Excerpt: "Amid the distractions of the holiday season, the New York Times
revealed that the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon proposal to
create a 'new' and 'enduring' system of military bases around the Middle
East."
US Army Special Forces are seen doing training exercises at the John F.
Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, not
unlike the kind of exercises done at military bases the world over. (photo:
USAOC News Service/Flickr/Creative Commons)
The Obama Administration Is Continuing a Failed Strategy of Building
Military Bases Around the World
By David Vine, In These Times
16 January 16
The United States seems intent on continuing its imperialistic policies in
the Middle East (and worldwide).
Amid the distractions of the holiday season, the New York Times revealed
that the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon proposal to create a
"new" and "enduring" system of military bases around the Middle East. Though
this is being presented as a response to the rise of the Islamic State and
other militant groups, there's remarkably little that's new about the
Pentagon plan. For more than 36 years, the U.S. military has been building
an unprecedented constellation of bases that stretches from Southern Europe
and the Middle East to Africa and Southwest Asia.
The record of these bases is disastrous. They have cost tens of billions of
dollars and provided support for a long list of undemocratic host regimes,
including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Djibouti. They have enabled a
series of U.S. wars and military interventions, including the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, which have helped make the Greater Middle East a cauldron of
sectarian-tinged power struggles, failed states, and humanitarian
catastrophe. And the bases have fueled radicalism, anti-Americanism, and the
growth of the very terrorist organizations now targeted by the supposedly
new strategy.
If there is much of anything new about the plan, it's the public
acknowledgement of what some (including TomDispatch) have long suspected:
despite years of denials about the existence of any "permanent bases" in the
Greater Middle East or desire for the same, the military intends to maintain
a collection of bases in the region for decades, if not generations, to
come.
Thirty-Six Years of Base Building
According to the Times, the Pentagon wants to build up a string of bases,
the largest of which would permanently host 500 to 5,000 U.S. personnel. The
system would include four "hubs"-existing bases in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Djibouti, and Spain-and smaller "spokes" in locations like Niger and
Cameroon. These bases would, in turn, feature Special Operations forces
ready to move into action quickly for what Secretary of Defense Ashton
Carter has called "unilateral crisis response" anywhere in the Greater
Middle East or Africa. According to unnamed Pentagon officials quoted by
theTimes, this proposed expansion would cost a mere pittance, just "several
million dollars a year."
Far from new, however, this strategy predates both the Islamic State and
al-Qaeda. In fact, it goes back to 1980 and the Carter Doctrine. That was
the moment when President Jimmy Carter first asserted that the United States
would secure Middle Eastern oil and natural gas by "any means necessary,
including military force." Designed to prevent Soviet intervention in the
Persian Gulf, the Pentagon build-up under Presidents Carter and Ronald
Reagan included the creation of installations in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia,
and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. During the first Gulf War of
1991, the Pentagon deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia
and neighboring countries. After that war, despite the disappearance of the
Soviet Union, the U.S. military didn't go home. Thousands of U.S. troops and
a significantly expanded base infrastructure remained in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait. Bahrain became home to the Navy's Fifth Fleet. The Pentagon built
large air installations in Qatar and expanded operations in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Oman.
Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
the Pentagon spent tens of billions of dollars building and expanding yet
more bases. At the height of those U.S.-led wars, there were more than 1,000
installations, large and small, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Despite the
closing of most U.S. bases in the two countries, the Pentagon still has
access to at least nine major bases in Afghanistan through 2024. After
leaving Iraq in 2011, the military returned in 2014 to reoccupy at least six
installations. Across the Persian Gulf today, there are still U.S. bases in
every country save Iran and Yemen. Even in Saudi Arabia, where widespread
anger at the U.S. presence led to an official withdrawal in 2003, there are
still small U.S. military contingents and a secret drone base. There are
secret bases in Israel, four installations in Egypt, and at least one in
Jordan near the Iraqi border.Turkey hosts 17 bases, according to the
Pentagon. In the wider region, the military has operated drones from at
least five bases in Pakistan in recent years and there are nine new
installations in Bulgaria and Romania, along with a Clinton
administration-era base still operating in Kosovo.
In Africa, Djibouti's Camp Lemonnier, just miles across the Red Sea from the
Arabian Peninsula, has expanded dramatically since U.S. forces moved in
after 2001. There are now upwards of 4,000 troops on the 600-acre base.
Elsewhere, the military has quietly built a collection of small bases and
sites for drones, surveillance flights, and Special Operations forces from
Ethiopia and Kenya to Burkina Faso and Senegal. Large bases in Spain and
Italy support what are now thousands of U.S. troops regularly deploying to
Africa.
A Disastrous Record
After 36 years, the results of this vast base build-up have been, to put it
mildly, counterproductive. As Saudi Arabia illustrates, U.S. bases have
often helped generate the radical militancy that they are now being designed
to defeat. The presence of U.S. bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was,
in fact, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden's
professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.
Across the Middle East, there's a correlation between a U.S. basing presence
and al-Qaeda's recruitment success. According to former West Point professor
Bradley Bowman, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a "major
catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization" since a suicide bomber
killed 241 Marines in Lebanon in 1983. In Africa, a growing U.S. base and
troop presence has "backfired," serving as a boon for insurgents, according
to research published by the Army's Military Review and the Oxford Research
Group. A recent U.N. report suggests that the U.S. air campaign against IS
has led foreign militants to join the movement on "an unprecedented scale."
Part of the anti-American anger that such bases stoke comes from the support
they offer to repressive, undemocratic hosts. For example, the Obama
administration offered only tepid criticism of the Bahraini government,
crucial for U.S. naval basing, in 2011 when its leaders violently cracked
down on pro-democracy protesters with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia
and the UAE. Elsewhere, U.S. bases offer legitimacy to hosts the Economist
Democracy Index considers "authoritarian regimes," effectively helping to
block the spread of democracy in countries including Cameroon, Central
African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Low-Balling
The Pentagon's basing strategy has not only been counterproductive in
encouraging people to take up arms against the United States and its allies,
it has also been extraordinarily expensive. Military bases across the
Greater Middle East cost the United States tens of billions of dollars every
year, as part of an estimated $150 billion in annual spending to maintain
bases and troops abroad. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti alone has an annual rent
of $70 million and at least $1.4 billion in ongoing expansion costs. With
the Pentagon now proposing an enlarged basing structure of hubs and spokes
from Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, cost estimates reported in the New York
Times in the "low millions" are laughable, if not intentionally misleading.
(One hopes the Government Accountability Office is already investigating the
true costs.)
The only plausible explanation for such low-ball figures is that officials
are taking for granted-and thus excluding from their estimates-the
continuation of present wartime funding levels for those bases. In reality,
further entrenching the Pentagon's base infrastructure in the region will
commit U.S. taxpayers to billions more in annual construction, maintenance,
and personnel costs (while civilian infrastructure in the U.S. continues to
be underfunded and neglected).
The idea that the military needs any additional money to bring, as the Times
put it, "an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system" should
shock American taxpayers. After all, the Pentagon has already spent so many
billions on them. If military planners haven't linked these bases into a
coherent system by now, what exactly have they been doing?
In fact, the Pentagon is undoubtedly resorting to an all-too-familiar
funding strategy-using low-ball cost estimates to secure more cash from
Congress on a commit-now, pay-the-true-costs-later basis. Experience shows
that once the military gets such new budget lines, costs and bases tend to
expand, often quite dramatically. Especially in places like Africa that have
had a relatively small U.S. presence until now, the Pentagon plan is a
template for unchecked growth. As Nick Turse has shown at TomDispatch, the
military has already built up "more than 60 outposts and access points.. in
at least 34 countries" across the continent while insisting for years that
it had only one base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. With Congress
finally passing the 2016 federal budget, including billions in increased
military spending, the Pentagon's base plan looks like an opening gambit in
a bid to get even more money in fiscal year 2017.
Perpetuating Failure
Above all, the base structure the Pentagon has built since 1980 has enabled
military interventions and wars of choice in 13 countries in the Greater
Middle East. In the absence of a superpower competitor, these bases made
each military action-worst of all the disastrous invasion of Iraq-all too
easy to contemplate, launch, and carry out. Today, it seems beyond irony
that the target of the Pentagon's "new" base strategy is the Islamic State,
whose very existence and growth we owe to the Iraq War and the chaos it
created. If the White House and Congress approve the Pentagon's plan and the
military succeeds in further entrenching and expanding its bases in the
region, we need only ask: What violence will this next round of base
expansion bring?
Thirty-six years into the U.S. base build-up in the Greater Middle East,
military force has failed as a strategy for controlling the region, no less
defeating terrorist organizations. Sadly, this infrastructure of war has
been in place for so long and is now so taken for granted that most
Americans seldom think about it. Members of Congress rarely question the
usefulness of the bases or the billions they have appropriated to build and
maintain them. Journalists, too, almost never report on the subject-except
when news outlets publish material strategically leaked by the Pentagon, as
appears to be the case with the "new" base plan highlighted by the New York
Times.
Expanding the base infrastructure in the Greater Middle East will only
perpetuate a militarized foreign policy premised on assumptions about the
efficacy of war that should have been discredited long ago. Investing in
"enduring" bases rather than diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts
to reduce conflict across the region is likely to do little more than ensure
enduring war.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
US Army Special Forces are seen doing training exercises at the John F.
Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, not
unlike the kind of exercises done at military bases the world over. (photo:
USAOC News Service/Flickr/Creative Commons)
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18772/American-bases_Middle-East_foreign-pol
icyhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/18772/American-bases_Middle-East_foreign-
policy
The Obama Administration Is Continuing a Failed Strategy of Building
Military Bases Around the World
By David Vine, In These Times
16 January 16
The United States seems intent on continuing its imperialistic policies in
the Middle East (and worldwide).
mid the distractions of the holiday season, the New York Times revealed
that the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon proposal to create a
"new" and "enduring" system of military bases around the Middle East. Though
this is being presented as a response to the rise of the Islamic State and
other militant groups, there's remarkably little that's new about the
Pentagon plan. For more than 36 years, the U.S. military has been building
an unprecedented constellation of bases that stretches from Southern Europe
and the Middle East to Africa and Southwest Asia.
The record of these bases is disastrous. They have cost tens of billions of
dollars and provided support for a long list of undemocratic host regimes,
including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Djibouti. They have enabled a
series of U.S. wars and military interventions, including the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, which have helped make the Greater Middle East a cauldron of
sectarian-tinged power struggles, failed states, and humanitarian
catastrophe. And the bases have fueled radicalism, anti-Americanism, and the
growth of the very terrorist organizations now targeted by the supposedly
new strategy.
If there is much of anything new about the plan, it's the public
acknowledgement of what some (including TomDispatch) have long suspected:
despite years of denials about the existence of any "permanent bases" in the
Greater Middle East or desire for the same, the military intends to maintain
a collection of bases in the region for decades, if not generations, to
come.
Thirty-Six Years of Base Building
According to the Times, the Pentagon wants to build up a string of bases,
the largest of which would permanently host 500 to 5,000 U.S. personnel. The
system would include four "hubs"-existing bases in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Djibouti, and Spain-and smaller "spokes" in locations like Niger and
Cameroon. These bases would, in turn, feature Special Operations forces
ready to move into action quickly for what Secretary of Defense Ashton
Carter has called "unilateral crisis response" anywhere in the Greater
Middle East or Africa. According to unnamed Pentagon officials quoted by
theTimes, this proposed expansion would cost a mere pittance, just "several
million dollars a year."
Far from new, however, this strategy predates both the Islamic State and
al-Qaeda. In fact, it goes back to 1980 and the Carter Doctrine. That was
the moment when President Jimmy Carter first asserted that the United States
would secure Middle Eastern oil and natural gas by "any means necessary,
including military force." Designed to prevent Soviet intervention in the
Persian Gulf, the Pentagon build-up under Presidents Carter and Ronald
Reagan included the creation of installations in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia,
and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. During the first Gulf War of
1991, the Pentagon deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia
and neighboring countries. After that war, despite the disappearance of the
Soviet Union, the U.S. military didn't go home. Thousands of U.S. troops and
a significantly expanded base infrastructure remained in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait. Bahrain became home to the Navy's Fifth Fleet. The Pentagon built
large air installations in Qatar and expanded operations in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Oman.
Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
the Pentagon spent tens of billions of dollars building and expanding yet
more bases. At the height of those U.S.-led wars, there were more than 1,000
installations, large and small, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Despite the
closing of most U.S. bases in the two countries, the Pentagon still has
access to at least nine major bases in Afghanistan through 2024. After
leaving Iraq in 2011, the military returned in 2014 to reoccupy at least six
installations. Across the Persian Gulf today, there are still U.S. bases in
every country save Iran and Yemen. Even in Saudi Arabia, where widespread
anger at the U.S. presence led to an official withdrawal in 2003, there are
still small U.S. military contingents and a secret drone base. There are
secret bases in Israel, four installations in Egypt, and at least one in
Jordan near the Iraqi border.Turkey hosts 17 bases, according to the
Pentagon. In the wider region, the military has operated drones from at
least five bases in Pakistan in recent years and there are nine new
installations in Bulgaria and Romania, along with a Clinton
administration-era base still operating in Kosovo.
In Africa, Djibouti's Camp Lemonnier, just miles across the Red Sea from the
Arabian Peninsula, has expanded dramatically since U.S. forces moved in
after 2001. There are now upwards of 4,000 troops on the 600-acre base.
Elsewhere, the military has quietly built a collection of small bases and
sites for drones, surveillance flights, and Special Operations forces from
Ethiopia and Kenya to Burkina Faso and Senegal. Large bases in Spain and
Italy support what are now thousands of U.S. troops regularly deploying to
Africa.
A Disastrous Record
After 36 years, the results of this vast base build-up have been, to put it
mildly, counterproductive. As Saudi Arabia illustrates, U.S. bases have
often helped generate the radical militancy that they are now being designed
to defeat. The presence of U.S. bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was,
in fact, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden's
professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.
Across the Middle East, there's a correlation between a U.S. basing presence
and al-Qaeda's recruitment success. According to former West Point professor
Bradley Bowman, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a "major
catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization" since a suicide bomber
killed 241 Marines in Lebanon in 1983. In Africa, a growing U.S. base and
troop presence has "backfired," serving as a boon for insurgents, according
to research published by the Army's Military Review and the Oxford Research
Group. A recent U.N. report suggests that the U.S. air campaign against IS
has led foreign militants to join the movement on "an unprecedented scale."
Part of the anti-American anger that such bases stoke comes from the support
they offer to repressive, undemocratic hosts. For example, the Obama
administration offered only tepid criticism of the Bahraini government,
crucial for U.S. naval basing, in 2011 when its leaders violently cracked
down on pro-democracy protesters with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia
and the UAE. Elsewhere, U.S. bases offer legitimacy to hosts the Economist
Democracy Index considers "authoritarian regimes," effectively helping to
block the spread of democracy in countries including Cameroon, Central
African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Low-Balling
The Pentagon's basing strategy has not only been counterproductive in
encouraging people to take up arms against the United States and its allies,
it has also been extraordinarily expensive. Military bases across the
Greater Middle East cost the United States tens of billions of dollars every
year, as part of an estimated $150 billion in annual spending to maintain
bases and troops abroad. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti alone has an annual rent
of $70 million and at least $1.4 billion in ongoing expansion costs. With
the Pentagon now proposing an enlarged basing structure of hubs and spokes
from Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, cost estimates reported in the New York
Times in the "low millions" are laughable, if not intentionally misleading.
(One hopes the Government Accountability Office is already investigating the
true costs.)
The only plausible explanation for such low-ball figures is that officials
are taking for granted-and thus excluding from their estimates-the
continuation of present wartime funding levels for those bases. In reality,
further entrenching the Pentagon's base infrastructure in the region will
commit U.S. taxpayers to billions more in annual construction, maintenance,
and personnel costs (while civilian infrastructure in the U.S. continues to
be underfunded and neglected).
The idea that the military needs any additional money to bring, as the Times
put it, "an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system" should
shock American taxpayers. After all, the Pentagon has already spent so many
billions on them. If military planners haven't linked these bases into a
coherent system by now, what exactly have they been doing?
In fact, the Pentagon is undoubtedly resorting to an all-too-familiar
funding strategy-using low-ball cost estimates to secure more cash from
Congress on a commit-now, pay-the-true-costs-later basis. Experience shows
that once the military gets such new budget lines, costs and bases tend to
expand, often quite dramatically. Especially in places like Africa that have
had a relatively small U.S. presence until now, the Pentagon plan is a
template for unchecked growth. As Nick Turse has shown at TomDispatch, the
military has already built up "more than 60 outposts and access points.. in
at least 34 countries" across the continent while insisting for years that
it had only one base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. With Congress
finally passing the 2016 federal budget, including billions in increased
military spending, the Pentagon's base plan looks like an opening gambit in
a bid to get even more money in fiscal year 2017.
Perpetuating Failure
Above all, the base structure the Pentagon has built since 1980 has enabled
military interventions and wars of choice in 13 countries in the Greater
Middle East. In the absence of a superpower competitor, these bases made
each military action-worst of all the disastrous invasion of Iraq-all too
easy to contemplate, launch, and carry out. Today, it seems beyond irony
that the target of the Pentagon's "new" base strategy is the Islamic State,
whose very existence and growth we owe to the Iraq War and the chaos it
created. If the White House and Congress approve the Pentagon's plan and the
military succeeds in further entrenching and expanding its bases in the
region, we need only ask: What violence will this next round of base
expansion bring?
Thirty-six years into the U.S. base build-up in the Greater Middle East,
military force has failed as a strategy for controlling the region, no less
defeating terrorist organizations. Sadly, this infrastructure of war has
been in place for so long and is now so taken for granted that most
Americans seldom think about it. Members of Congress rarely question the
usefulness of the bases or the billions they have appropriated to build and
maintain them. Journalists, too, almost never report on the subject-except
when news outlets publish material strategically leaked by the Pentagon, as
appears to be the case with the "new" base plan highlighted by the New York
Times.
Expanding the base infrastructure in the Greater Middle East will only
perpetuate a militarized foreign policy premised on assumptions about the
efficacy of war that should have been discredited long ago. Investing in
"enduring" bases rather than diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts
to reduce conflict across the region is likely to do little more than ensure
enduring war.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
