Rethinking America

The Imperial Homeland in the 21st Century

Jeff Maskovsky, Ida Susser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594513848
• eBook ISBN: 9781317252863
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How has domestic life been reorganised to accommodate the new U.S. imperial ambitions? What are the consequences of empire for the people living here "at home"? This new collection of essays answers these questions by exploring the cultural, political, and economic shifts that are now under way in the United States. Encouraging a radical rethinking of what the country is today, this book highlights the connection of U.S. imperial strategies to the production of insecurity, uncertainty, and deepening inequality at home. Rethinking America also explores the instabilities and contradictions of the new imperialism from the unique vantage point of the newly emerging U.S. "homeland." Comprised of work from leading figures in the field of U.S. ethnography, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the changes taking place in the United States in the early years of the twenty-first century.

PART I
Human Rights and Imperialism at Home and Away

1
U.S. Foreign Military Bases

The Edge and Essence of Empire

Catherine Lutz

It has become permissible in just the last few years to use the word empire in reference to the United States. In the wake of Washington’s very visible gestures in Afghanistan and Iraq, debate has begun to flourish on the nature, efficacy, staying power, vulnerabilities, and morality of this empire (Foster 2003; Goff 2004; Hardt and Negri 2001; Harvey 2003; Hudson 2003; Lutz 2006; Todd 2003; Wallerstein 2003). However radically their evaluations of empire differ, most scholars and pundits agree that the global ambitions of successive post–World War II U.S. administrations, as well as the reach and lethality (if not the efficacy) of their military arm, are unprecedented by orders of magnitude. The mechanisms of that reach are embodied and launched from the approximately 5,311 current official U.S. military facilities. Looking just at the bases of significant size, there are 250,000 U.S. troops stationed at 823 major bases in 39 countries and 86 in U.S. territories, in facilities valued at $464 billion.¹ The U.S. military owns or rents over 28 million acres of land, on which it stores huge caches of weapons with enough explosive power to extinguish all life on earth many times over. The inventory involves not just its nuclear arsenal but also an array of chemical, biological, and “conventional” weapons, such as daisy cutter and incendiary bombs.

To official base accounting should be added the significant foreign military presence accomplished through the International Military Education and Training, or IMET, program, Visiting Forces Agreements and the establishment of bases under other names, such as “logistics sites,” or in secret. Also to be included are the hundreds of bombers, submarines, battleships, and spy satellites constantly on the move around the globe, as these military “platforms” also obviously serve base functions. Adding those troops not rostered in official U.S. bases, there are U.S. military personnel deployed in approximately 130 countries, engaged in combat, peacekeeping, and foreign military training as well as their own training exercises. From the Pentagon’s perspective, these bases are crucial to achieving “power projection,” “forward deterrence,” and the ability “to impose the will of the United States and its coalition partners on any adversaries” (DoD 2003, 17).

In this chapter, I ask two questions. Where do these military bases or base equivalents stand in relation to the projects of empire? And how do the bases link people in the rest of the world to U.S. citizens and to home front economies, politics, and culture? My preliminary answers to these questions are based in several different research projects, the first being fieldwork around U.S. military bases in North Carolina, Guam, the Philippines, Korea, and Okinawa (Lutz 2009). In those locations, I focused on the impact of the bases on local communities, as well as the movements that have sprung up in protest. The second research focus is a set of interviews with returning dissident Iraq War veterans, whose recruitment and use speak to the ways in which the overseas deployment of young men and women from the United States in the projects of empire ultimately creates change on the domestic front.²

I will begin by describing the U.S. overseas military presence and projects. Much of the U.S. global basing structure consists of the “spoils” of World War II, and some of the Spanish-American, Korean, and Gulf Wars too. A striking number of these facilities, however, are the result of the expansion of the U.S. network of bases since 2000. They include new bases in Ecuador, Aruba, Curaçao, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, as well as Kuwait, Qatar, Kosovo, Turkey, Bulgaria (Magdoff et al. 2002), and, of course, Iraq; there, for example, Camp Ironhorse is the new name of one of Saddam Hussein’s lush residences in Tikrit. Since September 11, 2001, the sheer number of soldiers sent into combat areas abroad has risen dramatically. Of the 155 combat battalions in the U.S. Army, for example, 17 were deployed before and 98 were deployed after 9/11.

The bases have an enormous and deleterious local impact, something that has been documented and protested by an unprecedented recent global networking of diverse social movements. The movements have made a variety of arguments against the bases, including environmentalist, nationalist, religious, pacifist (or conscience-based), and anti-imperialist ones. Some of the most powerful—and mobilizing—arguments have focused on the high rates of crimes against girls and women committed by U.S. soldiers. Feminist antibase activists make the point that these acts represent war crimes based in patriarchy and/or militarism, whereas other more nationalist activists tend to interpret this type of violence against women as crimes against national honor and sovereignty understood as masculine. Antibase protest was muted in the pre-1991 period by the cultural and political climate of the Cold War’s anticommunism and by the authoritarianism of many of the allied regimes hosting U.S. bases, as in South Korea and the Philippines. These factors not only violently repressed the development of the movements but also shaped their focus on what was seen as the prior but interconnected problems of democratization in South Korea and the Philippines, and of decolonization in Guam.

The three major concentrations of U.S. forces in the Asia Pacific region are in South Korea, with 77 facilities; Guam, with 21, covering a third of the island’s land area; and Japan, with 52, 75 percent of which are concentrated in the Okinawa prefecture. U.S. bases were ejected from the Philippines, a fourth important site, in 1992, but several thousand U.S. soldiers have been reintroduced through a controversial 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement that was meant to reestablish a permanent presence of U.S. soldiers, this time with much wider access to the country as a whole. After September 11, 2001, the United States reinvigorated its efforts to regain substantial military access to the Philippines via opening what was called “the second front in the war on terror” in Mindanao. The Pentagon’s strategic reposturing of its forces since 2003 has been to spread troops out from their Cold War positions. Previously, the focus was on Europe, Korea, and Japan but it has now shifted to elsewhere in Asia and Africa, where the Pentagon is concerned about future threats from terrorists and from an ascendant China.

ARE THESE BASES THE EDGE OR ESSENCE OF EMPIRE?

It is commonly assumed that overseas U.S. military forces are the edge of empire: they are the armed guard of the advancing civilizing mission, standing at the current limits of “the free world,” whether in policing, state-defensive, or expeditionary posture. They have been empire’s edge in the additional sense that they stand at the fuzzy border of the empire’s legitimacy or its control of shipping lanes and its ability to influence events. This situation is clearest in the case of newly established bases that bring U.S. hegemony into new, frontier-like areas. They are in areas that were off limits to the United States during the Cold War, such as the oil pipeline states bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan and in areas of Latin America and the Caribbean in which the United States has not had military forces since World War II. “Edginess” also characterizes the political climate, as the processes of land taking, labor management, and sexual exploitation are most incendiary at their beginnings. So, large protests have been organized in South Korea as the United States redeploys its troops from near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) to expanded bases farther south. As the Korean Defense Ministry began to evict a group of rice farmers from their land near Camp Humphries outside Pyongtaek in 2006, students, workers, and other farmers descended on the town in a faceoff with thousands of riot police and soldiers.

However, bases can also be seen as the essence of empire insofar as they engage what are called host nations in an intricate imperial relationship. That is, the bases directly (not just through the U.S. embassy or U.S. corporate personnel and activities) help structure a nation’s aboveground and underground economies, interprovincial politics, and other aspects of everyday life in and far beyond the base community itself. Such a notion seems belied by appearances. The bases look like extremely bounded institutions. They have walls and fences topped with concertina wire and gates designed with multiple baffles to foil intruders. Moreover, there are radical disjunctures between the appearance of the manicured lawns and ferocious military equipment inside and the everyday commercial urban setting and/or poverty outside.

But the daily operation of the military involves elaborate interactions, negotiations, and ultimately controlling exchanges based in the practical reliance on or exploitation of local land, capital, and labor. The Pentagon must acquire and retain massive amounts of land; it must feed, house, and provide sexual services for its troops (though it is not, of course, official Pentagon policy to provide sex to soldiers, research has shown that the United States works with local elites to permit prostitution around bases [Moon 1997]); and it must solve its perennial labor shortages by hiring locals. These activities affect immigration policy and practice. In South Korea, a special type of “entertainment” visa has been developed to allow for the influx of foreign women brought in to work the bars around base areas. These special work visas, which have been given to large numbers of trafficked Russian and Filipino women, legitimate and facilitate prostitution around the bases and elsewhere in the country. Local officials and U.S. base commanders develop close relationships that influence local government decisions in a variety of areas, including which laws to enforce (such as laws against underage drinking, prostitution, and environmental contamination).

The bases also structure national budgets because the host state in many cases pays substantially toward U.S. military operations. Japan, for example, covers most of the costs of U.S. bases on its soil, contributing $1.2 billion per year for employees, construction, land rents, and so on (Marine Corps PAO, Okinawa). (Ultimately, these subsidies affect Pentagon decisionmaking about where to position troops, as costs per soldier vary considerably from post to post.) Both South Korea and Japan are required to provide land for the United States and to build its facilities. These relationships have been much more visible in the recent past as base relocations have been announced in both areas. The South Koreans have asked for the removal of Yongsan Garrison, a huge U.S. base in downtown Seoul. (Like many Asia Pacific bases, this was an Imperial Japanese Army post prior to the end of World War II.) To do so, the United States has demanded that the South Korean government find, purchase, and make available alternative base land near Osan, farther south. The South Koreans have balked, however, at several demands. It is obviously a difficult task to get access to often extremely extensive off-base areas for jungle or urban training, flying, and bombing runs involving hundreds of daily flights in and out of some bases. Delays in gaining access have occurred as people have organized to resist the new land takings. In the Philippines, a planned repeat of joint exercises in Mindanao was sidelined after an international peace mission was sent to Basilan to document the activities of U.S. troops in 2002. In Nago, Okinawa, a yearlong tent city protest opposed construction of a new airfield planned for a sensitive offshore coral reef. The protestors’ small boats ran interference with the survey vessels that had begun work preparatory to base building, and the protestors ultimately forced the United States and Japan to abandon the project.³

The bases’ intimate daily relationship with local political leaders and other people—some of them impoverished and vulnerable—reinforces the governing cultural and affective rules of empire. These rules include expressing appropriate feelings of gratitude for past U.S. military actions, such as the U.S. seizure of Okinawa and recapture of Guam from the Japanese at the end of World War II (Diaz 1996) or the U.S. participation in the Korean War. U.S. expectations of gratitude and resentment when it does not appear forthcoming have been at the root of tensions in the relationship. Ambiguity about whether the United States is providing a free service to the country (i.e., defending it from attack) makes the question of tangible reciprocities ambiguous as well. So, too, does belief in the insincerity of indigenous social movements or complaints about the U.S. military presence or practice; many military officials appear to believe that these are simply devices for extracting more monetary concessions from the national government. In Korea, the lack of “respect” for the nation in these base relationships is bitterly remarked on, and in Guam and Okinawa, activists refer back to the ongoing insecurity they associate with World War II memories. By some accountings, both the Japanese and U.S. armies often protected themselves before, or rather instead of, civilians.

Judicial practice is affected: a good number of Korean nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been pressuring for an amendment to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) governing the facilities available to and rules regulating the conduct of U.S. forces. Amended several times since 1966, it requires, for example, that the Korean government “furnish … without cost to the United States and make compensation where appropriate to the owners and suppliers thereof all facilities and areas and rights of way…. Korea … will hold the Government of the United States as well as its agencies and employees harmless from any third party claims which may be advanced in connection with such use.” Korea is also to provide weather information and integrate its civilian air traffic control with the U.S. military. On Okinawa, for instance, air controllers at Kadena Air Force Base (AFB) direct all air traffic into the island (except final civilian runway landing).

The inequality of the relationship between the empire and the states that have accepted its troops is blatantly evident in provisions that have emerged, as a result of intense pressure from the local social movements, to make the relationship more fair or respectful. One of the clauses of the SOFA that many Koreans have been intent on changing gives the United States exclusive jurisdiction over soldiers’ “offenses arising out of any act or omission done in the performance of official duty” (Article XXII, 3.a.ii). The most that has been conceded through past negotiations is a new clause stating that the United States will give “due consideration” to requests for local trial of soldiers who commit crimes off duty. The United States continues to decide, however, whether a given soldier was engaged in official duties when the crime occurred.

BASES AND THEIR IMPACT

Unlike in the United States, where military bases are often treated as a natural and necessary feature of the landscape, surrounding communities in Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines see the U.S. bases as a significant problem. In Guam, a small but passionate segment of the population (most especially a middle generation of Guam’s indigenous people, the Chamoru) has campaigned against the bases, even as the majority of the population appears to accept the notion that the bases are economically and politically good for the island. (The island’s long history of colonialism, the assignment of U.S. citizenship in 1950, and its American educational system—until quite recently, the Chamoru language was forbidden in schools—have helped produce this outcome.) I will briefly go through the set of these problems as antibase activists define them, including land loss, crime against women, and environmental and health damage.⁴

Land Loss

Land loss is a special concern in Guam and Okinawa: these are former or current agrarian island societies for whom the land has been key not only for livelihood but also for reproducing kin relations (Inoue 2004). In Guam, Okinawa, and, to a lesser extent, South Korea, landowners have organized themselves for the return, at a minimum, of “excess” or unused military land. (One landowner who did this received a small parcel that belon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: The Death of Neoliberalism?
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rethinking America
• Part I Human Rights and Imperialism at Home and Away
• Part II Twenty-First-Century Culture Wars
• Part III Governance in the Age of Preemptive War
• Part IV Coercion and Class in an Era of Insecurity
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors