Forum calls for social and economic justice

September 23, 2008

Empire?

Overwhelming cost?

During the 1990s, Bush family Republican insiders envisioned a quasi-empire of U.S. sway around the world. Through their Project for the New American Century, they said the only remaining superpower should forge a global network of power and influence.

During the 1990s, Bush family Republican insiders envisioned a quasi-empire of U.S. sway around the world. Through their Project for the New American Century, they said the only remaining superpower should forge a global network of power and influence.

Today, that reality partly exists, because the sun never sets on American military bases. The Pentagon lists 761 active U.S. "sites" abroad.

Officially, the Pentagon acknowledges it operates "facilities" in 39 of the world's 194 countries, but that figure does not include U.S. bases in Afghanistan or Iraq. In 2005, America had 106 bases in Iraq alone.

Tom Engelhardt compiled those figures for a Web site associated with The Nation magazine. He noted that, at its height, the Roman Empire had 37 bases to secure its domination. And during its greatness, the British Empire maintained 36 bases around the world.

Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA analyst and author of the "Blowback" trilogy of books, also decries America's "empire of bases" stretching from Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Romania to Okinawa.

Conservative writer and former Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan raises similar questions in Human Events, a conservative weekly. America's current economic crisis, Buchanan believes, will undercut taxpayer spending for foreign ventures.

"The American Empire has become a vast extravagance," he wrote. "With U.S. markets crashing and wealth vanishing, what are we doing with 750 bases and troops in over 100 countries?" He added:

"America needs a bottom-up review of all strategic commitments dating to a Cold War now over for 20 years."

Englehardt commented: "Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later ... the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad."

The "American Century" is over, Englehardt said, but "fantasy reigns in both parties where a relative upbeat view of our globally dominant future is a given."

Other nations don't feel a compulsion to run the entire world. Why does America plant military bases in so many foreign countries? Can you imagine the U.S. outrage if France or Germany tried to base troops or planes in Kentucky or Nebraska? The empire mentality doesn't mesh with modern international democracy.