Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World

436 Pages·2015·6.44 MB·English

by  David Vine

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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page

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This book is dedicated
to the memory of my grandparents,
Tea Eichengruen Stiefel and Master Sergeant Erwin Stiefel and
Gloria Simon Vine and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt Vine,
and to the memory of
U.S. Army Specialist Russell E. Madden,
who died of combat injuries in Afghanistan, June 23, 2010
A residential neighborhood for U.S. military personnel and their families at U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba.
Introduction
From a hilltop at the Guantánamo Bay naval station, you can look down on a
secluded part of the base bordered by the Caribbean Sea. There you’ll see thick
coils of razor wire, guard towers, search lights, and concrete barriers. This is the
U.S. prison that has garnered so much international attention and controversy,
with so many prisoners held for years without trial. But the prison facilities take
up only a few acres of the forty-five-square-mile naval station. Most of the base
looks nothing like the detention center. Instead, the landscape features suburban-
style housing developments, a golf course, and recreational boating facilities.
This part of the base has received much less attention than the prison. Yet in its
own way, it is far more important for understanding who we are as a country and
how we relate to the rest of the world.
What makes most of the naval station so remarkable is just how
unremarkable it is. Looking out on Guantánamo Bay, a U.S. flag flies outside
base headquarters. Nearby, an outdoor movie theater has a regular schedule of
Hollywood blockbusters. Next door, there are bright-green artificial turf fields
for football and soccer, at a new sports facility that also features two baseball
diamonds, volleyball and basketball courts, and an outdoor roller-skating rink. In
the air-conditioned gym, ESPN’s Sportscenter plays on TV. Across the main
road there’s a large chapel, a post office, and a sun-bleached set of McDonald’s
golden arches. Neighborhoods with names like Deer Point and Villamar have
looping drives and spacious lawns with barbecue grills and children’s toys.
There’s a high school, a middle and elementary school, and a childcare facility.
There are pools and playgrounds, several public beaches, a bowling center,
barber and beauty shops, a Pizza Hut, a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Subway.
From the hilltop you can also faintly see two nearby Cuban towns, but most
everywhere else on base it’s easy to forget you’re in Cuba. What base residents
call “downtown,” for example, could be almost anywhere in the United States—
or at another of the hundreds of U.S. military bases spread around the globe,
which often resemble self-contained American towns. The downtown is where
you find the commissary and the Navy’s version of the post exchange, or PX—
the shopping facility present on U.S. military bases worldwide. Surrounded by
plentiful parking, the commissary and exchange feel like a Walmart, full of
clothing and consumer electronics, furniture, automotive products, and groceries.
At Guantánamo, the base souvenir shop is one of the few reminders of where
you really are. There, along with U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay postcards
and mugs, you can buy a T-shirt bearing the words DETAINEE OPERATIONS.
During years of debates over the closure of Guantánamo Bay’s prison, few
have asked why the United States has such a large base on Cuban territory in the
first place, and whether we should have one there at all. This is unsurprising.
Most Americans rarely think about U.S. military bases overseas. Since the
end of World War II and the early days of the Cold War, when the United States
built or acquired most of its overseas bases, Americans have considered it
normal to have U.S. military installations in other countries, on other people’s
land. The presence of our bases overseas has long been accepted unquestioningly
and treated as an obvious good, essential to national security and global peace.
Perhaps these bases register in our consciousness when there’s an antibase
protest in Okinawa or an accident in Germany. Quickly, however, they’re
forgotten.
Of course, people living near U.S. bases in countries worldwide pay them
more attention. For many, U.S. bases are one of the most prominent symbols of
the United States, along with Hollywood movies, pop music, and fast food.
Indeed, the prevalence of Burger Kings and Taco Bells on many of our bases
abroad is telling: ours is a supersized collection of bases with franchises the
world over. While there are no freestanding foreign bases on U.S. soil, today
there are around eight hundred U.S. bases in foreign countries, occupied by
hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.
Although the United States has long had some bases in foreign lands, this
massive global deployment of military force was unknown in U.S. history before
World War II. Now, seventy years after that war, there are still, according to the
Pentagon, 174 U.S. bases in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea.
There are hundreds more dotting the planet in Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and
Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and Qatar, to name just a few. Worldwide, we have
bases in more than seventy countries. Although few U.S. citizens realize it, we
probably have more bases in other people’s lands than any other people, nation,
or empire in world history.
And yet the subject is barely discussed in the media. Rarely does anyone ask
whether we need hundreds of bases overseas, or whether we can afford them.
Rarely does anyone consider how we would feel with a foreign base on U.S.
soil, or how we would react if China, Russia, or Iran built even a single base
somewhere near our borders today. For most in the United States, the idea of
even the nicest, most benign foreign troops arriving with their tanks, planes, and
high-powered weaponry and making themselves at home in our country—
occupying and fencing off hundreds or thousands of acres of our land—is
unthinkable.
Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, highlighted this rarely considered
truth in 2009 when he refused to renew the lease for a U.S. base in his country.
Correa told reporters that he would approve the lease renewal on one condition:
“They let us put a base in Miami—an Ecuadorian base.”
“If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil,” Correa
quipped, “surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorian base in the United States.”1
THE SCALE
At the height of the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the total number
of bases, combat outposts, and checkpoints in those two countries alone topped
one thousand.2 With American troops largely withdrawn, almost all of those
have been shut down. Yet officially, according to the most recent publicized
count, the U.S. military currently still occupies 686 “base sites” outside the fifty