Resistance Growing to U.S. Military Bases

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As members of Congress and various presidential candidates debate the war in Iraq and proposals for withdrawing American forces, most put forth the idea that the U.S. must leave military bases behind for the training of Iraqi troops and countering terrorism. A few, like Democratic presidential hopefuls Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich, pledge to bring all the troops home.

Iraq is currently one of about 160 nations around the world that hosts a total of 700 U.S. military bases and a number of other smaller outposts. Some of these bases are a legacy of World War II and the Cold War, located in Europe and the Pacific. There are relatively few bases in Latin America and Africa . But across the globe, there is growing opposition to America 's military presence, which has sparked movements pushing for the closure of these bases.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Zoltan Grossman, a geographer and faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. who is an authority on U.S. military bases. He talks about where they have proliferated most recently, what model the U.S. is following, and how international resistance is growing.

ZOLTAN GROSSMAN: The expansion is really happening in the Middle East, stretching from Poland to Pakistan , there is a new swath of permanent-looking U.S. military bases that have been left behind by each of the interventions since 1990. The Gulf War, the Balkans War in the former Yugoslavia, the Afghan war and now the Iraq war – have left behind these sprawling installations in places where the U.S. didn’t have permanent bases before. And if you look at it collectively, it looks like a new U.S. sphere of influence right in between the EU and China , the two main economic competitors. So I think bases are central to what’s happening, perhaps even more so than oil and natural resources. It used to be you could say bases were constructed to wage wars. Now you can almost say, that the wars are being waged in order to station the bases. When you look at Pentagon statements, Pentagon documents, they see what’s left behind after the war as important, or more important, than the war itself.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You said Iran and Syria are about the only countries left in the Middle East, in that area, that don’t have U.S. bases.

ZOLTAN GROSSMAN: Right. I mean, the Gulf War left behind bases in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia . A lot have been withdrawn from Saudi Arabia because of blowback of 9/11, but there is still a U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia . The Balkans war left behind a huge base – Camp Bonstiel – in Kosovo, as well as bases in Bosnia , Hungary , other countries. The Afghan War leaving behind bases not only in Afghanistan but some of the central Asian states, kind of a secret presence in Pakistan . And the Iraq war kind of moving the large bases in Saudi Arabia into Iraq . Iraq is a substitute in a sense. And then other countries that were used as launching pads for the invasion – Romania and Bulgaria now have agreements for U.S. military bases. So if you look at it collectively and put it on a map as I have done, you see a contiguous string of countries with recent U.S. military bases stretching from Poland to Pakistan , and the only obstacles left to complete the set are Iran and Syria .

BETWEEN THE LINES: What do you think the chances are that the U.S. would leave no military bases behind if and when the war there ends?

ZOLTAN GROSSMAN: Well, the linchpin is Iraq , in the same way that in the post-Vietnam era in the 1970s there was a lot of reluctance on the part of the American people and the rest of the world for U.S. military intervention, I think the collapse of the U.S. strategy in Iraq is going to portend the same. I don’t know if that would lead to withdrawal of military bases from countries where they are now, which has happened to a limited extent in Saudi Arabia , Uzbekistan , Ecuador , the Philippines . There’s a worldwide movement of people from places like Ecuador, Okinawa, the Philippines, many other countries that are opposing the presence of U.S. military bases – this is a global movement. I think there’s a possibility that the collapse of the U.S. in Iraq could lead to a reversal of this strategy throughout the Middle East . The opposite danger is what’s been recently called in the administration the Korea Model – and that’s a permanent presence in Iraq stretching across Republican and Democratic administrations, modeled on the presence in South Korea, and I think that’s a very dangerous concept of this decades long – you know, instead of being in Iraq for four years, it would be being in Iraq for four decades. And to think somehow this would stabilize Iraq in the way that South Korea is now a rather stable, relatively prosperous country in East Asia – that’s mixing apples and oranges. Iraq is not South Korea . We’re not fighting an insurgency in the streets and villages of South Korea . It’s one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries on earth as compared to Iraq , a very, very diverse country divided along ethnic and religious lines. Washington says it’s promoting democracy in Iraq , but the Korea model involved a whole string of dictatorships to take control of South Korea and to make sure it’s not a democracy.

The U.S. says it’s following the Korea model, but it really doesn’t look like that. To me it looks like it’s following the Palestine model with checkpoints, building walls, systematic imprisonment of large swaths of the population, in order to control the population, absent, of course, civilian settlements, so it’s not an exact parallel. But I think in terms of the methodology used in the occupation, it very closely resembles Palestine . But I don’t think the U.S. can go in and say that they’re doing that, so the code word for permanent presence, instead of it being like the Israelis in the West Bank, it’s like the U.S. in South Korea . The real telling moment was the building of a wall between Sunni and Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad , and I think a lot of the European media, in particular, noticed the parallels there, with the West Bank .

Really, the anti-war movement in the U.S. shouldn’t just be about war, it shouldn’t just be about the actual violence. It should be about the occupation and the permanent presence. Even if the level of violence declines, it’s really a question of the self-determination of the Iraqi people.

Zoltan Grossman is author of the article, "New U.S. Military Bases: Side Effects or Causes of War?" For more information, visit the website of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases at www.no-bases.net

Melinda Tuhus is producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 40 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending Sept. 28, 2007. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Melinda Tuhus and Anna Manzo.

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