy. He agreed to sponsor what would become the single most influential source of news in Muslim countries, the cable-news network al-Jazeera (meaning “the peninsula,” i.e., Qatar), whose studios are located in Doha, Qatar’s capital. In April 1996, Saudi Arabia had thrown the BBC out of the country for reporting on such controversial issues as beheadings and Saudi dissidents. A few months later, the new emir hired most of the BBC’s Arabic Service editors, reporters, and technicians and set them up as the nucleus of al-Jazeera. His intent seems to have been to end censorship in Qatar and thereby relieve some of the pressure for more openness without destabilizing the country. The emir has subsequently given his TV network almost complete journalistic freedom. So far, al-Jazeera has been criticized by virtually every Islamic country from Saudi Arabia to Algeria and, of course, by Israel. In October 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice demanded that the emir censor interviewees who contended that American foreign policy was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001. The following month, the United States bombed al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, as it would bomb the network’s Baghdad studio during the second Iraq war. The emir still backs al-Jazeera to the tune of $100 million a year—corporate advertisers are hard to come by—and the station continues to report world news. The only matters that are off-limits are interviews with Qatari political dissidents and details of U.S. basing policy in the emirate.³⁸

Among the Qatari bases the Pentagon has appropriated is one of the best airfields in the gulf, nineteen miles southwest of Doha in the open desert. During the late 1990s, the government of Qatar actually built al-Udeid Air Base at a cost of $1.4 billion with the thought that it might attract the Americans, who clearly were not going to hold on to their Saudi bases forever, and perhaps bribe them into becoming the country’s protector. It is the only base in Qatar that the authorities allow to be mentioned in the press. Its 14,760-foot runway is one of the longest in the gulf, greatly exceeding the needs of Qatar’s dozen or so fighter aircraft. The airfield has hardened concrete bunkers for as many as 120 warplanes.

The air force enthusiastically took the bait. Al-Udeid is the site for prepositioned air force weapons, fuel, medical supplies, and munitions—the army’s site is elsewhere in Qatar. In March 2002, the air force began to build there a combined air operations center that, although not as advanced as Price Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, could serve as an alternative. Following the assault on Afghanistan, the air force put up its own money to complete all the facilities at al-Udeid as fast as possible. In March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney visited the site, and in June the U.S. secretary of defense did the same. The main air force unit based there is the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, composed of F-15E and F-16 fighters and KC-10, KC-130, and KC-135 aerial tankers. Al-Udeid played an important role in the Afghan war as the main base for refueling war-planes on their way to and from Afghanistan. The air force estimates that the tankers of the 379th delivered more than 220 million pounds of fuel over Afghanistan, about half of all refueling undertaken during the war.³⁹

Al-Udeid also played a key role in the 2003 assault on Iraq, hosting some 6,500 airmen with a planned eventual population of 10,000. They live in a large desert tent city that the air force calls Camp Andy, after Master Sergeant Evander Andrews, the first U.S. casualty of the Afghanistan operation, who died as a result of a forklift accident. It is hard to know whether the officials who supply these names are being intentionally saccharine or are running out of genuine heroes. A permanent housing complex, rechristened Expeditionary Village, is to open on the 3,000-acre base late in 2003. During the summer of 2002, according to one informed source, the first swimming pool at al-Udeid had already been completed, usually a sign that the air force plans a long stay.⁴⁰ Dyn-Corp of Reston, Virginia, is responsible for providing this and other amenities and for accepting, storing, maintaining, and protecting the prepositioned war material, the same services it performs at air bases in Oman and Manama, Bahrain.

Two other installations in Qatar are Camp as-Sayliyah, located in the outskirts of Doha, and Camp Snoopy, at Doha International Airport, both army prepositioning sites for tanks and other fighting vehicles, together with their fuel and munitions for a full armored brigade. These are state-of-the-art facilities completed in the summer of 2000. While most other bases in the Persian Gulf region are paid for by the host countries, Congress actually put up a total of $110 million for these. The government of Qatar contributed only the land and utilities.

During the second Iraq war, Camp as-Sayliyah was the forward headquarters of commander in chief General Tommy R. Franks, who, in December 2002, under cover of a military training exercise, moved about 750 staff officers from MacDill Air Base, Florida, to direct the war in front of banks of computers and video displays located in air-conditioned tents. The base was also the site of the $1.5 million, made-for-TV “Coalition Media Center,” where Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, the six-foot-plus, Hollywood-handsome African American spokesman for Central Command, gave hundreds of journalists his daily edited video presentations.⁴¹ Reporting the war from Qatar for New York magazine, Michael Wolff described Camp as-Sayliyah as “pure moonscape. Not a tree, not a bush. Hardly a structure. Just a horizon of flat limestone. And then you come upon the U.S. base—really just a ring of wire and then a no-man’s-land behind which there is a base. The lack of cover in every direction must provide a high security level, but, in addition, the base is fortified with all other maximum-paranoia, extra-protection measures. It’s hunkered down. Not just defended, but defensive.” Both the high-tech war and the extreme attention to controlling media coverage were the latest in American-style militarism and imperialism.

As-Sayliyah is said to be the army’s largest locale of prepositioned war material in the world. Camp Snoopy is a logistics facility at Qatar’s main commercial airport, responsible for shipping food and other supplies to bases throughout the gulf. Whereas a high inner wall and .50-caliber machine guns defend as-Sayliyah’s 36.3 acres and twenty-seven warehouses, Snoopy is defended only by guard towers. In May 2003, following the defeat of Iraq, General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Snoopy was no longer needed and would be eliminated. The number of troops there had already dropped from 1,800 during the war to around 800.

The gulf state least attracted to the United States’s imperial presence is undoubtedly the United Arab Emirates. Lying east of Qatar, it is unusual in that it has a good seaport on the Persian Gulf and also one near the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman. Yet for all its advantages, the UAE in 1994 concluded a defense cooperation agreement with us, giving the air force access to al-Dhafra Air Base, about an hour outside the capital of Abu Dhabi. The United States has used this facility for launching manned U-2 and pilotless Global Hawk reconnaissance aircraft against Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and it bases there the 763rd Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron’s KC-10 tanker aircraft.

When the air force first deployed to the UAE, its personnel lived in downtown Abu Dhabi, one of the more sophisticated cities in the region, in an apartment building called the Sahara Residency. But after the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon moved all its personnel from Abu Dhabi to al-Dhafra Air Base. American meals at the airfield, including box lunches for the air crews, are supplied under contract by the local Holiday Inn. In May 2003, the Army Corps of Engineers invited bids from contractors on a headquarters building, dormitories, dining, gym, and medical facilities, and roads and parking at al-Dhafra, again an indication that the Pentagon planned to stay a long time.⁴²

The UAE is also familiar to crews of major navy vessels since Jebel Ali, the seaport for the city of Dubai, is the navy’s most frequented port outside the United States. Carrier battle groups on patrol in the Persian Gulf call there regularly for fuel, supplies, and shore leave. Perhaps the most important commercial center on the Persian Gulf, Jebel Ali has the largest man-made harbor in the world, with sixty-seven berths and extensive dry docks. It is connected by a good road straight across the UAE to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman. Most military cargoes from Japan and Diego Garcia are unloaded at Fujairah and trucked to Jebel Ali or flown to Bahrain. This route allows for the resupply of forces in the Persian Gulf even if the Strait of Hormuz should be closed. Neither of these UAE ports has a permanent U.S. naval presence but officers are based in both to assist military ships in transit.

The last and least typical of the Persian Gulf states, to the east of the UAE, is Oman. With a per capita income of $7,700 and a population of 2.5 million, a half million of whom are nonnationals, it is the poorest of the smaller gulf states. It has no arable land and only about 5 percent of its territory serves as pasture. Oil sales make up 80 percent of its export earnings and 40 percent of its gross domestic product. Oman’s oil was discovered in commercial quantities only in 1962, later than in any of the other gulf states, and the cost of extracting it is well above that of its neighbors. It is not a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which pleases the United States. One of the reasons Oman accepts the presence of American military bases is because they generate substantial income and help diversify the economy. Moreover, the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, entrenched in Oman for decades, recommended the U.S. military to the sultan.

The Oman of today is a remnant of an old Arabian empire that once extended as far south as Zanzibar on the African coast. Located directly across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, it has long, undefined borders with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The first American ambassador arrived in Oman’s capital, the old city of Muscat, only in 1972. In 1980, as a consequence of the fall of the shah in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Oman negotiated a security agreement with the United States. In 1990, this military cooperation agreement was expanded and renewed. Until recently, Oman purchased most of its air force’s aircraft from British manufacturers, and in September 2001, following through on arrangements unrelated to that month’s terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, carried out a large-scale joint exercise in the desert with 22,000 British troops. In October 2001, it signed a contract with the Department of Defense to buy twelve advanced F-16C/D fighters for $1,120 million. The Omani public does not like the government’s military subservience to the United States, but the sultan shrewdly supplies new jobs and benefits whenever internal tensions begin to look dangerous.

Oman is an important location for prepositioned war-fighting equipment and supplies, and the army, navy, and air force all use its four major airfields for aerial refueling, logistics, and intelligence operations in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Oman’s royals claim that there are no foreign military bases in the country and that the Americans are present only as “guests.” However, Oman is building a new, highly secret air base at al-Musnana, eighty miles west of Muscat in the desert, at a cost of $120 million. The United States is paying for the base, which will feature a runway able to accommodate the most advanced American bombers, fighters, and cargo aircraft. Al-Musnana will also provide air command and control facilities. When it is completed, the Omani air force will transfer its fighters from Seeb, the international airport for the capital, to al-Musnana, and Seeb will be expanded to handle more civilian traffic.⁴³ This American buildup in Oman could be a sign of hostile intent toward Iran.

In the far south of the country, in Dhofar, not far from the Yemeni border, Thumrait Air Base is a site for U.S. prepositioned war material and also the home of the British-built Hunter and Jaguar aircraft belonging to the Omani air force. During the 1991 Gulf War, the USAF’s 1660th Tactical Airlift Wing was located at Thumrait. In April 1996, the United States sent a Red Horse squadron to expand the runway and aprons, and in November 1998, the Pentagon posted the USAF’s Twenty-eighth Air Expeditionary Group from Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, to Thumrait. After the October 12, 2000, terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen, the 219 surviving sailors were flown out through Thumrait, which is a relatively short distance north of Aden.

A fourth Omani airfield is located on Masirah Island in the Arabian Sea. Oman has allowed the United States to use Masirah Air Base since World War II, and today it is one more site for prepositioned war equipment and home to a navy patrol squadron flying P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft and EP-3E Aries II spy planes, such as the one that was forced to land on China’s Hainan Island on April 1,2001. It is one of only four sites in the world that houses a permanent navy espionage squadron operating P-3 aircraft; the others are located at Manama, Bahrain; Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa; and Diego Garcia. Masirah Island is remote and considered a hardship post.

This compilation of American military bases in the Persian Gulf region is by no means complete. Since December 2002, the United States has been building a new base for its Special Forces in the former French colony of Djibouti, separated by only a twenty-mile strip of water from the port of Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea. We have long deployed several thousand personnel at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, as well as around fifty F-15 and F-16 fighters and A-10 tank busters, although in the wake of Turkey’s refusal to let the United States use its territory for the 2003 assault on Iraq, the Pentagon quickly withdrew most of them. We have also stationed dozens of aircraft at two bases close to the Iraqi border in Jordan and have often used “Cairo West” air base in Egypt for refueling and airlift operations.

Most of these Middle Eastern military bases were hardened and outfitted specifically for the second war with Iraq and then used during that war. Iraq, however, is but part of a larger picture. Over the past half century the United States has been inexorably acquiring permanent military enclaves whose sole purpose appears to be the domination of one of the most strategically important areas of the world. Of course the United States has an interest in the oil of the region, but the carrier task forces that have already turned the Persian Gulf into an American lake would be sufficient to protect those interests.

The permanent deployment of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen whose culture, lifestyles, wealth, and physical appearance guarantee conflicts with the peoples who live in the Middle East, is irrational in terms of any cost-benefit analysis. In fact, given the widespread political unrest and a strong revival of militant Islam, the United States seems inexplicably intent on providing future enemies with enough grievances to do us considerable damage. One need only recall the arming of Saddam Hussein or the Stinger shoulder-launched missiles that the United States gave so freely to Afghan “freedom fighters” and that were ultimately turned against us. The question is: Have these bases become ends in themselves? Does their existence cause the United States to look for ways to use them? Was the assault against Iraq driven by Iraq’s actions or by military capabilities in American hands? It may be that the ultimate causes of twenty-first-century mayhem in the Middle East are American militarism and imperialism—that is, our empire of bases itself.

In accordance with the logic of Sun Tzu, Bill Clinton was actually a much more effective imperialist than George W. Bush. During the Clinton administration, the United States employed an indirect approach in imposing its will on other nations. The government of George W. Bush, by contrast, dropped all legitimating principles and adopted the view that might makes right. History tells us that an expansive nation must at least attempt to disguise what it is doing if it wants to consolidate its gains. It must pretend that its exploitation of the weak is in their own best interest, or their own fault, or the result of ineluctable processes beyond human control, or a consequence of the spread of civilization, or in accordance with scientific laws—anything but deliberate aggression by a hyperpower.

Clinton camouflaged his policies by carrying them out under the banner of “globalization.” This proved quite effective in maneuvering rich but gullible nations to do America’s bidding—for example, Argentina—or in destabilizing potential rivals—for example, South Korea and Indonesia in the 1997 economic crisis—or in protecting domestic economic interests—for example, in maintaining the exorbitant prices of American pharmaceutical companies under cover of defending “intellectual property rights.” During the 1990s, the rationales of free trade and capitalist economics were used to disguise America’s hegemonic power and make it seem benign or, at least, natural and unavoidable. The main agents of this imperialism were Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy (today, president of Harvard University), Lawrence Summers. The United States ruled the world but did so in a carefully masked way that produced high degrees of acquiescence among the dominated nations.

George W. Bush, by contrast, turned to a frontal assault based on the use of America’s unequaled military power. Even before 9/11, the Bush administration had unveiled its unilateral approach to the world. It withdrew from important international treaties, including those seeking to ban antiballistic missile weapons, control the emission of greenhouse gases, and create a court to try perpetrators of the most heinous war crimes. Bush also proclaimed openly his adherence to a doctrine of preventive war. The United States said it was a New Rome, beyond good and evil and unrestrained by the established conventions of the international community. In its spring 2003 attack on Iraq, it affirmed that it no longer needed (or cared about) international legitimacy, that it had become a power answerable only to itself, and that internal forces of militarism were dictating foreign policy. These policies produced international isolation and a global loss of confidence in the American foreign policy establishment. Two and a half years into the Bush administration, most of our allies had left us, our military was overstretched, and no nation on earth doubted our willingness to employ military power to solve any and all problems.

By the end of the Clinton administration, globalization was under sustained political attack by its victims and their allies. Many of its once prominent supporters, such as the international currency speculator George Soros or the former chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph E. Stiglitz, were intellectually undercutting its major tenets. Globalization, however, was not dead. The world—including the Bush administration—still pretended that the World Trade Organization mattered, that free trade would end poverty in the Third World, and that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were functioning as they were supposed to. Bankers, industrialists, and economists still went to their annual conclave in Davos, Switzerland, but protectionism by rich countries and poverty for most of the people of the world were ascendant.

The aftermath of September 11, 2001, more or less spelled the end of globalization. Whereas the Clinton administration strongly espoused economic imperialism, the second Bush government was unequivocally committed to military imperialism. The Bush administration’s adoption of unilateral preventative military action undercut the international rules and norms on which commerce depends. Increasingly, even people who believed in globalist solutions to international economic and environmental problems threw up their hands in despair. At the August 2002 world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg, the delegates wore badges asking, “What do we do about the United States?”

“The central political idea of imperialism,” wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, is “expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics.”¹ This is true of all empires—witness the endless wars of ancient Rome, the subjugation of Asia by the Mongols and Ottoman Turks, Spain’s rape of the Western Hemisphere, Napoleon’s ambitions to unite Europe under the French flag, Britain’s search for new investment opportunities for its capitalists, the Third Reich’s attempts to seize lebensraum for its racially defined nation, and now an insatiable American appetite for ever more military bases. Imperialism cannot exist without a powerful military apparatus for subduing and policing the peoples who stand in its way and an economic system for financing an expensive and largely unproductive military establishment. Thus far in this book I have dealt primarily with the military side of American imperialism. Now I turn to America’s attempted economic hegemony over much of the world. My intent is to examine the elaborate ideology of “neoliberalism” that has obscured America’s international endeavors before the triumph of unilateral militarism and to reveal how militarism has displaced and discredited America’s economic leadership. Ironically, it is in this economic sphere that the overstretched American empire will probably first begin to unravel.

Following World War II, America’s military might and economic assets were so great that it met with very little resistance of any sort, except from the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites. From the onset of the Cold War until about 1980, those countries that chose to belong to neither the Communist nor the capitalist camps—the so-called Third World—had room to maneuver by playing one superpower against the other. The superpowers, even though they possessed weapons of mass destruction, were often hesitant to exert direct imperial control over these contested nations because they feared that any of them might then bolt to the other camp. The nonaligned countries also had some freedom to experiment with different paths and arrangements that might lead toward “economic development” in accordance with their own cultural traditions and whatever norms they chose of distributive justice. These nations were said to be “underdeveloped,” meaning that they had little industry or technology but instead supplied agricultural products and raw materials to the developed countries of the north. In theory, this was to be a mutually beneficial trade that would eventually lead to the industrialization of the Third World, bringing it wealth and true sovereignty.

This situation started to change in the early 1980s. The threat of a superpower war receded as the United States and the USSR became accustomed to their respective roles in the elaborate pas de deux of detente and arms control. Both countries also began to show signs of economic fatigue as the Cold War ground on. The USSR, much poorer than the United States, was by far the more seriously affected as the rigidities of its economic doctrine stood in the way of most forms of entrepreneurship and industrial innovation. Still a mighty military power, the USSR became increasingly bifurcated economically into an authorized and an informal, or “underground,” sector. Without the latter it would have collapsed much sooner than it did. From the mid-1980s on, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev sought to reform the ailing economy, but he was ultimately undercut by deeply entrenched vested interests. The United States knew about these problems but pretended in its intelligence estimates not to notice so that it could continue to pour money into its own military machine.

Even though the Soviet Union had lost its potency as an economic challenger, the United States and its allies had for some time been worried by other trends. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the rules governing the opening of trade drawn up by the United States and Britain late in World War II and subsequently signed by some twenty-one other nations, had ensured spectacular growth in international trade. (The purpose of GATT was to prevent a recurrence of the economic nationalism and the collapse of international trade that had caused the Great Depression and contributed directly to the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia.) Between 1948 and 1995, when GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organization, international trade expanded from about $124 billion to $10,772 billion.² This pattern was fine with the United States so long as its trade balance remained favorable and it could dictate the terms on which others participated in the good times.

The 1970s, however, had already ushered in a period of questioning about where the capitalist world was heading. The American and British economies were plagued by “stagflation” (high rates of inflation combined with low economic growth), high rates of unemployment, large public-sector deficits, two major oil crises as producer nations sought to influence the policies of consuming nations, racial strife, and, for the United States, defeat in Vietnam. Equally ominous, by the mid-1980s, Japan had displaced the United States as the world’s leading creditor nation, while America’s fiscal deficits and its inability to cover the costs of products imported from foreign countries turned it into the world’s largest debtor.

These circumstances allowed for the rise of conservative political parties and leaders—Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—in the United States and Britain. To revive international trade and, more important, put the United States back in charge of it, the new governments committed themselves to a rebirth of nineteenth-century capitalist fundamentalist theory. This meant withdrawing the state as much as possible from participation in the economy, opening domestic markets at least in principle to international trade and foreign investment, privatizing investment in public utilities and natural resources, ending most protective labor laws, enacting powerful domestic and international safeguards for private property rights, including, above all, “intellectual property rights” (that is, patents of all sorts), and enforcing conservative fiscal policies even at the expense of the public’s health and welfare. This program, which soon became Anglo-American mainstream economic thought, was supposed to deliver “a widespread improvement in average incomes,” as Bruce R. Scott of the Harvard Business School puts it. “Firms will reap increased economies of scale in a larger market,” the thinking went, “and incomes will converge as poor countries grow more rapidly than rich ones. In this ‘win-win’ perspective, the importance of nation-states fades as the ‘global village’ grows and market integration and prosperity take hold.”³

Because the ideas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish and English economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, from whom the new orthodoxy derived, were associated with the political movement in Britain called “liberalism,” the new economic dispensation was often called “neoliberalism.” In policy circles it became known as the “Washington consensus,” in academic life as “neoclassical economics,” and in public ideology as “globalism” or, more proactively, “globalization.” One of the leading academic specialists on globalization, Manfred Steger, says that it amounted to “a gigantic repackaging” of two centuries of classical liberalism, relabeled “the new economy.” Steger writes: “Globalization’s claims and political maneuvers remain conceptually tied to a ... nineteenth-century narrative of ‘modernization’ and ‘civilization’ that presents Western countries—particularly the United States and the United Kingdom—as the privileged vanguard of an evolutionary process that applies to all nations.”⁴

Perhaps the most deceptive aspect of globalization was its claim to embody fundamental and inevitable technological developments rather than the conscious policies of Anglo-American political elites trying to advance the interests of their own countries at the expense of others.⁵ In its spurious scientificity, globalism has proved similar to Marxism, whose roots lie in the same intellectual soil. As Steger points out, “While disagreeing with Marxists on the final goal of historical development, globalists nonetheless share with their ideological opponents a fondness for such terms as ‘irresistible,’ ‘inevitable,’ and ‘irreversible’ to describe the projected path of globalization.”⁶ In 1999, President Bill Clinton told an audience, “Today we must embrace the inexorable logic of globalization—that everything from the strength of our economy to the safety of our cities, to the health of our people, depends on events not only within our borders, but half a world away.” At other moments, he indeed emphasized that globalization was “irreversible.”⁷ His successor, George W. Bush, continued to promote these same nostrums to a reluctant Latin America under a scheme he called the “Free Trade Area of the Americas.”⁸

The upside-down Marxism of U.S.-sponsored globalism has been noted by the distinguished diplomat Oswaldo de Rivero, the Peruvian ambassador to the World Trade Organization. He has written, “The ideological war between capitalism and communism during the second half of the twentieth century was not a conflict between totally different ideologies. It was, rather, a civil war between two extreme viewpoints of the same Western ideology: the search for happiness through the material progress disseminated by the Industrial Revolution.”⁹ As a government official from a part of the world devastated by globalization, de Rivero concluded that “the cost of the Soviet version of development was shortages and lack of freedom; today, that of the neoliberal, capitalist variant is unemployment and social exclusion.”¹⁰

Proponents of globalism, particularly American academic economists and political scientists, cling to it with religious fervor. The theologian Harvey Cox has drawn attention to this devotion in an article entitled “The Market as God.”¹¹ Many otherwise sober business and political leaders in the United States have been carried away by globalization’s messianic claims. This phenomenon, too, is not new. Classical liberalism blinded no small number of Englishmen to the racism, genocide, and ruthless exploitation that accompanied the growth of the British Empire. As Hannah Arendt remarked about that earlier period of market worship: “The fact that the ‘white man’s burden’ is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.”¹²

It is critically important to understand that the doctrine of globalism is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers. It is also designed to persuade the new imperialists that “underdeveloped” countries bring poverty on themselves thanks to “crony capitalism,” corruption, and a failure to take advantage of the splendid opportunities being offered. The claim that free markets lead to prosperity for anyone other than the transnational corporations that lobbied for them and have the clout and resources to manipulate them is simply not borne out by the historical record. As even the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former director of research at the World Bank, has come to acknowledge, “It is now a commonplace that the international trade agreements about which the United States spoke so proudly only a few years ago were grossly unfair to countries in the Third World.... The problem [with globalists is] ... their fundamentalist market ideology, a faith in free, unfettered markets that is supported by neither modern theory nor historical experience.”¹³ It must be added that, until November 1999, when 50,000 protesters confronted the World Trade Organization in Seattle and began forcing a reluctant First World to acknowledge its exploitation and hypocrisy, statements like Stiglitz’s were not “commonplace,” nor had “modern” academic economic theory come to grips with the real nature of globalism.

There is no known case in which globalization has led to prosperity in any Third World country, and none of the world’s twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in globalization doctrine. What globalization has produced, in the words of de Rivero, is not NICs (newly industrialized countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse, UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities).¹⁴ There is occasional evidence that this result is precisely what the authors of globalization intended.

In 1841, the prominent German political economist Friedrich List (who had immigrated to America) wrote in his masterpiece, The National System of Political Economy, “It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.”¹⁵ Much of modern Anglo-American economics and all of the theory of globalization are attempts to disguise this kicking away of the ladder.

Leaving aside the former Soviet Union, the main developed countries—Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, and the East Asian NICs (South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore)—all got rich in more or less the same way. Regardless of how they justified their policies, in actual practice they protected their domestic markets using high tariff walls and myriad “nontariff barriers” to trade. Britain, for example, did not accept free trade until the 1840s, long after it had become the world’s leading industrial power. Between 1790 and 1940, the United States was probably the most highly protected economy on earth. In the 1970s and 1980s, the only country in the world without a single Japanese car in it was South Korea, because it was nurturing its own automobile industry. All these “developing” nations begged, bought, or stole advanced technology from the countries that first pioneered it and then, through reverse engineering and targeted investment, improved on it. They used state power to support and protect efficient capitalists within their own national boundaries who had the potential to become exporters. They poured subsidies into uncompetitive industries in order to substitute domestically produced goods for imports, often at almost any price. Some of them captured overseas markets through imperial conquest and colonialism and then defended these markets from other would-be conquerors, using powerful navies and armies. Even when defeated, like Japan after World War II and the USSR and the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the Cold War, they used every device and all the artifice in their power to subvert the economic reform programs that American economists applied to try to turn them into textbook capitalist economies.¹⁶ They understood, as the academicians did not, that a premature introduction of American economic norms was much more likely to produce mafia capitalism than development, as it did in Russia.

In short, the few successful economies on earth did exactly the opposite of what the gurus of globalization said they should have done. In places where economic managers had no choice but to follow the guidelines of globalization—“free” trade, sell-offs of public utilities, no controls over capital movements, the end of all national preferences—the results have been catastrophic. In de Rivero’s own Peru, in the twenty-four years preceding the great outburst of terrorist violence by the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrillas, the average yearly per capita income growth rate was 0.1 percent, while the yearly population increase was more than 2.3 percent. In all of Latin America and the Caribbean between 1960 and 1980, gross domestic product grew by 75 percent per person, but over the next twenty years—the high tide of globalization—GDP rose only 6 percent.¹⁷

Starting in approximately 1981, the United States introduced, under the cover of globalization, a new strategy intended to accomplish two major goals: first, to discredit state-assisted capitalism like Japan’s and prevent its spread to any countries other than the East Asian NICs, which had already industrialized by following the Japanese model; and second, to weaken the sovereignty of Third World nations so that they would become even more dependent on the largesse of the advanced capitalist nations and unable to organize themselves as a power bloc to negotiate equitably with the rich countries.

The United States’s chosen instruments for putting this strategy into effect were the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank and the IMF were created after World War II to manage the international economy and prevent a recurrence of the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s. What has to be understood is that both the fund and the bank are actually surrogates for the U.S. Treasury. They are both located at 19th and H Streets, Northwest, in Washington, DC, and their voting rules ensure that they can do nothing without the approval of the secretary of the Treasury. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson compares the IMF to the famous dog in the old RCA advertisements listening to “his master’s voice”—the Treasury—on a Victrola.¹⁸

In addition to GATT, the IMF, and the World Bank, the postwar economic reformers created a truly innovative system of fixed exchange rates among the currencies of all the capitalist nations, so that, for example, from 1949 until 1971 one U.S. dollar could be exchanged for exactly 360 Japanese yen. This system was made credible by tying the value of each currency to the U.S. dollar and by an American guarantee that it would ultimately be willing, on request, to exchange all dollars for gold. Fixed exchange rates expanded international business by making trade stable and predictable, and they formed a major obstacle to the return of the ruinous speculation that had led to the Great Depression.

In this system, the IMF was charged with making loans to redress occasional imbalances between one nation’s currency and that of its trading partners (or, rarely, to help alter a fixed exchange rate in the direction of realism); and the World Bank was given responsibility for making developmental loans to countries that needed to invest in their infrastructures and infant industries in hopes of bringing them up to the level of the advanced nations. John Maynard Keynes, the English economic theorist and historian, first formulated the ideas behind these institutions, and at the end of World War II the leading Allies thrashed out compromises to bring them to life. The United States did not accept all of Keynes’s proposals, and its objections prevailed largely because of its immense wealth and power, but both the United States and Britain were agreed on a world economic order maintained by enlightened governments. The market was not “king.” It was only a widely accepted conventional means for individuals, households, and enterprises to exchange goods and services with one another at mutually acceptable prices. The system of fixed exchange rates, a currency adjustment agency, and a lender to the poor for economic development produced marvelous results during their first twenty years.

By 1971, however, the United States was no longer able to guarantee the fixed value of the dollar in gold. It had ruined its public finances by lavish spending on the Vietnam War, on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, and on payments to countries that it feared might join the Communist camp or “go neutralist” if the United States stopped bankrolling them. In order to staunch the hemorrhaging of dollars, President Richard Nixon closed the American “gold window” by ending the system of fixed exchange rates. From then on, the currencies of the various nations were allowed to “float,” their values being set daily by supply and demand in international currency markets. With floating exchange rates, the market did indeed become king and governments took a backseat. The IMF and the World Bank were left with little to do for the rest of the decade.

The end of fixed exchange rates encouraged risky investments and speculation. Because profits could be huge and costs were low, American banks began to make large “overloans” (that is, loans well beyond the collateral on offer or their own reserves) to Third World countries. Banks like Citicorp and Bankers Trust were soon bringing in almost 80 percent of their revenue from risky overseas transactions.¹⁹ Many loans went to dictatorial or corrupt regimes, with little likelihood of ever being repaid. The banks nonetheless assumed that the governments of “developing countries” were not likely to go broke or, if they did, that some international institution would bail them out.

Thus was born the weird phenomenon of “moral hazard,” meaning American bankers could make outrageously irresponsible loans without any risk of having to absorb the loss or make good the money they had mismanaged. Before it was over, the 1970s loan bonanza produced a disaster of exactly the sort Keynes and the reformers at the end of World War II had sought to avoid. Virtually every country in Africa and Latin America was deeply in debt. In August 1982, Jésus Silva Herzog, the Mexican minister of finance, announced that his country was bankrupt and would no longer be able to pay interest on any of its loans. Just as the bankers had assumed, the U.S. government stepped in—not to save Mexico but to ensure that American banks did not collapse. At no time, then or later, did our government suggest that the people who made the bad loans bore some responsibility for the results.

In the early 1980s, following the international loan debacle, the United States put the IMF and the World Bank in charge of the Third World debt problem and essentially instructed them to do two things: keep the debtor countries paying something so that official defaults could be avoided and squeeze as much money out of them as possible. The two semimoribund institutions accepted their new role with alacrity, delighted to act as collection agencies for banks that had made bad loans. Thus were born the World Bank’s “structural adjustment loans” and the IMF’s “structural adjustment programs.”

Under structural adjustment, the World Bank lends funds to a debtor nation so that the nation can continue to “service” its debts in small, pro forma ways. As a condition for the loan, however, the IMF imposes a drastic socioeconomic overhaul of the country in accordance with the neoliberal agenda. If a debtor nation does not accept these terms, all access to international capital is denied it, thereby destabilizing its economy still further and perhaps setting it up for a CIA-abetted coup d’état. The overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the installation of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet were an early and classic example of this process, but there have been many others since. The entire Third World very quickly came under the supervision of the IMF’s economic ideologues, and by the late 1990s, close to ninety countries were being “structurally adjusted” by means of shock therapy ordered up in Washington.²⁰

In a typical structural adjustment program, the IMF and World Bank require that a country “liberalize” trade—that is, give foreigners free access to its economy. The country is also forced to reduce spending on social programs such as health care and education in order to release public funds to repay debts to foreign banks and transnational corporations. Subsidies to local agriculture are eliminated, usually rendering it unprofitable, while subsidies to agrobusinesses growing export crops such as flowers and fruits are increased. The IMF insists that the country drop all controls over the movements of capital and allow foreign investors and businesses to buy state-owned enterprises, such as electric power, telephone, transportation, natural resources, and energy companies. Perhaps most important, a country receiving a World Bank loan has to agree to maintain the convertibility of its currency—that is, it cannot prohibit the exchange of its own money for that of another country’s, which would temporarily halt the outflow of capital. Instead, maintaining free convertibility regardless of the exchange rate makes speculation about a currency’s future value possible. What a country gets out of such a mélange of “reforms” is not economic recovery, long-term growth, or stability but a government so weakened that it usually declines into a kleptocracy, experiences periodic economic collapses precipitated by rampant speculation (Mexico, 1994-95; Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia, 1997; Brazil and Russia, 1998; Argentina, 2000; Venezuela, 2002), and is forced to rely on U.S. corporations to provide virtually all consumer products, employment, and even public services.²¹

The United States was the architect of and main profiteer from these efforts. From 1991 to 1993, Lawrence Summers was the chief economist at the World Bank and the man who oversaw the tailoring of “austerity measures” to each country that needed a loan. He decided exactly what a country had that Washington wanted to open up. On December 12,1991, Summers became notorious for a leaked memo to senior officials of the bank encouraging polluting industries in the rich nations to relocate to the less developed countries. He wrote, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Brazil’s secretary of the environment, Jose Lutzenburger, replied, “The best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.”²²

Meanwhile, across town in Washington, at the Department of Commerce, Jeffrey Garten, undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and another author of these schemes, explained, “We had a mission: [Ron] Brown [secretary of commerce] called it ‘commercial diplomacy,’ the intersection of foreign policy, government power, and business deals. We used Washington’s official muscle to help firms crack overseas markets. The culture was electric: we set up an economic ‘war room’ and built a ‘trading floor’ that tracked the world’s largest commercial projects.” Garten acknowledged that many of the business deals, often involving insider trading by high-level government officials, were probably crooked, but he justified them on these grounds: “If you open a wild bazaar, as we did, you have to expect the occasional pickpocket.”²³

What these pickpockets achieved can be illustrated by the plight of the Philippines. Between 1980 and 1999, the country received nine structural adjustment loans from the World Bank and six different balance-of-payments loans from the IMF. Between 1983 and 1993, it recorded exactly zero average growth in GNP.²⁴ Two decades after the first structural adjustment program, the World Bank gave up on the loans for the straightforward reason that, in the words of Walden Bello of the University of the Philippines, “failure, spectacular failure, could no longer be denied at the pain of totally losing institutional credibility.”²⁵

What began as a poorly conceived program of emergency measures for debtor countries early in the 1980s slowly matured into the hard orthodoxy of the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s. The U.S. government became determined to impose neoliberal economics on every country on earth. To do so, it unveiled its master plan, the “Uruguay Round” of international trade negotiations (1986 to 1994), and its crown jewel, created on January 1,1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Acting in compliance with a seemingly innocent effort to create a common set of trade rules for all and to bring agriculture under such rules for the first time, “many developing countries discovered that in signing on to the WTO, they had,” as Bello put it, “signed away their right to development.”²⁶

It should be understood that there was no need to create the WTO. There was no crisis in international commerce between 1986 and 1994 that required rectification. International trade was expanding nicely under the GATT formula. The WTO was created because the United States discovered that it could be created. Concretely, it had two objectives: to try to manage the growing trade rivalry among the leading industrial countries, particularly the United States, the European Union, and Japan, and to ensure that the Third World was prevented from using trade as a legitimate instrument for its industrialization, thereby threatening the neoliberal global economic structure. The United States achieved the latter objective through the Agreement on Agriculture and the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, two of the pacts that the Uruguay Round delivered in 1995 to the WTO to enforce.

Prior to the World Trade Organization, agriculture had for all intents and purposes been outside the purview of GATT because the United States had long threatened to withdraw if it was not allowed to continue protecting domestic sugar, dairy products, and other agricultural commodities. To head off an explosion, GATT simply decided not to enforce any rules on agriculture. By the 1970s, however, Europe had become a net food exporter, and competition between the two agricultural superpowers, the European Union and the United States, was growing ever fiercer. Both wanted to force open the Third World as a new market for agricultural exports. To do this, they had to put the farmers of poor countries out of business and replace them with giant agrobusinesses. In the Uruguay Round of agricultural negotiations, the European Union and the United States excluded all representatives of the Third World and agreed between themselves on rules covering agriculture. In the Blair House Agreement of 1992-93, they prohibited the Third World from protecting its agriculture but exempted their own subsidies because these were already in place before the agreement was concluded. Unsurprisingly, a huge surge of agricultural imports then poured into developing countries without a commensurate increase in their exports. This intrusion produced a flight into Third World cities by displaced agricultural workers, an ever-greater concentration of land holdings, and a marked rise in rural violence as local farmers tried to protect their way of life.

In the late 1990s, under the European Union’s Common Agricultural Program, the fifteen EU countries spent $42 billion annually subsidizing their farmers, while they allocated to the Third World only $30 billion in developmental aid for all purposes. The level of overall subsidization of agriculture in Western countries rose from $182 billion in 1995, when the WTO was born, to $280 billion in 1997, and $362 billion in 1998. By 2002, European Union subsidies to agriculture were six times the total amount of foreign aid that all rich countries gave to the poor.²⁷ The result in the First World was the overproduction of a vast range of agricultural products, including cereals, beef, pork, milk, butter, tomatoes, sunflower oil, and sugar. These commodities were then unceremoniously “dumped” (that is, sold below the costs of production) in developing countries. Joseph Stiglitz’s conclusion is unavoidable: “The well-to-do countries that officially praise free trade frequently use tariffs and subsidies to limit imports from poor countries, depriving them of the trade they need to relieve poverty and pursue their own economic growth.”²⁸

Having deprived the Third World countries of access to agricultural subsidies and crippled their ability to build competitive industries, the WTO proceeded to prevent them from using the foreign technology employed by the industrialized nations and to lock in the monopoly profits of companies that owned patents on indispensable products such as medicines. The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS), which instituted these barriers, proved to be a gold mine for transnational corporations. Its purpose was to prevent developing countries from copying or stealing proprietary technology in the same manner the currently advanced countries had done in their processes of economic growth. The agreement provides transnational corporations with a minimum patent protection of twenty years and places the burden of proof in a dispute on the presumed violator. It is a clear example of the rich nations kicking away the ladder to keep poor nations from catching up.

The chief profiteers have been American and European pharmaceutical companies and agrobusiness conglomerates. On the drug front, Third World countries have demanded that they be allowed to import or manufacture cheap generic copies of patented medicines to deal with acute public health problems, something currently barred by the WTO. All members of the WTO except the United States have in fact favored relaxing a strict interpretation of TRIPS for medicines. The United States instead demands that exemptions be restricted to treatments for AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and a few tropical diseases, claiming that the pharmaceutical industry must continue to receive high prices in order to finance future research.²⁹ With regard to agriculture, the TRIPS system has for the first time given corporations the right to patent life-forms, particularly seeds. Companies that produce genetically modified food (what the Europeans call “Frankenfood”) lobbied strenuously for this provision. Monsanto, for example, holds the patent on Roundup Ready soybean seeds, which, until recently, tolerated Monsanto’s weed-killing herbicide Roundup.³⁰ Monsanto is a major player in the corn and soybean markets in North America, Latin America, and Asia and in the European wheat market; one of the ways it and other companies, such as Novartis and DuPont, use the TRIPS system is to develop and patent genetically modified plants that will not produce seeds for succeeding years’ crops and that must be fertilized with expensive products made by those same companies. These corporations are thus in a position to extract monopoly profits from poor countries by dominating their agricultural sectors and dictating what they will eat, if they eat at all.

Another abuse of the TRIPS system has come to be called “biopiracy.” In this practice, some firms and universities obtain patents on plants that Third World countries have known about and used, often for centuries, and then extract royalties if these countries want to continue growing them. A classic case was the 1997 attempt of RiceTec, Inc., of Alvin, Texas, to patent a hybrid of India’s basmati rice, which has been harvested for two centuries throughout the subcontinent; so far its patent is good only in the United States and has been universally denounced by the Third World.³¹ Given these abuses of medical and agricultural technology, even some supporters of the WTO now argue that it would have been better not to include agriculture in its purview and not to extend patent rights over life-forms.

In all, the WTO system that came into being in 1995 is a deceptive but extremely effective tool of economic imperialism wielded by rich nations against poor ones. Within a few years after it was launched, however, the system started to fall apart. Post-September 11, the overemphasis on militarism and unilateralism in the United States has radically weakened the effectiveness of international law, eroding the facade of legality that supports the WTO rules. At the same time, the interests of American militarists and economic globalists have begun to clash, particularly over the rise of an obvious future superpower—China. The economic globalists have invested more heavily in manufacturing in China than in any other place outside the Anglo-American world. The militarists, on the other hand, are already plotting to contain China, militarily if necessary, to decide future global supremacy.

Moreover, as the Bush administration declared “war on terrorism,” it discovered that globalization was as helpful to terrorists trying to launder their money and finance their militants as it was to capitalist speculators. So it began to tighten its grip on, restrict, or close down various channels of American economic interaction with the rest of the world, including access to our universities by students from the Third World. This trend suggests that globalization, at least as it was promoted in the 1990s, may enjoy a rather short life.

Perhaps the first clear sign that globalization and the WTO were in trouble was the Asian financial collapse of 1997. The Clinton administration had put the smaller economies of East Asia under tremendous pressure to accept neoliberalism, particularly to open up their financial sectors to foreign participation. None of the East Asian countries truly believed this was a good idea, and none of them realized what was necessary in the way of bank supervision and regulation of capital markets in order to operate an American-style economy and prevent a crash, but favorable credit ratings and access to markets required cooperation with Washington. Moreover, foreign investors did not care about the outcome; after the U.S. government’s bailout of Mexico in 1994-95, most investors concluded that the U.S.-IMF combination would not permit major defaults in emerging markets, and so capital poured in from all over the world.

Once these smaller nations were loaded up with debt and announced that they would have trouble meeting their repayment schedules, the foreign capital fled even faster than it had arrived. Starting with Thailand, then proceeding to Indonesia and South Korea, most of Asia’s economies suddenly were teetering on the edge of default and had to implore the IMF for help. The IMF imposed draconian reforms as a precondition for its loans, prompting a full-blown political crisis that led to the revolutionary overthrow of the government of Indonesia. A permanent and deep-seated hostility to the IMF, the World Bank, and the United States spread slowly and quietly across East Asia.³² American globalists did everything in their power to divert blame for the East Asian collapse away from its proxies, the IMF and World Bank, and to keep it from tarnishing globalization itself. They argued that the cause of the collapse was Asian corruption, which they termed crony capitalism—meaning insider dealing and a lack of transparency—a phrase originally invented by the Filipinos to describe their own Marcos regime.

One of the few East Asian countries to emerge from the crisis unscathed, indeed in better shape, was Malaysia, and its success in standing up to Washington’s neoliberal “remedies” helped discredit globalization still further. Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian prime minister, resisted the demands of the IMF and quickly restored capital controls over his economy. The fraternity of international economists declared that he was committing commercial suicide. He, in turn, accused Western powers and speculators like George Soros of manipulating markets and currencies in order to destroy healthy East Asian economies. This charge greatly irritated Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times and author of a best-selling paean to globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Friedman gibed, “Excuse me, Mahathir, but what planet are you living on? You talk about participating in globalization as if it were a choice you had. Globalization isn’t a choice. It’s a reality.... And the most basic truth about globalization is this: No one is in charge.... We all want to believe that someone is in charge and responsible. But the global marketplace today is an Electronic Herd of often anonymous stock, bond, and currency traders and multinational investors, connected by screens and networks.”³³

Two years later in Seattle, to the apoplectic fury of Friedman and other neoliberal apologists, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations began to put names and faces on this electronic herd of politicians and IMF and World Bank officials who were responsible for globalization and who, they argued, ought to be held accountable for its consequences.

Even more disconcerting to Anglo-American globalists, Third World poverty grew faster after the creation of the WTO. Corruption was certainly one factor. For example, Raul Salinas, the brother of the former president of Mexico, siphoned $87 million out of his country through Citibank accounts in New York, Switzerland, and London. Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s former dictator, looted his nation of $110 million, also laundered for him by Citibank. One authority estimates that Carlos Menem, president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999, collected close to $1 billion in bribes during his two terms in office.³⁴ The poor countries’ domestic and administrative structures were another factor; these nations lacked, according to Peru’s de Rivero, “both the middle class and the national market they needed in order to be governable and viable.”³⁵

In 1999, at the WTO’s third ministerial conference in Seattle, a coalition of people with experience in Third World development programs—environmentalists, trade unionists, anarchists, and some Americans concerned about the role of the “sole remaining superpower”—advanced an alternative explanation for Third World poverty, finally unmasking the imperial, expansionist motives behind neoliberal theory. They emphasized the absence of democracy within the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO: IMF voting rules, they pointed out, are rigged so that only the richest countries have any influence; the United States reserves the right to name the president of the World Bank; and the WTO takes decisions based on “consensus” whereby any rich nation that does not join the consensus has a de facto veto.³⁶

The protesters’ demands for reform resonated strongly around the world, and the movement rapidly gained more adherents. By 2002, international meetings of the globalizing powers were drawing protests half a million strong. By and large the globalists, assisted by the big media corporations, chose to vilify the protesters. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain declared them to be “anti-democratic hooligans” and a “travelling circus of anarchists.”³⁷ Robert Zoellick, U.S. trade representative in the second Bush administration, compared the protesters to the September 11 terrorists by archly suggesting, “It is inevitable that people will wonder if there are intellectual connections with others who have turned to violence to attack international finance, globalization, and the United States.”³⁸ Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman declared that the Seattle demonstrators were “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for the 1960s fix.” After 9/11, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called them “Talibanized hordes.”³⁹ At the same time, the WTO and the G8 nations took to holding their meetings in ever less accessible places, such as Doha, Qatar, or Kananaskis in the Canadian Rockies. In a cosmetic attempt to improve its image—and in tacit acknowledgment that the ragtag protesters were in fact unnerving the globalists—the IMF changed the name of its “structural adjustment facility” to the more protester-friendly “poverty reduction and growth facility.”

Prior to September 11,2001, three other major developments occurred to further discredit globalization. In March 2000, the Meltzer Report, mandated by the U.S. Congress, concluded that the IMF had “institutionalized economic stagnation” and that the World Bank was “irrelevant rather than central to the goal of eliminating global poverty.” Several years earlier, the U.S. Treasury had asked Congress to increase U.S. guarantees to the IMF by $18 billion. In light of the developmental disasters then occurring in East Asia, Brazil, and Russia, Congress set up an International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission to investigate the records of the IMF and the World Bank, under the chairmanship of neoconservative Alan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University and the American Enterprise Institute. The findings of the “Meltzer Report” were already common knowledge in the Third World, but this was the first time they were put forth by a reputable figure within the Washington consensus. Meltzer wrote, “Both institutions are driven to a great extent by the interests of key political and economic institutions in the Group of Seven (G7) countries—particularly, in the case of the IMF, the U.S. government, and U.S. financial interests.” When it came to addressing its avowed goal of eliminating global poverty, the World Bank’s performance, he concluded, was “miserable.”⁴⁰

Soon after, Argentina’s economy collapsed disastrously, further evidence of IMF and World Bank incompetence. Argentina had faithfully followed the free-market ideas of neoliberalism and the prescriptions of the IMF, even selling off its banking sector to foreigners, who, by 1998, owned 80 percent of the country’s banks, and pegging the peso at parity to the value of the dollar, meaning that one peso was worth one dollar and both currencies circulated freely in the country. By 2002, Argentina held the unenviable record of having accumulated the largest amount of public debt by any single country in history—some $160 billion.⁴¹ Its national income shrank by nearly two-thirds in the space of a year; more than half of its largely middle-class population found itself living below the poverty line; and no politician of any orientation dared appear on the streets for fear of public lynching.

The IMF agreed to help the Argentine government meet its debt service payments and then made exactly the same mistake it had in 1997 in East Asia. As a condition for its loans, it demanded an austerity budget that involved firing large numbers of government workers, cutting pensions, reducing wages, and eliminating fringe benefits. Rioting and a fierce police reaction brought the country to a standstill. In December 2000, the IMF provided nearly $40 billion to Argentina on the condition that the government continue to pay foreign debts by intensifying its squeeze on the poorest elements of the society. No government could meet these terms and avoid revolution. Argentina went through five governments and six economic ministers in fourteen months, but the IMF decided that the country was still not being tough enough and was, in any case, of little strategic importance to the United States. It therefore pulled the plug and refused to supply any more loans. Double-digit monthly inflation resulted, the peso fell in value by 220 percent, and social order collapsed. Argentina, once the most prosperous country in Latin America, became a basket case—thanks to neoliberalism, globalization, and the IMF.

The third event that helped discredit globalization was the disclosure of major malfeasance at Enron and other multinational corporations based in the United States. When the agents of globalization, the corporations themselves, are revealed as criminal conspiracies to defraud both their customers and their own employees and their governments, not just the practice but the whole idea of globalization becomes farcical. Evidence that this might be the case was already accumulating in the months leading up to September 11. After the attacks, when the United States shifted decisively from economic to military imperialism, globalization stood revealed in all its predatory nakedness.

Following 9/11, munitions and war profiteering replaced the blatantly illegal or crony capitalism deals of the late 1990s as the best way for politically well-connected capitalists to make money. The military-industrial complex and its protector, the Pentagon, have always played powerful roles in the post-World War II economy, but after 9/11 they became the economy’s stars. Arms manufacturing, however, does not follow the rules of globalization. Normally it has only one customer and is not subject to market discipline. Risks of profit and loss are simply not taken into account by governments when national security is an issue. Munitions making is an example not of “free enterprise” but instead of state socialism.

The United States is officially and explicitly opposed to “industrial policy,” which is said to subvert the free market in order to produce a governmentally desired outcome. Anathema to orthodox Anglo-American economics, industrial policy is outlawed by the WTO under provisions addressing nontariff barriers to trade. There is, however, a glaring exception to this rule—the production and sales of weapons. The United States has long run one of the world’s most highly developed industrial policies through its defense sector. It is illegal, for example, for the United States openly to subsidize Boeing’s 747 jumbo jets for export (as the European Union does for Airbus’s airliners), but the government has found numerous ways around this restriction, for decades financing technological innovation in universities and enterprises under the cover of national defense needs. Foreign military sales are often financed by Pentagon loans and concessions, and the privatization of numerous activities formerly performed by the armed forces serves the interests of privately owned companies. Given recent trends toward militarism, the United States has become a de facto industrial-policy superpower.

The original GATT Treaty of 1947 treated military subsidies as different from all others under a “national security exception” that became part of every trade treaty negotiated since then. This exception allows states to underwrite production, promote sales, and impose trade embargoes if they do so in the name of national security. Moreover, all structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank include a security exception. This means that although the IMF may impose an austerity budget on a country seeking an emergency loan, it permits the purchase of weapons from a foreign power, usually the United States, even as jobs and health benefits are being slashed. In 1997, when South Korea buckled under its burden of debt, the IMF suggested that it suspend buying military equipment until it had recovered, but the U.S. government overruled this directive. Similarly, Turkey has for years relied on IMF loans to keep its financial system functioning while it has sheltered some 14 percent of its gross domestic product from IMF-required reductions by putting the endangered expenditures into its military budget.

In 1993, the Clinton administration came up with a great new corporate welfare idea—giving defense contractors tax breaks if they would merge into bigger, more diversified agglomerations. For example, the Pentagon supplied the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and Martin Marietta with $1.2 billion in tax relief when in 1995 they merged to form Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. Similarly, after the Cold War ended, Boeing began to move away from arms production—until the tax breaks were announced. Then it reversed course, bought up McDonnell Douglas and parts of Rockwell International, and became one of the world’s largest arms exporters.

A further expansion of the military economy is made possible by interpreting the war on drugs as an element of national security. While the U.S. Export Import Bank is prohibited from financing military sales, an exception is made if the weapons are to be used in drug interdiction. The bank has therefore been a prime financier of Sikorsky’s sale of nineteen Black Hawk helicopters to Colombia, allegedly to be used in its drug war. In 1996, in order to get around the remaining restrictions on lending Ex-Im Bank funds for military purchases, the government went a step further and created a new agency called the Defense Export Loan Guarantee Fund. It disbursed nearly $8 billion to U.S. companies in its first year of operations.⁴²

War profiteering is usually thought of as something done by greedy civilians. But this view understates the role of uniformed military officers in hawking weapons to foreigners. In countless cases, it is a Pentagon-led high-pressure campaign that closes a sale. In April 2002, for example, the United States played the hardest of hard ball with South Korea. It demanded that Seoul award its $4.46 billion contract for forty multirole fighter aircraft to Boeing for its F-15K rather than to France’s Dassault for its Rafaele. Leaks from the Korean Defense Ministry indicate that the state-of-the-art Rafaele outperformed the F-15K in every area and was $350 million cheaper. Nonetheless, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Koreans that if they went ahead with the French purchase, the United States would refuse both to install cryptographic systems that allow aircraft to identify one another and to supply the Raytheon-built AIM 120B AMRAAM air-to-air missiles the plane uses.⁴³ Dassault countered that it could easily outfit the Rafaele with an advanced electronic identification system and that missiles were available from several sources. South Korea nonetheless chose Boeing, claiming that it did so to ensure “interoperability” of its weapons with those of its ally. It is worth noting that the United States’s closest ally, Britain, does not have a single American combat aircraft in the Royal Air Force but routinely deploys its airplanes and helicopters alongside American-made ones.

U.S. pressure on Latin American countries to buy weapons is blatant. In October 2002, the Colombian Defense Ministry wanted to buy forty Super Tucano light attack aircraft from Embraer of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest exporter. The deal was worth $234 million. Instantly, General James T. Hill, head of the U.S. Southern Command, sent a letter to Bogotá warning that the purchase of Brazilian airplanes would have a “negative influence” on congressional support for future military aid to Colombia. Hill recommended that Colombia instead spend its money modernizing its fleet of C-130s, airplanes manufactured by Lockheed Martin in Georgia.⁴⁴ The deal with Brazil fell through.

The first sign of resistance to these strong-arm tactics came in the wake of Luiz Lula da Silva’s election as president of Brazil, also in October 2002. The previous Brazilian government had been negotiating with both France and the United States to buy as many as twenty-four new fighter planes for the Brazilian air force. In June, the Pentagon tried to sweeten its offer by promising to sell air-to-air missiles with the aircraft, the first time it would have done so in Latin America. However, when Lula da Silva was sworn in on January 1, 2003, he canceled the deal and transferred $750 million from the defense budget to hunger-eradication projects.⁴⁵

The new focus on military imperialism has been a boon to U.S. defense contractors. In the months following 9/11, Boeing went to two shifts of workers making its Joint Direct Attack Munitions, a “smart bomb” heavily used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Raytheon operated three shifts to produce its Tomahawk cruise missiles.⁴⁶ The problem was how to sustain these levels of activity. In November 2002, in a foreign policy decision dictated significantly by the promise of arms sales, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization brought seven Eastern European and Baltic nations into the alliance. The United States had worked for at least six years to achieve this enlargement. It immediately signed up Poland to buy forty-eight Lockheed F-16 fighter aircraft, manufactured in Texas, in order to bring the Polish air force up to NATO standards, and lent it $3.8 billion on concessionary terms to help pay for them. Pentagon planners hoped that the sales of arms and munitions to new NATO members might amount to $35 billion over ten years.⁴⁷

Another way of keeping up armaments sales is through wars. They have the desirable features of depleting stocks and demonstrating to potential customers around the world the effectiveness of new generations of American weapons. The military-industrial complex warmly welcomed the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq as good for business. Actions just short of war, such as bombings and missile strikes, are also, in the words of Karen Talbot, for twenty years the World Peace Council’s representative to the United Nations, “giant bazaars for selling the wares of the armaments manufacturers.”⁴⁸ The military incessantly peddles the latest gadgetry to Taiwan, for instance, even though the Pentagon’s efforts to spark a war with China are of declining effectiveness as the mainland and Taiwan begin to integrate their economies. Israel, however, remains one of the Pentagon’s oldest and most faithful customers and seems likely to continue to be in the future.

As the United States devotes ever more of its manufacturing assets to the arms trade, it becomes ever more dependent on imports for the non-military products that its citizens no longer manufacture but need in order to maintain their customary lifestyles. With a record trade deficit for 2002 of $435.2 billion and a close-to-negligible savings rate, Americans may end up owing foreigners as much as $3.5 trillion in the next few years alone. As the economic analyst William Greider concludes, “Instead of facing this darkening prospect, [President George W.] Bush and team regularly dismiss the worldviews of these creditor nations and lecture them condescendingly on our superior qualities. Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly.... American leadership has ... become increasingly delusional—I mean that literally—and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it.”⁴⁹

Our government seems not to grasp the relationship between its military unilateralism and the collateral damage it is doing to international commerce, an activity that depends on mutually beneficial relationships among individuals, businesses, and countries to function well. If foreign creditors conclude that the United States is no longer a defender of international law, they may lose interest in investing in such a country. Our version of unilateralist military imperialism undercuts international institutions, causes trade to dry up, distorts the availability of finance, and is environmentally disastrous. While the globalization of the 1990s was premised on cheating the poor and defenseless and on destroying the only physical environment we will ever have, its replacement by American militarism and imperialism is likely to usher in something much worse for developed, developing, and underdeveloped nations alike.

With the fall of Baghdad on April 11,2003, America’s dutiful Anglophone allies, the British and Australians, were due for their just rewards—luncheons for Prime Ministers Blair and Howard with the boy emperor at his “ranch” in Crawford, Texas. We fielded an army of 255,000 in Iraq, the British added 45,000, and the Australians 2,000 specialists. It was not much of a war, though it confirmed the antiwar forces’ contention that dealing with the menace of Saddam Hussein did not require a largely unchallenged slaughter of Iraqis and a Mongol-like sacking of an ancient city. But the war, paradoxically, did leave us and our two coalition nations much weaker than before—the Western alliance of democracies was fractured; the potential for British leadership of the European Union went up in smoke; Pentagon plans to make Iraq over into a client state quickly foundered on Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish realities; and the very concept of “international law,” including the Charter of the United Nations, was grievously compromised. Why the British and Australians went along with this fiasco when they could so easily have stood for something other than “might makes right” remains a mystery.

As I have shown, the United States has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Our leaders, disguising the direction they were taking, cloaked their foreign policies in euphemisms such as “lone superpower,” “indispensable nation,” “reluctant sheriff,” “humanitarian intervention,” and “globalization.” With the advent of the George W. Bush administration and particularly after the assaults of September 11, 2001, however, these pretenses gave way to assertions of the second coming of the Roman Empire. “American imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination,” wrote the English journalist Madeleine Bunting, “now it is an uncomfortable fact of life.”¹

During 2003, the Bush administration took the further step of carrying out its first “preventive” war—against Iraq, a sovereign nation one-twelfth the size of the United States in population terms and virtually undefended in the face of the Pentagon’s awesome array of weaponry and military power. Conducted with few allies and no legal justification and in the face of worldwide protest, this war brought to an end the system of international order that persisted throughout the Cold War and traced its roots back to seventeenth-century doctrines of sovereignty, nonintervention, and the illegitimacy of aggressive war.

From the moment we took on a role that included the permanent military domination of the world, we were on our own—feared, hated, corrupt and corrupting, maintaining “order” through state terrorism and bribery, and given to megalomanic rhetoric and sophistries that virtually invited the rest of the world to unite against us. We had mounted the Napoleonic tiger. The question was, would we—and could we—ever dismount?

During the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, the president’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. “John,” he said, “once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s hard to get it back in.” This homely metaphor by a former advertising executive who was to spend eighteen months in prison for his own role in Watergate also describes the situation of the United States on the day our invasion of Iraq began.

For us, the sorrows of empire may prove to be the inescapable consequences of the path our elites chose after September 11,2001. Militarism and imperialism always bring with them sorrows. The ubiquitous symbol of the Christian religion, the cross, is perhaps the world’s most famous reminder of one sorrow that accompanied the Roman Empire. It represented the most atrocious death Roman proconsuls could devise to keep subordinate peoples in line, as empires invariably discover they must do. From Cato to Cicero, the slogan of Roman leaders was “Let them hate us so long as they fear us” (Oderint dum metuant).

Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx. If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our Constitution. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an “executive branch” of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchange the education, health, and safety of our fellow citizens. The future, of course, is as yet unmade. All these trends can be resisted and other—better—futures can certainly be imagined. But it is important to be as clear-eyed as possible about what the present choices and the present path of our imperial leaders portend. So let me briefly assess the ramifications of each of these sorrows and try to estimate how far they have advanced.

In the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush declared that our policy would be to dominate the world through absolute military superiority and to wage preventive war against any possible competitor. He began to enunciate this “doctrine” in a June 1, 2002, speech to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The White House billed his speech as an explicit prelude to an “overall security framework,” which on September 20,2002, was spelled out in an official document, the “National Security Strategy of the United States.”²

At West Point, the president stated that we had a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world we deemed a threat to our security. He argued that we must be prepared to wage a “war on terror” in many countries if weapons of mass destruction are to be kept out of terrorists’ hands. “We must take that battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Americans must be “ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.... In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.” Although Bush did not name any countries in the speech, it turned out he had a hit list of sixty possible targets, an escalation over Vice President Dick Cheney’s November 2001 identification of “forty or fifty” countries we would consider placing on our attack roster after eliminating the al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan.³ The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., former special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, was so appalled that he wrote, “The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.”⁴

At West Point, the president justified his proposed massive military effort in terms of alleged universal values: “We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.” He added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that, in the mouth of the president of the United States on an official occasion, amounted to an announcement of a crusade: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, in every place.” The preamble to the National Security Strategy document that followed claimed that there is “a single sustainable model for national success”—ours—that is “right and true for every person in every society.... The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere.”

Paradoxically, this grand strategy may prove more radically disruptive of world order than anything the terrorists of September 11, 2001, could have hoped to achieve on their own. Through its actions, the United States seems determined to bring about precisely the threats that it says it is trying to prevent. Its apparent acceptance of a “clash of civilizations” and of wars to establish a moral truth that is the same in every culture sounds remarkably like a jihad, especially given the Bush administration’s ties to Christian fundamentalism. The president even implicitly equated himself with Jesus Christ in repeated statements (notably on September 20, 2001) that those who are not with us are against us, a line clearly meant to echo Matthew 12:30, “He that is not with me is against me.”⁵

Analysts familiar with the history of international relations reacted to the Bush administration’s strategy report with a chorus of skepticism. International relations theorist Stanley Hoffmann declared it “breathtakingly unrealistic,” “morally reckless,” and “eerily reminiscent of the disastrously wishful thinking of the Vietnam War.”⁶ The inventor of “world systems theory,” Immanuel Wallerstein, noted that the new strategy has brought into being something American foreign policy historically sought to avoid—namely, the possibility of a coalition involving France, Germany, and Russia. It also stands to alienate the only country in the world, Saudi Arabia, that by turning off its oil supply could transform the United States into a huge junkyard (more on this subject under the sorrow of bankruptcy). “When George Bush leaves office,” Wallerstein predicted, “he will have left the United States significantly weaker.”⁷

In late February 2003, John Kiesling, a senior diplomat then serving at the American embassy in Greece, resigned and wrote to the secretary of state, “The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests.... We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.”⁸

Implementation of the new National Security Strategy is considerably more problematic than its promulgation and presents blowback possibilities galore. By mid-2003, our armed forces were seriously overstretched and we were going deeply into debt to finance our war machine. Already, 93 percent of budgetary allocations dedicated to international affairs were going to the military and only 7 percent to the State Department.⁹ During 2003, the Pentagon deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq while several thousand soldiers were engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless navy crews were manning ships in the waters off North Korea, a few thousand marines were in the southern Philippines assisting local forces in fighting an Islamic separatist movement with roots a century old, and several hundred “advisers” were involved in what might someday become a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia (and possibly elsewhere in the Andean region). We had a military presence in 153 of the 189 member countries of the United Nations, including large-scale deployments in twenty-five of them. We had military treaties or binding security arrangements with at least thirty-six countries.¹⁰

Aside from the financial costs of all this, another constraint exists. The American people have, since Vietnam, proved unwilling to accept large numbers of casualties in our imperial wars. To produce what military analyst William Arkin calls a “painless dentistry” approach to warfare or what retired Russian major general and specialist on future wars Vladimir Slipchenko refers to as “no-contact war,” the Pentagon has committed itself to a massive and very expensive effort to computerize the battlefield.¹¹ It has spent lavishly on smart bombs, battlefield sensors, computer-guided munitions, and technologically complex high-performance aircraft and ships, without comparable efforts to train and retain personnel capable of using them. The result, as any computer owner can guess, is that these devices often break down. Lieutenant Colonel John A. Gentry, U.S. Army Special Forces (ret.), writing in the Army War College’s journal Parameters, details a three-day failure of the National Security Agency’s computers in January 2000 that was so threatening to national security it was immediately classified at the highest level. He describes the incredible complexity of the Pentagon’s 1.5 million individual computers—which are organized into some 10,000 systems, of which 2,300 are “mission critical”—and the ease with which adversaries could hack into, jam, or deceive our cyberwarfare technology.¹²

The main reason for the emphasis on the highest of high-tech warfare is to keep our troops out of the line of fire. Many soldiers being sent into what bloviating senators like to call “harm’s way” are now in considerably less danger than they would be in their automobiles at home. Working in front of computer screens in air-conditioned tents miles from the battlefield or at 35,000 feet in a B-2 bomber, they have no more sense of combat than teenagers in a video arcade. Colonel Gentry deplores “the debilitating effects on military ethics resulting from the technologists’ promises of easy victories and comfortable lives.”¹³

But there is another problem as well. Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in March 2002 was supposed to be a showcase for “the miracle of modern technology as applied to combat, with an array of sensitive surveillance platforms to pinpoint the enemy and then precision-bomb him out into the open.”¹⁴ An investigation by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, however, discovered that more than half of the enemies’ positions went undetected by our eyes in the sky and many precision-guided bombs missed their targets. The operation was a failure as large numbers of al-Qaeda terrorists escaped. A month later, on April 17, 2002, one of our F-16 fighters mistakenly bombed a group of Canadian soldiers, killing four and injuring eight—a typical incident caused by inappropriately high-tech equipment (overly fast aircraft on a ground support mission) and failures of command and control communications. The Pentagon, as usual, dismissed it as just another “tragic” case of friendly fire.

When cyberwarfare munitions do work, they often kill so many non-combatants that their use constitutes a war crime. Although air power can be utterly devastating to all forms of life on earth, it has never once won a war alone. Yet the military remains committed to the most devastating forms of terror bombing with only a pretense of “precision” targeting of militarily significant installations. This strain of current military thinking can be found in the writing of Harlan Ullman, a former high-ranking Pentagon adviser and protégé of General Colin Powell, who advocates that the United States attack its enemies in the same way it defeated Japan in World War II. “Super tools and weapons—information age equivalents of the atomic bomb—have to be invented. As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed toward a similar outcome.” Ullman is the author of the idea that the United States should “deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary’s perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility.” He calls this “rapid dominance” or “shock and awe.” He once suggested that it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves to attack people’s neurological systems and scare them to death.¹⁵

In the interest of avoiding military casualties altogether, our government has even declared that it must resume nuclear testing, acquire an array of new “low yield” nuclear weapons, and deal with nuclear proliferation not by trying to control the spread of nuclear devices through treaties and international pressure but through “counter-proliferation,” or what commentator Jonathan Schell has called “disarmament wars.” The administration’s March 2002 Nuclear Posture Review identified Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya as potential targets for nuclear weapons, and it laid out plans to build a nuclear “robust earth penetrator” as well as a new plant to manufacture nuclear weapons, a new intercontinental ballistic missile, a new submarine-launched missile, and a new bomber. In a leaked document of January 2003, the Pentagon revealed its desires to acquire “mini-nukes” of under one kiloton of explosive power (the Hiroshima bomb was a twenty-kiloton weapon) and neutron bombs; it wants a “future arsenal panel” to study “what forms of testing these new designs will require.”¹⁶

Although our government was an active promoter of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, the Bush administration’s weapons proposals are open violations of that treaty’s article 6, which “requires that the original five nuclear weapon states pursue effective nuclear disarmament measures.” Any use of nuclear weapons is also a prima facie violation of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States is an adherent. Nonetheless, in a 1995 statement to the International Court of Justice, the United States defended the use of nuclear weapons, arguing that “the deliberate killing of large numbers of people” counts as genocide only if the aggressor sets out to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.”¹⁷

High-tech warfare invites the kind of creative judo the terrorists of al-Qaeda utilized on September 11. Employing domestic American airliners as their weapons of mass destruction, they took a deadly toll of innocents. The United States worries that terrorists might acquire or be given fissionable material by a “rogue state,” but the much more likely source is via theft from the huge nuclear stockpiles of the United States or the far less well guarded ones Russia inherited from the USSR. The weapons-grade anthrax used in the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States almost certainly came from the Pentagon’s own biological stockpile, not from some poverty-stricken Third World country.¹⁸

The government has other ways to implement its new world strategy without getting its hands dirty, including what it (and its Israeli allies) call “targeted killings.” During February 2003, the Bush administration sought the Israeli government’s counsel on how to create a legal justification for the assassination of suspected terrorists. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, President Bush said that some terrorism suspects who were not caught and brought to trial had been “otherwise dealt with,” and he observed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”¹⁹

If the likelihood of perpetual war hangs over the world, the situation in the United States is hardly better. Militarism and imperialism threaten democratic government at home just as they menace the independence and sovereignty of other countries. Whether George Bush and his zealots can bring about “regime change” in a whole range of other countries may be an open question, but they certainly seem in the process of doing so within the United States. In the second presidential debate, on October 11, 2000, Bush joked, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” A little more than a year later, in response to a question by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, he said, “I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”²⁰

Bush and his administration have worked tirelessly to expand the powers of the presidency at the expense of the other branches of government and the Constitution. Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution says explicitly, “The Congress shall have the power to declare war.” It prohibits the president from making that decision. The most influential author of the Constitution, James Madison, wrote in 1793, “In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not the executive department.... The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.”²¹ Yet, after September 11, 2001, President Bush unilaterally declared that the nation was “at war” more or less forever against terrorism, and a White House spokesman later noted that the president “considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason.”²²

During October 3 to 10, 2002, Congress’s “week of shame” (in the phrase of military affairs analyst Winslow T. Wheeler), both houses voted to give the president open-ended authority to wage war against Iraq (296 to 33 in the House and 77 to 23 in the Senate). The president was also given the unrestricted power to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq whenever he—and he alone—deemed “appropriate.” There was no debate. Congressional representatives were too politically cowed even to address the issue. Instead, Senator Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) extolled the 4-H Club, a kind of fraternity for budding young farmers, on its hundredth anniversary; Senator Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky) discussed the Future Farmers of America in his state; and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) offered her colleagues a brief history of the city of Mountain View, California (even though she voted against the resolution). As Wheeler concluded, all that the public owed their representatives after such a debacle was “the fare for a trip to the dustbin of history.”²³

The Bush administration also arrogated to itself the power unilaterally to judge whether an American citizen is part of a terrorist organization and could therefore be stripped of all constitutional rights, including the Sixth Amendment guarantees of a speedy trial before a jury of peers, the assistance of an attorney in offering a defense, the right to confront one’s accusers, protection against self-incrimination, and, most critically, the requirement that the government spell out its charges and make them public. The key cases here concern two native-born American citizens—Yasir Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla.

Hamdi, age twenty-two, was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but raised in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon at first claimed he was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan. In a more detailed submission it later acknowledged that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces, the warlords paid to fight on our side, without having engaged in any form of combat. Handed over to the U.S. military, Hamdi was transferred to the detention camp in Guantánamo, Cuba, where many foreign nationals captured on foreign soil are now sequestered. Discovering that Hamdi was an American citizen and fearing intervention by the courts, prison officials flew him to a naval prison in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was held incommunicado. As a citizen, he should be covered by the due process guarantees of the Constitution, but the Department of Justice contends that, having been designated an “enemy combatant” by the president, he can be held indefinitely without a lawyer merely on the president’s say-so.

On June 19, 2002, representatives of the Bush administration and the Pentagon outlined to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals a claim of presidential power that in its breathtaking sweep is unsupported by the Constitution, law, or precedent. “The military,” they argued, “has the authority to capture and detain individuals whom it has determined are enemy combatants ... including enemy combatants claiming American citizenship. Such combatants, moreover, have no right of access to counsel to challenge their detention.” They went on to contend that “the court may not second-guess the military’s enemy combatant determination” because by doing so they would intrude on “the president’s plenary authority as commander in chief,” which supposedly includes the power to order “the capture, detention, and treatment of the enemy and the collection and evaluation of intelligence vital to national security.” The courts should defer to the military “when asked to review military decisions in time of war.”

Since only Congress can declare war, however, the president’s personally declared “war on terror” is merely a rhetorical device. There is no legally valid war on terrorism. Moreover, the president does not enjoy “plenary” (absolute or unqualified) authority in his role as commander in chief, since both he and the military theoretically exercise their powers subject to the budgetary authority of Congress. The claim that a military commander, acting under presidential orders, can be “the supreme legislator, supreme judge, and supreme executive” within his area of responsibility was struck down by the Supreme Court following the Civil War. In Ex Parte Milligan (1866), the Court held that “martial rule can never exist where the courts are open and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction.”²⁴ The federal judge hearing the Hamdi case challenged everything the government asserted, but the solicitor general’s representative merely replied, “The present detention is lawful.” The judge then asked, “So the Constitution doesn’t apply to Mr. Hamdi?” He got no answer. Hamdi remains in military confinement until the Supreme Court, the same court that intervened in the 2000 election to appoint Bush president, hears his appeal—if it ever does.

Padilla’s case is similar. A Brooklyn-born American of Puerto Rican ancestry, Padilla (known as Abdullah al-Muhajir after his mid-1990s conversion to Islam) was arrested by federal agents on May 8, 2002, at O’Hare Airport, Chicago, as he stepped off a flight from Pakistan. He was held for a month without charge or any contact with an attorney or the outside world. Finally, on June 10, while visiting Russia, Attorney General John Ashcroft made the sensational announcement that Padilla had been plotting with al-Qaeda to detonate a “dirty bomb” somewhere in the United States. On the eve of Padilla’s appearance in federal court in New York, however, he was hastily transferred to a military prison in Charleston, South Carolina, while President Bush publicly designated him “a bad guy” and an “enemy combatant.” No charges were brought against him, and attempts to force the government to make its case via writs of habeas corpus have been routinely turned down on the grounds that the courts have no jurisdiction over a military prisoner.²⁵

The government may have resorted to these procedures because its only evidence against Padilla seems to consist of statements by prisoners at Guantánamo whom it knows to be untrustworthy. Attorney General Ashcroft, a notorious Washington “camera moth,” may have used his announcement simply to gain some personal publicity, as he has done in the past. Even the administration’s hardest of hard-liners, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said to CBS News, “I don’t think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and Padilla’s coming in here obviously to plan further deeds.”²⁶ Meanwhile, Padilla remains in a military prison—uncharged, unrepresented, unfree.

The Bush administration has expanded presidential power at the expense of the constitution in another area, thanks to the little-known and totally secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which threatens to turn into an American version of the Star Chamber, Henry VIII’s personal tribunal for bringing actions against his opponents and having them whipped, pilloried, or branded. The court came into being following the Watergate scandal. For decades up until then, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency had illegally wiretapped the telephone calls of citizens, opened their mail, and surreptitiously entered their homes to snoop for information that might be used to blackmail or smear them. The Senate committee investigating these matters after Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency revealed that between 1953 and 1973 the Postal Service in New York City had illegally made more than twenty-eight million letters available to the CIA.

In one of the few concrete cases that came to light, the FBI admitted using such illegally obtained information to concoct a piece it planted in Newsweek magazine that defamed the then-pregnant actress Jean Seberg, who committed suicide as a result. Her death led fifteen months later to the suicide of her husband, French novelist and diplomat Romain Gary. The intent of the story, partially based on illegally obtained information, was to “cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the public.”²⁷ In 1974, that public learned for the first time that the FBI had illegally spied on over 10,000 U.S. citizens, including virtually all national politicians as well as public figures like Martin Luther King.

To bring the FBI and CIA under some semblance of control, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which President Jimmy Carter signed into law on October 25, 1978. This act allowed the FBI and the National Security Agency to continue to conduct intelligence operations against American citizens within the United States but only under the supervision of a new secret federal tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). In snooping on suspected criminals in cases not involving intelligence, the FBI must go before an ordinary federal judge and obtain a warrant. It must also meet the “probable cause” standard by providing a judge with evidence that an individual is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a crime. The Fourth Amendment states unambiguously: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” In setting up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Congress reasoned that monitoring spies might not be the same as catching thieves but that some form of judicial supervision should still exist to keep federal investigators and voyeurs in line. It has not worked out that way.

The court was originally made up of seven federal judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court; the USA Patriot Act of 2001 expanded that number to eleven. The judges’ identities are secret. They meet in total privacy behind a cipher-locked door in a windowless, bug-proof, vaultlike room guarded twenty-four hours a day on the top floor of the Justice Department’s building in Washington, DC.²⁸ Everything they do is “top secret.” Since the court was created in 1978, the FBI and the NSA have requested some 13,000 warrants to spy electronically or physically on citizens, and the court has granted all but one of them. The judges hear only the government’s side. The court makes annual reports to Congress, normally just two paragraphs long, that give only the total number of warrants it has approved. Beyond that, there is no congressional oversight of the court’s activities whatsoever. Patrick S. Poole, an authority on the court, concludes, “The FISC has been nothing but a rubber-stamp court.”²⁹

Since September 11, 2001, the situation has actually gotten worse. In the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, law enforcement officials could seek a FISA warrant only if gathering intelligence was the primary purpose of the investigation. But the USA Patriot Act, hastily passed by votes of 98 to 1 in the Senate and 357 to 66 in the House and signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001, allows FISA warrants if gathering intelligence is merely a significant purpose of the investigation.³⁰ The Patriot Act also allows the government to spy on Internet surfing by Americans, including to collect the terms they enter into search engines such as Google. The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation, and the government is not obligated to report to the court or tell the person involved what it has done.

In the past, FISA warrants were issued only to gather raw intelligence data. Under no circumstances was this information ever to be divulged to federal prosecutors, who might then use it to bring a criminal indictment, since this is precisely what the Fourth Amendment forbids. Under the Patriot Act, however, information gathered under a FISA warrant is routinely passed on to prosecutors. Many observers suspect that U.S. attorneys have for years been using the FISA routinely to subvert constitutional protections. The FISA law also allows for “emergency searches” that the attorney general can sign on his own authority without the approval of any court, so long as he justifies the search to the FISC within seventy-two hours. Between September 11, 2001, and early 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft authorized over 170 such emergency searches, more than triple the 47 authorized by all other attorneys general over the preceding twenty years.³¹

On May 17, 2002, an unusual occurrence for the first time gave outsiders a glimpse into this secret world. Ashcroft asked the FISC to allow him to blur the distinction between monitoring spies and catching criminals even more than the Patriot Act allows—and the court turned him down. It also sent a copy of its opinion to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which on August 22, 2002, released it to the public. In this opinion, the judges of the court unanimously criticized FBI agents for misleading them in some seventy-five different eavesdropping cases and barred one FBI agent—the supervisor in charge of surveillance involving the Palestinian organization Hamas in this country—from ever appearing before them again. Their rebuke was one of the harshest any court has ever delivered to the FBI.

The attorney general appealed this decision to an even more obscure court—the FISA Court of Review—a special three-judge panel created by the FISA that is supposed to oversee the surveillance court. This court had never met. Ashcroft’s appeal was the first case ever brought before it in its twenty-three-year history. It is composed of three semiretired judges whose names—unlike those of the FISC judges—have been revealed to the public; all three judges are Republicans appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan and then to seven-year terms on the special review court by Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Not surprisingly, the FISA Court of Review overruled the FISC and granted Attorney General Ashcroft the additional authority he wanted.³² The conclusion is unavoidable: a year and a half after September 11,2001, at least two articles of the Bill of Rights, the fourth and the sixth, were dead letters, and the second half of Thomas Jefferson’s old warning “that when the government fears the people, there is liberty; when the people fear the government, there is tyranny” clearly applied.

On February 7, 2003, Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said to the press, “The department’s deliberations are always undertaken with the strongest commitment to our Constitution and civil liberties.”³³ This statement brings us to the third sorrow that accompanies imperialism and militarism—the replacement of truth by propaganda and disinformation and an acceptance of hypocrisy as the norm for declarations coming from our government.

Official lying increases exponentially as imperialism and militarism take over. Our military sees propaganda as one of its major new functions. During the autumn of 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created within the Pentagon an “Office of Strategic Influence” with the function of carrying out what defense planners call “information warfare”—disinformation and propaganda against foreign enemies as well as domestic critics who do not support presidential policies. Only when it became clear that the new office’s operations would include funneling false stories to the American news media did Rumsfeld say that perhaps it was all a mistake and officially shut the operation down.

Nonetheless, the idea did not go away. In the autumn of 2002, Rumsfeld created a new position, deputy undersecretary of defense for “special plans” (a euphemism for “deception operations”). These missions go beyond traditional military activities like jamming enemy radars or disrupting command and control networks. Deception operations include managing (and restricting) public information, controlling news sources, and manipulating public opinion. As the air force explained, the military must prevent “the news media going to other sources [such as an adversary or critic] for information.... U.S. and friendly forces must strive to become the favored source of information.” “Information warfare,” writes military analyst William M. Arkin, “includes controlling as much as possible what the American public sees and reads.”³⁴ In January 2003, the White House followed up by forming its own version of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon propaganda agency, the “Office for Global Communications.” Its officials seem to spend their time auditioning generals to give media briefings and booking administration stars on foreign and domestic news shows. Its stated purpose is to see that “any war commentary by a U.S. official is approved in advance by the White House.”³⁵

Typical information-warfare operations range from the trivial to major projects like inventing pretexts for war. An example of the former occurred on January 27,2003, when the government arranged to have a large blue curtain placed over a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica hanging near the entrance to the United Nations Security Council. Guernica, a small Basque village in northern Spain, was the site Adolf Hitler chose on April 27,1937, to demonstrate his air force’s new high-explosive and incendiary bombs. He was then allied with the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco. The hamlet burned for three days, and sixteen hundred civilians were killed or wounded. Picasso’s famous depiction of this atrocity is perhaps modern art’s most powerful antiwar statement. The government decided that the carnage wrought by aerial bombing was an inappropriate backdrop for its secretary of state and its ambassador to the United Nations when they made televised statements that might lead to the bombing of Iraqi cities.

Other typical information-warfare operations included the February 2003 efforts of Bruce Jackson, a former Department of Defense official and subsequently head of a “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.” He played a “considerable role” in drafting a statement “supporting” the United States in its plans to invade Iraq and then in getting ten small European countries, the so-called Vilnius Ten—Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—to sign it. President Jacques Chirac of France was so infuriated by this meddling in European affairs that at a European Union summit meeting in Brussels on February 17, 2003, he threatened to block their memberships in the union.³⁶

Another function of information warfare is to decontaminate as best as possible incidents of blowback or incidents that could lead to blow-back that cannot be denied but are embarrassing. Decontamination techniques include bald-faced lying, classifying relevant documents, refusing requests under the Freedom of Information Act, stonewalling, and obfuscating (as in the cases, for instance, of the Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome sicknesses). One particular strategy is the coining of new terms that make it sound like the Pentagon has always had a situation under control or that give the embarrassing event or act or phenomenon a spuriously scientific aura or downplay its significance. A classic example is the term “collateral damage” for the killing of innocent bystanders in a military attack. The newest term for incidents like the Reagan administration’s selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein is “mission myopia,” meaning that hardworking officers were so focused on the task at hand they did not bother to try to imagine its repercussions down the road.³⁷ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is particularly fond of neologisms such as “forward deterrence” and “unwarned attacks,” which he seems to think are strategic innovations. Perhaps he is merely trying to disguise their more familiar names: “aggression”—that is, what Nazi Germany did to Russia on June 22, 1941—and “surprise attack”—what the Japanese did to us at Pearl Harbor on December 7,1941.

Probably the most corrupt function of information warfare is to fabricate intelligence to justify the policies of a president and his staff. This is a criminal offense, even if it is rarely prosecuted. It involves a conspiracy among technical experts, field agents, supervisors, and leaders to counterfeit evidence and foist it onto sometimes unwitting politicians, complicit or timorous journalists, and a trusting public. When it is exposed, it inevitably undermines the credibility of government officials and the agencies that perpetrated the fraud. It also makes it likely that subsequently, if intelligence should reveal a genuine impending threat to the nation, the public will not believe the president when he warns them about it.

Over the years many governments have manufactured pretexts for going to war. Perhaps the classic instance was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939—Germany claimed that it was avenging attacks by Polish soldiers, who it said had seized a German radio station and broadcast hostile statements. After the war it was revealed that the “raiders” were actually German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms. The U.S. government also has a long, sad record of inventing pretexts for military action, ranging from the manufactured hysteria over the 1898 sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor to President Lyndon Johnson’s use of a nonexistent attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1965 to get Congress to endorse a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

During the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually delivered to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a proposal, dubbed Operation North-woods, that the military clandestinely shoot innocent people on American streets, sink boats carrying refugees from Cuba, and carry out terrorist attacks in Washington, Miami, and elsewhere and then pin the blame on Cuban agents. The intent, after the failed Bay of Pigs operation, was to provide an excuse for a new invasion of Cuba. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed off on it. McNamara silently refused to act on it and a few months later forced the retirement of General Lyman Lemnitzer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs.³⁸

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council to set the stage for war by presenting what he called “definitive” American secret intelligence proving the existence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. The secretary of state even went out of his way to try to emulate the famous occasion in 1962 when U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson introduced photographs taken by a low-flying U-2 spy plane showing Russian nuclear missile emplacements in Cuba. Powell came with his own blowups of satellite reconnaissance photos. Apparently to add to the credibility of his presentation, Powell placed the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, in a chair directly behind him. Tenet appeared in all television pictures of Powell speaking. He made no comment, but his presence seemed to imply that what Powell had to say came with the full backing of the CIA.

In his statement to the Security Council, Powell pointed to a satellite photograph dated November 10, 2002, and said, “Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers.... The truck you also see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers.” Powell showed another photo of U.N. vehicles arriving at the same site on December 22,2002, and said that “the signature trucks are gone.... Iraq had been tipped off to the forthcoming inspections.” On February 14, 2003, chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix directly countered this testimony, commenting that his inspectors had visited the site in the Powell photo often and that the truck was just a truck. He also said, “Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming.”³⁹

At the United Nations, Powell claimed, “It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent VX. A single drop on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.” Similar statements had been made by President Bush in an October 7, 2002, speech and by Vice President Cheney in an August 27,2002, speech. What all three knew was that Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel had also said, “After the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.” A military aide who defected with him backed his assertions. Kamel was debriefed in Jordan by the CIA, British intelligence (MI6), and the head of the U.N. inspection team at the time, Rolf Ekeus. All three agreed to keep Kamel’s statements secret, allegedly to prevent Saddam Hussein from finding out how much they had learned. On February 26,2003, a complete copy of the transcript of Kame’s statements was obtained from U.N. sources by Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. In the transcript, Kamel says bluntly, “All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”⁴⁰ This is what Scott Ritter, a senior American member of the team of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq during the 1990s, had said all along.⁴¹

Hussein Kamel, who defected from Iraq in August 1995, was easily the single most important source of intelligence on Iraq since the first Gulf War. In a January 25,1999, letter to the U.N. Security Council, Rolf Ekeus reported that the entire eight years of disarmament work since the end of that war “must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure ... of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel.” As Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Kamel was for ten years the man in charge of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs. When he defected to Jordan, he took with him crates of secret documents in the apparent belief that his revelations would lead to Saddam’s overthrow and that he would then replace him. After six months, he concluded that his plan was not working and returned to Baghdad to try to reconcile with his father-in-law. Instead, Saddam had him executed. Since 1995, any number of American officials have cited information Kamel gave to Western intelligence without ever including the fact that he offered equally compelling evidence that Saddam’s weapons no longer existed.

Among Secretary of State Powell’s numerous statements on February 5,2003, he incautiously complimented British intelligence for coming up with a dossier on how Saddam Hussein was concealing his weapons. “I would call my colleague’s attention,” he said, “to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed ... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.” Two days after Powell spoke, the British press, acting on a tip from Rangwala of Cambridge University, reported that the document Powell praised had been plagiarized from articles published in Jane’s Intelligence Review, one of them six years old, and from a paper written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, an American student of Iraqi Shi’ite ancestry at the Monterey Institute for International Affairs, a small graduate school in California. Marashi published his article in the September 2002 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, an Israeli scholarly journal. British intelligence not only quoted verbatim from these previously published sources, without attribution, but even repeated typographic and punctuation mistakes in the originals.⁴²

Following his less than sterling performance before the U.N. Security Council, Secretary Powell insisted to Peter Jennings, the anchor of ABC News, “I think I have better information than the inspectors, I think I have more assets available to me than the inspectors do.”⁴³ One of these assets proved to be some letters between Iraq and the Central African country of Niger purporting to show that between 1999 and 2001 Niger agreed to sell uranium to Iraq. In his January 28,2003, State of the Union address, President Bush referred to this evidence: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Secretary Powell turned these documents over to Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as proof of the Anglo-American charges that Iraq had revived its efforts to produce nuclear weapons after the U.N. inspections ended in 1998.

Allegations about Iraq’s purchase of uranium actually first surfaced in a British government report published on September 24,2002, which did not name Niger as the source. On December 19, 2002, the U.S. State Department elaborated on the British originals and for the first time said that Niger had supplied the fissionable material. According to the Washington Post, however, although U.S. intelligence officials had “extensively reviewed” the documents, they failed to notice the “relatively crude errors” in the letters, including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written.⁴⁴

On March 7,2003, ElBaradei testified to the Security Council that “the IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents, and signature[s] of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation. Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which form the basis for the reports of recent uranium transaction[s] between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.”⁴⁵

A final instance of the governmental manufacture of intelligence involves the question of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. On October 7, 2002, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA director George Tenet said that the agency could find no ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden’s network. Yet in a letter to the same committee on February 11,2003, Tenet reversed himself. Two days later, Ray McGovern, an analyst for the CIA for twenty-seven years, denounced Tenet for having “caved in to political pressure.”⁴⁶ McGovern noted that on February 5, as Tenet sat “like a potted plant” behind Powell at the Security Council, he “did not wince once” at what he heard. Instead, Tenet had ensured that statements based on America’s vast, expensive intelligence apparatus would no longer be believed. It also seemed likely that Secretary Powell’s integrity had been hopelessly compromised.

After the second Iraq war, no unconventional weapons of any kind were found that came even slightly close in terms of quantities or deadliness to the claims of the Bush administration. Postwar analysis strongly indicated that a small group of ideologues working for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had manufactured the intelligence, sometimes based on reports of Iraqi exiles who had already been discredited by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then vigorously sold it to the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the president. An intelligence insider interviewed by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh said of this group, “They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting [from the CIA and the DIA], and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God. If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”⁴⁷

It is not usual for the aides and advisers of a president of the United States to allow him to deliver a fake intelligence report in a State of the Union address. It is even more unusual that, such a blunder having occurred, the director of central intelligence would keep his job. The only logical explanation is that the director’s political superiors instructed him in what they wanted done. If so, then it seems that high government officials falsified pretexts for the second Iraq war and committed a fraud against the Congress and the American people. In a constitutional republic, these are impeachable offenses. The fact that such proceedings have not even been mentioned is a further sign of the political decadence brought about by militarism and imperialism.

The final sorrow of empire, financial ruin, is different from the other three in that bankruptcy may not be as fatal to the Constitution as endless war, loss of liberty, or habitual official lying; but it is the only sorrow that will certainly lead to a crisis, regardless of how cowed, deeply in denial, or misinformed the public may be. During 2003, the United States may have been ready militarily for a war in Iraq, even for wars in North Korea and Iran, but it was unprepared economically for even one of them, much less all three, or—equally important—their aftermaths.

Permanent military domination of the world is an expensive business. For fiscal year 2003, our military appropriations bill, signed on October 23, 2002, came to $354.8 billion. For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Defense asked Congress for and received an increase to $379.3 billion, plus $15.6 billion for nuclear weapons programs administered by the Department of Energy and $1.2 billion for the Coast Guard. The grand total was $396.1 billion. These amounts included neither intelligence budgets, most of which are controlled by the Pentagon, nor expenditures for the second Iraq war itself, nor a Pentagon request for a special $10 billion account to combat terrorism. When this outsized budget was presented to the House, sycophantic members spent most of their time asking the secretary of defense if he was sure he did not need yet more money and suggesting weapons projects that might then be located in their districts. The message they sent seemed to be: No matter how much the United States spends on “defense,” it will never be enough. The budget of the next-largest military spender, Russia, is only 14 percent of the U.S. total. The military budgets of the next twenty-seven highest spenders would have to be added together to equal our expenditures.⁴⁸

The first Gulf War cost slightly over $61 billion. However, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other American allies chipped in $54.1 billion, about 80 percent of the total, leaving the U.S. financial contribution at a minuscule $7 billion.⁴⁹ Japan alone contributed $13 billion. Nothing like that will happen again soon. Virtually the entire world was agreed on the eve of the second Iraq war that if the lone superpower wanted to go off in personal pursuit of a “preventive” victory, it could pick up its own tab.

The problem with the Bush administration’s unilateralist policies and their focus on military power is that the United States is actually quite short on cash. Forecasts based on the 2003 budget estimate a $480 billion federal deficit, excluding the costs of the Iraq war. Virtually every state in the country faces a severe fiscal shortage and is pleading with the federal government for a bailout, particularly to pay for congressionally mandated antiterrorism and civil defense programs. The Congressional Budget Office projects federal deficits over the next five years of a staggering $1.08 trillion, on top of an existing government debt in February 2003 of $6.4 trillion.⁵⁰

Equally serious, as already mentioned, the country’s trade deficits are increasingly difficult to finance. During 2002, the United States imported a record $435.2 billion more than it exported. At some 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), this deficit represents an unusual economic statistic for a country with imperial pretensions. In the nineteenth century, the British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the first World War, Britain had a surplus that was 7 percent of GDP.

Once the problem of oil is factored in, the future looks even more economically ominous. The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest levels ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf countries. Bush administration projections show the country’s import dependency growing substantially, particularly because the government is unwilling to enforce a serious program of auto fuel efficiency. Some Pentagon strategists seemed to think that by conquering Iraq, the United States could ensure its own future petroleum supplies and also dominate other industrialized regions by threatening their oil supplies. But Iraq’s share of proven global oil reserves is only just over 10 percent, or about 112.5 billion barrels.⁵¹ By contrast, Saudi Arabia possesses around 25 percent, or 262 billion barrels, and the other gulf states that often cooperate with Saudi Arabia control a further 20 percent. Saudi Arabia and its allies also possess another great advantage. They alone can produce profitably at very low prices.

One of the stated goals of the Bush administration in waging war against Iraq was to replace authoritarian rule there—and elsewhere in the Islamic Middle East—with “democracy.” Instead, the Bush strategy may well generate intense opposition to Islamic governments that aided or tolerated the war, hastening the collapse of the Saudi government or of the smaller sheikhdoms around the gulf. It is more than possible that a truly popular government in Saudi Arabia would be hostile to the United States. A serious interruption of Saudi oil supplies would produce an economic catastrophe for the United States, even if it had exclusive control of Iraq’s oil production.⁵²

The economic consequences of imperialism and militarism are also transforming our value system by degrading “free enterprise,” which many Americans cherish and identify with liberty. Our military is by far the largest bureaucracy in our government. Militarism removes capital and resources from the free market and allocates them arbitrarily, in accordance with bureaucratic decisions uninfluenced by market forces but often quite responsive to insider influence and crony capitalism. For example, on March 10, 2003, the government invited five engineering companies to submit bids for postwar reconstruction work in Iraq, including the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of the Halliburton Company and the Bechtel Group. Brown & Root, as we noted earlier, is Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company; Bechtel has half-century-old connections with the CIA and high-ranking Republican politicians.⁵³ Virtually all contracts coming from the military reflect insider trading. Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, summarizes the military-industrial complex as follows: “a vast cesspool of mismanagement, waste, and transgressions not only bordering on but often entering deeply into criminal conduct.... The great arms firms have managed to slough off much of the normal risks of doing business in a genuine market, passing on many of their excessive costs to the taxpayers while still realizing extraordinary rates of return on investment.”⁵⁴

Similarly, in allocating funds to the missile defense program, the Pentagon no longer specifies how the money is to be spent. Congress simply gives public funds—$7.4 billion for missile defense research and development in 2004—to the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency. This agency has invented something it calls the “national team” concept. The team consists of uniformed officers from the Missile Defense Agency and executives of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and TRW, the prime contractors, who decide among themselves how the money is to be spent. As Fred Kaplan, a reporter for Slate, notes, “The idea is that Congress gives us a chunk of money; we’ll figure out how to spend it once we have a better idea what we’re doing.” This is increasingly the standard pattern throughout the United States’s permanent war economy.⁵⁵

None of this bears any relation to “free enterprise,” whatever else it might be called. Indifference to how public monies are spent ultimately destroys those who tolerate it. Bankruptcy is one obvious possible outcome, but it is in some ways the least serious. More corrosive is contempt for the government and its department entrusted with national defense. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is very hard to get it back in. The most serious sorrow of empire is the irreversible damage we do to ourselves.

2: THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN MILITARISM

1. Hyman G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1976).

2. Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 11.

3. “The Spanish American War,” <http:/www.smplanet.com/imperialism/splendid.html>.

4. “A Gift from the Gods,” <http:/www.smplanet.com/imperialism/gift.html>.

5. Amy Forliti, “Camp Commander Relieved of Duties,” Associated Press, October 14, 2002; and “‘Too Nice’ Jail Commander Is Fired,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 17,2002.

6. Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” p. 1.

7. Cited in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 306.

8. Quoted by Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” p. 26.

9. Joseph Lepgold and Timothy McKeown, “Is American Foreign Policy Exceptional? An Empirical Analysis,” Political Science Quarterly, Fall 1995, <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/tag/intrel/lepgold.htm>.

10. For the fullest details on the “Farewell Address, Washington’s Final Manuscript,” see <http://www.virginia.edu/gwpapers/farewell/>.

11. Quoted by Ralph Raico, “American Foreign Policy—The Turning Point, 1898–1919: Part I,” <http://www.fff.org/freedom/0495c.asp>.

12. Elihu Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States: Addresses and Reports (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), pp. 417–40, <http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:aF2E4_mZg9YC:www.shsu.edu/-his_ncp/RootGS.html+Elihu+Root&hl=en>.

13. Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly) 31:1 (Spring 2001), inside back cover.

14. Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson Biography,” <http://www.gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/bios/28pwils.html>.

15. See Peter van den Maas, “The American Tradition in Diplomacy,” <http://odur.let.rug.n1/~usa/E/kissinger/kiss03.htm>.

16. “President Woodrow Wilson’s War Message, April 2, 1917,” <http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1917/wilswarm.html>.

17. Alistair Cooke, “Letter from America: The Pursuit of Self-Determination,” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/letter_fromnewsid_288000/2882_50.stm>.

18. Ibid.

19. William Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 275.

20. James A. Donovan, Militarism U.S.A. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), p. 10.

21. James Dunnigan, “A Long American Tradition,” Strategy Page, August 20,2001.

22. United States Civil War Center, “Statistical Summary of America’s Major Wars,” June 13, 2001, <http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm>.

23. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 1111; cited by Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 474.

24. Donovan, Militarism U.S.A., pp. 114–15.

25. Quoted by Telford Taylor, Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), p. 368.

26. United States Civil War Center, “Statistical Summary.” Also see U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Public Affairs, America’s Wars (Washington, May 2001), <http://www.va.gov/pressrel/amwars01.htm>, which gives slightly different totals but offers no figures at all on the Confederate side in the Civil War.

27. See, in particular, Robert Higgs, “The Cold War: Too Good a Deal to Give Up,” Intervention Magazine Online, March 2002; and Robert Higgs, “The Cold War Is Over, but U.S. Preparation for It Continues,” Independent Review 6:2 (Fall 2001). The totals used here are based on the purchasing power of 2002 dollars. For actual amounts in billions of 1996 dollars, compare Martin Calhoun, Senior Research Analyst, Center for Defense Information, U.S. Military Spending, 1945–1996, <http://www.cdi.org/issues/milspend.html>. Calhoun places military spending for 1950 at $133.0 billion; for 1953 at $437.0 billion; for 1968 at $388.9 billion; and for 1989 at $376.2 billion.

28. Peter Pae, “Southland Defense Industry Quietly Heeds War’s Drumbeat,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2002. Also see Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Economic Earthquakes: Converting Defense Cuts to Economic Opportunities (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 1994).

29. Jonathan Reingold, “Attack of the Pork Barrel Posse,” AlterNet, April 23, 2002. Also see Julian E. Barnes, Peter Cary, and Christopher H. Schmitt, “Special Investigative Report: War Profiteering,” U.S. News & World Report, May 13,2002, pp. 20–34; Gopal Ratnam and Gail Kaufman, “A New Way to Pay for Weapons? Boeing, U.S. Air Force Eye Third-Party Financing for B-52 Work,” DefenseNews.com, March 31, 2003; Michelle Ciarrocca, “Boeing: ‘Forever New Frontiers’ or ‘The Purse Is Now Open,’” Arms Trade Resource Center, April 4,2003; and Leslie Wayne, “Creative Deal or Highflying Pork?” New York Times, April 20,2003.

30. Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “Rumsfeld Inherits Financial Mess,” Insight-Mag.com, August 2001.

31. See John Dower, War without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1987); and Sheila K. Johnson, The Japanese through American Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

32. William Manchester, “The Bloodiest Battle of All,” New York Times Magazine, June 14,1987.

33. See William Rivers Pitt, “Think the Days of the Draft Are Gone? Think Again,” Truthout/Perspective, September 11,2002, <http://www.truthout.com/docs_02/09.12A.wrp.draft.htm>.

34. See Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), particularly part 3: “The Era of Reversals (1962–1975).”

35. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 5.

36. Vagts, History of Militarism, p. 463.

37. See, e.g., Walter V. Robinson, “One-Year Gap in Bush’s National Guard Duty,” Boston Globe, May 23, 2000; Wayne Slater, “Records of Bush’s Alabama Military Duty Can’t Be Found,” Dallas Morning News, June 26, 2000; “G. W. Bush Went AWOL,” New Republic, November 13, 2000; Richard Sisk, “General Raps Plans for Invasion,” New York Daily News, August 27, 2002; James Bamford, “Untested Administration Hawks Clamor for War,” USA Today, September 17,2002; Eric Margolis, “Bush Looks for Buddies in Bad Times,” Toronto Sun, September 29, 2002; George Johnson, “The Chicken Hawks’ War,” TomPaine.com, November 14,2002; and Linda McQuaig, “What Did Dubya Do in the War, Daddy?” Toronto Star, November 17,2002.

38. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), p. 329.

39. See Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Touchstone, 2000).

40. See Chalmers Johnson, “In Search of a New Cold War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 1999, pp. 44–51; and editorial, “China Viewed Narrowly,” New York Times, June 10, 2001.

41. Kurt M. Campbell, “China Watchers Fighting a Turf War of Their Own,” New York Times, May 20, 2000. The Times failed to identify Campbell as a former member of the Pentagon establishment.

42. James Dao, “Signaling Change, Bush Picks 3 Executives for Pentagon Jobs,” New York Times, April 25, 2001.

43. Richard Gardner, “Foreign Policy on the Cheap,” Financial Times, June 8, 2001.

44. Newsweek, June 25, 2001.

45. Ronald Steel, Pax Americana (New York: Viking, 1967), pp. 17–18.

SEEKS TO DEFEND” (THE BOSTON GLOBE)

* * *

In the years after the Soviet Union imploded, the United States was described first as the globe’s “lone superpower,” then as a “reluctant sheriff,” next as the “indispensable nation,” and, in the wake of 9/11, as a “New Rome.” In this important and bestselling book, Chalmers Johnson explores the new militarism that is transforming America and compelling its people to pick up the burden of empire.

Recalling the classic warnings against militarism—from George Washington’s Farewell Address to Dwight Eisenhower’s denunciation of the military-industrial complex—Johnson uncovers its roots deep in our past. Turning to the present, he maps America’s empire of military bases and identifies the new caste of professional militarists overseeing its expansion. This militarism, Johnson concludes, is already putting an end to the age of globalization, bankrupting the United States, and creating conditions for a new century of virulent blow-back. The Sorrows of Empire suggests that the former American republic has already crossed its Rubicon—with the Pentagon in the lead.

* * *

“In Blowback, published before September 11, Chalmers Johnson introduced us to a chilling code word for our times. The Sorrows of Empire is even more sobering, for it associates the United States with a dynamic most Americans still find unmentionable—our ever-deepening militarism. Here is a scholar’s critique and a patriot’s cry, presented with unflinching courage.”

—John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“A frightening picture of a military-industrial complex grown into exactly the powerful, secretive force that Dwight 0. Eisenhower warned against.”

—The New York Times Book Review

CHALMERS JOHNSON, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and The Nation. His previous books include the national bestseller Blowback, as well as MITI and the Japanese Miracle. He lives near San Diego.