I wanted to start tonight actually not about military bases, but over the last month I'm
a civilian member of the board of directors at Coffee Strong.
The organization is called GI Voice.
And over the last month we've had an incredible sea change at Joint Base Lewis-McChord ever
since the Panjwai massacre.
The attention of the world has really been focused on Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
And a lot of the things that a lot of the Iraq and Afghan vets have been saying for
the last three years since we were founded on Election Day 2008 has come to pass and
is now very well known in the world's media.
CNN, CBS, everybody was there.
And right now we can say for certainty that the whole world is watching Lewis-McChord.
And we have an amazing situation in Olympia where we have a very large progressive anti-war
community in Olympia, Tacoma, et cetera, side by side with a very, very large military base
community.
And there are very few places in the country where you can say that that opportunity for
dialogue, for outreach is there.
And so it's a really important time.
And instead of the deployments to Afghanistan rolling down, they're rolling up.
We have 4,000, 4,000 more soldiers being deployed from JBLM over the next month or so.
And so this idea that somehow everything is going to be over in 2014, there's nothing
to worry about is really reading false.
We see the war at home around Olympia.
We see the accidents.
We see the domestic violence, the suicides, the PTSD, all of the results of war.
We see the helicopters overhead.
We hear the artillery fire.
And so the war really is at home.
And I think the more we bring out that connection and the more we stand with some of the soldiers
who are dissenting, the better for all of us.
I wanted to open with a poem related to Afghanistan.
I was teaching a program at Evergreen on food, place, and culture.
And I started researching pomegranates.
And so I wanted to share just six minutes.
It's my first PowerPoint poem.
So be patient.
I'm not sure it will work so well.
But this is from an experience I had coming back from Canada a few years ago.
It's called Pomegranates and Grenades.
Pomegranate soda tastes pretty good.
That's what I thought on a visit to Canada a few years ago.
Why not take a couple of 12 packs back home in our car?
Nothing to declare when we passed through the border, only to discover to our horror
that during the war on terror, we had smuggled in two crates of grenades.
You see, in bilingual Canada, all products have to be labeled in both English and in
French.
So it's pomegranate on one side and grenade on the other.
After perplexing why someone would name a fruit after a weapon, I did a little wikipedizing
and found out it was the other way around.
French soldiers in the 16th century named their cool new exploding ball after the French
word for pomegranate.
The grenadiers thought their invention resembled the size and shape of the fruit, whose blend
of blood red juicy seeds resembled the soon to be bloody shrapnel.
In many other languages, the pomegranate and grenade came to share similar or identical
terms.
Granada in Spanish, hence the city in Spain.
Granata in Italian, Polish and Russian, and even remon in Hebrew.
The pomegranate giveth life and the grenade taketh it away by cutting through the skin
and puncturing internal organs.
Each pomegranate has about 600 seeds encased by arils or tiny sacks of juice.
The proper way to extract the arils is to first carefully cut off the callix or crown,
second lightly score the leathery rind into quarters, third gently pull apart the fruit
to expose arils, and fourth peacefully pluck them out from the white membrane.
Preparing a pomegranate is like disarming a grenade.
If you push in the callix, you have armed the striker lever.
If you violently tear apart the fruit or cut too deeply into it, the arils will be punctured.
They will bleed red stains.
They will scream and cry.
They will die.
The original homeland of the pomegranate stretches from India to Iran through Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
It spread across the red and Mediterranean seas in ancient times and was worshiped by
all peoples who ate its succulent fruit.
To the Romans, it was pomegranatus, or seeded apple, whose tree could live up to 200 years.
To the Egyptians, it symbolized everlasting life and was buried with King Tut.
Like the Phoenicians, they grew pomegranates for religious purposes.
To the Greeks, it symbolized love and fertility and the blood of death.
Also in Aphrodite offered the sensuous fruit in marriage, and Greek brides wore its twigs
in their hair.
But Hades also tricked Persephone into eating four pomegranate seeds, thus creating the
four barren months of winter.
To the Jews, the pomegranate was a blessed fruit.
Its callix, the source of the design for King David's crown.
Its seed symbolizing the 613 mitzvot, or commandments of the Torah.
To the Christians, the seeded apple may have been the fruit that tempted Eve in the Garden
of Eden.
It stood for suffering, resurrection, and the blood of martyrs.
To the Muslims, the fruit is associated with the Garden of Paradise and was a favorite
of the Prophet Muhammad.
It is still used today in red pepper spread in Syria, tabbouleh in Turkey, and chicken
stew in Iran.
To the Americans, the pomegranate is a life-saving food and an elixir of health, an instrument
of war, and a tool of occupation.
When their towers were toppled by a flying army, the Americans invaded the homeland of
the pomegranate, bringing the fruit's namesake as part of their vast arsenal.
The grenade machine gun had its first use in Afghanistan, where it became a very popular
weapon against the Taliban.
Pomegranates themselves still grew along the Argandab River in Kandahar province, the Pashtun
heartland of the Taliban.
The strategists of US counterinsurgency looked to them as a lucrative cash crop that could
lure Afghan farmers away from growing opium poppies.
The way to curb addiction to narcotics would be addiction to export-oriented capitalism.
Instead of grenadiers harvesting blood, harvest pomegranate juice for grenadine cocktails.
It was only a matter of months before the aggressive worldwide campaign began, the war
for POM and the war on terror by the antioxidant superpower.
As the army fought insurgence in the pomegranate groves, the engorging growing industry fought
for customers in the globalized market.
Within three years, by the time I bought my soda, nearly 200 pomegranate products had
hit the shelves.
Wine and vodka, beer and salsa, soap and pills, dressing and shampoo.
The fruit's miracle properties could cure high blood pressure, cancer, and heart disease
among citizens of the heart of the empire.
They do little to heal wounds caused by hellfire missiles, cluster bombs, or shrapnel from
shiny new grenade machine guns.
In the Argandab Valley, the 5th Striker Brigade from Fort Lewis, Washington set up a base
in pomegranate country in the middle of Taliban country.
A kill team placed a grenade on an innocent civilian they killed to cover his murder.
Another striker platoon got marooned in an orchard for several days.
Bars ran so low that they turned to juice-filled pomegranates to maintain their strength.
Like the Greeks and Persians, the British and Russians before them, the American soldiers
had to sip the blood of life from the ancient pomegranate to give them the energy to hurl
the modern tools of death.
Because of the battles and the booby traps in the Argandab Valley, no one can pick the
fruit which now lies in rotting piles.
Preparing a pomegranate is like disarming a grenade.
Carefully cut off the crown.
Lightly score the rind.
Gently pull apart the fruit.
Peacefully pluck out the seeds.
Handle it with care so it doesn't explode in your face.
So I want to talk about a very much related topic of the military bases around the world.
I think being exposed to them in places like Washington State, I spent some time in the
Philippines and Europe.
I'm really convinced that warfare is not just about violence.
It's not just about killing.
It's about power and domination.
And it's just as horrific if it's done without explicit violence.
And one country's dignity and self-determination is taken over by another and it becomes something
normal.
And I think that's one of the reasons I was attracted to Native American studies.
And I really think that a lot of what we're seeing in the world today is very much along
the lines of this idea of occupation, of controlling the economy, controlling the culture of a
place and dominating it.
And I think it's important to focus on things like the economics, like the military bases,
like the resources, and not just focus on the moments when there's an invasion, when
there's bombing, when there are people being killed.
To me, the most interesting time is after a war, is after the occupation goes off the
front pages into the back pages and the real control by the United States is instituted.
So I think that that's one of the reasons that I've been studying military bases for
years and years.
But just to get a sense of the radical, radical changes that we've seen in the global network
of U.S. military bases over just the last 20 years is astounding.
And we have a number of these countries that in 1990 had no U.S. military bases.
And now it seems almost like they've been there forever, a large part of the Middle
East and Central Asia in particular, but also other parts of the world.
Next to the U.S. nuclear monopoly, there's no more universally recognized symbol of the
nation's superpower status than its overseas basing system.
Senior advisor to vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Give you a sense of the size of some of these monstrous forward operating bases or FOBs
in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.
This is a satellite photo of Iraq.
You can see this yourself on Google Earth.
We could probably go on Google Earth.
I think we have a signal.
But I just did a few snapshots from Google Earth.
And in the Tigris Euphrates River Valley, there's a little dot.
At first you don't really see it, but it's right there.
That little red box is around the dot.
Just keep your eye on there as we zoom in.
And you can see there's this kind of natural lay of the land around the river valley where
it turns into desert.
But there's this kind of artificial rectangle as we zoom in.
And that's Balat Air Base.
It's built with, it was Saddam's Air Force.
It was built with Soviet help.
And when the Americans went in, this is the premier air base and still functions because
it's the headquarters of a lot of the private contractors.
Down here is what's called KBR land or Kellogg Brown and Root, former subsidiary of Halliburton.
You can see the Chinook helicopters there on the tarmac.
You can see those little holes.
Those are mortar craters that are left by insurgent mortars.
So many of them that people who were stationed at the base, I met several, used to call
it Mortaritaville.
And they even have a song to accompany that.
So that gives you a sense of the gargantuan scale of some of these bases in places like
Iraq or Afghanistan or Kosovo.
So looking at, and I know there's the take the billions back home.
So I looked up the base structure report from 2007.
There's been one more recently, but not with as accurate data.
823 bases outside the U.S. and that doesn't count Iraq or Afghanistan.
Those are considered in war zones rather than part of the U.S. military base network maintained
at about $100 billion a year.
So when you have a little conversation with someone about the federal budget, about all
the cuts, it's a figure that kind of sticks in the mind, $100 billion a year.
There are many in U.S. territories.
There are about 4,000 on the U.S. mainland, about 700 of the major.
The 100 billion is just the ones outside the United States.
So that would be the savings if we just decided to close down all four military bases and
bring them home.
There are many purposes of military bases, not just one purpose.
Obviously it's to project force into other countries.
Also is a listening post, electronic surveillance on the surrounding area.
Pre-positioning supplies, even if you don't have a lot of personnel there.
There's supplies there ready to be used in a war.
Training, munitions testing, and all the other kinds of things that are associated with military
personnel, medical facilities, a prison, rest and recreation facilities.
What I find most important about bases is their function as a tripwire.
And by tripwire I mean something that is present that if it is positioned, it's put in place
in order that it become a controversy, in order that it can generate conflict.
So a military tripwire, for instance in South Korea, because they're U.S. military bases
in Korea, if there's a war between North and South Korea, we automatically have a role
in it because we already have bases there.
It's not a matter of invading from the United States.
A political tripwire is one, and Philippines is a very good example, all through the 80s
and 90s.
It cements U.S. interests in that country.
So if there's any kind of fundamental social change going on in that country, it has to
be squashed because it might affect the status of the bases.
Or if there's a dictator who's repressing his own people, that might be to the detriment
of the U.S. military bases as well, and that dictator might have to be held back.
But the primary interest of the United States is to defend the bases and will interfere
in internal politics in order to do so.
It's obviously easier, as we saw in Panama.
I visited Panama a couple years ago and saw the former U.S. military bases there.
It's obviously easier to invade a country if you already have bases there.
You just roll right out of the front gate instead of just having to drop in a pair of
troops.
And so I really do believe that one of the reasons for foreign military bases is to win
popular support in the United States for intervention with the message of we've got to protect our
troops, our people are there, we have to do something.
And I think that that's deliberate, conscious, not just a side effect.
We never ask for permission from any of the countries that we sent down these militaries.
Well, we do.
We do, but the question is who, and I'll get to that, who do we ask permission from?
And if it's a dictatorship that doesn't have popular support, if it's an elite that really
only represents a tiny fraction of the population, those are the people who give the permission,
much like how the World Bank or IMF interacts with the country.
It's much like the U.S. military interacts.
But there are obviously, and there's quite a bit of exposure on this, in particular an
author named Cynthia Enloe, that if you really want to see the dynamics of U.S. military
bases both abroad and at home, I think she's the best scholar of the interaction, especially
of women and militarism, but in particular military bases.
And you can see the economic gap between the Americans and the local population, the racial
attitudes, usually racism by Americans towards the local people.
In some instances in Europe, the other way around.
Racism directed towards American GIs, African American, Latino, or other GIs who are put
in an all European environment.
The dangers, the risks of explosions from unexploded ordnance, environmental contamination,
et cetera.
The crimes that are directed by U.S. military personnel towards local women and girls in
particular and how if a Marine is accused of rape, instead of being put on trial in
that country, they're pulled out and perhaps court-martialed in U.S. territory or perhaps
not.
And that's under the SOFA or the Status of Forces Agreement.
When I was in the Philippines, I was just amazed by the scale of the prostitution industry
and how women have been systematically prostituted, not as some accidental side effect of having
a lot of soldiers there, but as part of the arrangement worked out with the host businesses
and host government.
So this is what I want to talk about is kind of the geography of U.S. military bases and
how in particular in this strategic area of the Middle East, it's changed radically over
the last 20, 25 years.
In 1989, these were the only host countries for U.S. military bases in the region.
Turkey, Greece, Somalia had a naval base that was Soviet, was turned over to the Americans.
A lot of oil the British had pulled out, but not a big U.S. military presence.
Since 1990, we've had a series of wars that have left behind a whole string of permanent
military bases in this region that previously had not had military bases.
And I guess the question should be asked, are these bases being built to wage wars by
the United States or is the United States waging wars in order to leave behind these
military bases as a political, military, and economic cementing of U.S. influence in this
strategic area?
So the military bases that we leave behind are as important as the wars themselves.
And I think that each of these wars, it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or a Democratic
administration, this is through the Bush administrations, through the Clinton administration, through
the Obama administration, seeing the stationing of the bases not only to wage the wars, but
using each of the wars, not necessarily planning it out in advance, it's not a conspiracy theory,
but looking at each of these wars as a convenient opportunity to station these bases and leave
them behind after the war is over.
American vital interests in the central region are longstanding with over 65% of the world's
oil reserves located in the Gulf states of the region, from which the U.S. imports nearly
20% of its needs, Western Europe 43%, and Japan 68%, the international community must
have free and unfettered access to the region's resources, the head of central command.
So it isn't a matter of the oil from the region is vital to American interests.
Whenever you hear about this idea of domestic energy independence, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, not very much of our oil actually comes from the Middle East, it comes from places
like Canada, Mexico, West Africa, very little of it comes from the Middle East.
What actually the U.S. role in the Middle East in terms of oil is in terms of getting
the profits from the oil, and it's primarily Western Europe and Japan and now increasingly
China that are the ones dependent, particularly Japan that doesn't have domestic energy resources
of its own, is very dependent on Persian Gulf oil.
So as far back as the Gulf War, Jacques Chirac in France correctly summed it up, he said
it's not that the Americans want the oil so they can use the oil, it's so they can control
the spigot of oil for their emerging economic competitors, which is the European Union and
Japan and China.
So when we see the Gulf War, to think, well, I think people, my students don't even know
that the Gulf War happened.
They know about the Iraq War, but they don't know about the Gulf War in 1991.
When you think about the blowback then, it was the Kobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that
was attacked by Al-Qaeda.
It wasn't so much the war itself that generated that blowback, it was the presence of the
bases still in Saudi Arabia that generated the resentment that led to the formation of
Al-Qaeda.
And I'm not going to get into all of the theories about Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda came out of the war in Afghanistan, really the Americans supporting the Mujahideen
against the Soviets, and it was the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and
support for Israel that created the huge scale resentment that I think was exploited by Al-Qaeda.
But after the war, after the Gulf War in 1991, the invasion of Kuwait and southern Iraq,
this was the situation where you had a cluster of bases set up, Saudi Arabia, you had the
Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, you had air base in Qatar, you had United Arab Emirates Oman,
and the U.S. has pulled back because of this blowback from much of Saudi Arabia that the
U.S. still has a presence in Saudi Arabia.
There's still communications bases, there are still Saudi bases used by the United States
that hasn't abandoned those.
So this was the cluster left behind by the Gulf War.
The Yugoslav Wars, the series of interventions in both Bosnia and Kosovo left behind a series
of small bases in the NATO zone of Bosnia and a very large, and several of my students
at Evergreen who are veterans have been stationed at Camp Bondsteel, which is not only to have
a U.S. presence in that sector in Kosovo, which is the point of contention between Serbs
and Albanians, but also a lot of them have been stationed at Camp Bondsteel, this enormous
sprawling site, before they're deployed to the Middle East.
So it's the stepping stone, this lily pad strategy that's being utilized.
So this was the cluster left behind after the Yugoslav Wars or Balkan Wars in an air
base in Hungary, bases in Bosnia, bases in Kosovo, for a while a presence in Macedonia
and Albania, so in southeastern Europe as well.
The Afghan War, launched in November of 2001, has left behind a large number of forward
operating bases throughout the country, in particular in the Pashtun South, which is
the heartland of the Taliban, and really stepping into that very complex ethnic geography.
We also, of course, have Afghanistan as a transit point for the new great game of oil
and gas pipelines coming out of the Caspian Sea basin, and several of the figures involved
in the Afghan War have been actually figures with UNICAL Corporation, so even though it's
not rich in oil like Iraq, Afghanistan still plays a role in the game of oil and natural
gas.
When the Afghan conflict is over, we will not leave Central Asia.
We have long-term plans and interests in this region, and its countries will be given assistance
in exchange for concrete steps, like having these air bases in Afghanistan.
I was actually amazed, one of my students in Wisconsin in 2002 had been stationed at
Bagram and she learned more about me in my class, and I didn't even know that much about
Afghanistan at that point.
She learned more for me in my class than she had learned from the Air Force before she
was deployed.
She didn't even know the ethnicity of the people who were around that air base.
She didn't know the cities that were nearby.
They deliberately keep people in the dark in a systematic way.
This is the cluster that was left behind after Afghanistan, a series of semi-secret bases,
air bases or parts of air bases in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, which
is very interesting.
It's actually a country that has had both US and Russian military bases right next to
China, of great concern to China.
In Uzbekistan, the dictator massacred a large number of people in the city of Andijan in
2005, and the US actually objected for once.
It was so blatant, and that dictator temporarily pulled out the bases.
There's a similar situation in Kyrgyzstan where the US pulled out, at least for a while,
it's hard to tell whether they've been kicked out of there.
There's a whole series of US military bases around the world that have been kicked out.
Of course, Iraq War, and I put a lot of question marks.
I think the question marks would go from there to the wall if the Iraq War has really ended
in 2011.
The whole reason for the war is to get American troops into the region to put pressure on
other governments.
This is going to be the main American military base in that region.
I think that that has come to pass to some extent.
Even though you have the ground forces supposedly having pulled out, you have a large number
of private contractors.
Most of the JBLM soldiers are still being deployed to Kuwait.
There's nothing in any of the agreements that says the US can't use drones in Iraq or bomb
insurgent positions in Iraq.
Watch for that kind of warfare, that kind of technical warfare to be continuing.
Even Jimmy Carter said, the reason that we went to Iraq was to establish a permanent
military base in the Gulf region.
I've never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi
people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in
Iraq.
Now, remember back to when we were talking about gender and about social costs.
It was really the insistence by the Iraqi Shia opposition of Muqtada al-Sadr that the
United States has to renounce immunity of its troops when they commit crimes.
That caused the Iraqi parliament to say, you have to pull out your most explicitly military
troops.
What's happened now is that the private contractors, and in 2009 the number of contractors surpassed
the number of soldiers, and they are not under the military.
It's true, Department of Defense has pulled out almost all its people.
The command for the private contractors is the State Department, isn't the Department
of Defense.
Hillary Clinton, who's giving the orders for the armed personnel in Iraq, not the Pentagon.
The major bases, six major bases that are under the Iraqi flag now, but where there's
still American Special Forces operations, private contractors operations, that's still
happening.
Just fill in the map a little bit.
This was the situation in 1989 I showed you.
After the Gulf War, you see Saudi Arabia in the Gulf States hosting bases.
After the Yugoslav wars, you see in southeastern Europe, number of bases.
After the Afghan war started, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia.
The Iraq war, not only in Iraq, but also now in Romania, Bulgaria, to some extent Poland.
There are also bases being built.
You can see on this map why there's so much attention, beyond simply the fact that their
governments are repressing protesters.
Even before that, there was a huge amount of attention and pressure on Iran and Syria.
Because if Iran and Syria, Iran as it did under the Shah, if they ended up hosting US
military bases, if the current regime was toppled and a new government was put in that
welcomed in US bases like the Shah did, that would complete the contiguous belt of US military
bases from Poland to Pakistan.
Contiguous US military sphere of influence, which also ends up being a US economic sphere
of influence.
So Iran and Syria would maintain this US sphere of influence between the European Union, one
emerging economic competitor of the United States, and China and Japan, the two economic
poles to the east that are in competition with the United States.
So it's almost like, I tell my friends, it's almost as if you have all of Johnny Cash's
CDs except for two, right?
And you want those last two.
There's been so much effort to build up, to have a permanent presence in this region between
Asia and Europe and Russia.
And the two obstacles that are left are Iran and Syria.
Yeah, and this really comes from analysis by John Stockwell.
And that is not necessarily that each of these dictators was financed, supported with arms,
although a heck of a lot of them were, if you look at Saddam, at Noriega, the ones who
were later toppled because they turned against the United States.
But it's really who's in the media, who is put out there as the enemy who is going to
justify this huge military budget.
It used to be easy, the Soviet Union.
They have missiles aimed at our cities.
They're pretty easy to demonize.
But since the fall of the Soviet Union, what I found is there's usually one Middle Eastern
dictator and one Latin American dictator or rebel movement of some sort that's put forward.
Latin American dictators haven't worked too well.
Nicaragua was hard to demonize.
Venezuela, Chavez has won a lot of elections, kind of hard.
But I think around the time of the Iran hostage crisis, they started test driving the Muslim
enemy and that worked a lot better.
And so I think since then, there's always been Iran or somebody else that's put forward
as the enemy.
And I think that in many cases, the attention and demonization of some of these dictators
actually prolonged them in power because they were able, like the case of Cuba is a good
one where they're able to say, our economic problems, that's not our fault.
It's not the fault of the Cuban government.
It's the fault of the United States that's launched an embargo for many years.
And to some extent, that's true factually.
And so you have an ability of someone like Noriega, like Saddam, to stay in power when
they're demonized.
So I think that you see this pattern over time.
That some of the ones who have been the most demonized are the ones who end up staying
in power the longest, kind of counterproductive.
So I think in a lot of these cases, we saw opportunities to prevent wars before they
happened.
And we all went through it with Iraq.
There are all these arguments to go to war because of famine, because of humanitarian
reasons, because we need to catch a terrorist, because the country might be constructing
nuclear chemical weapons.
But the drive towards war seemed inexorable, no matter what the protests were.
And I think that the stationing of military bases is one of the reasons for this, because
the powers that be knew that these wars could lead to a more permanent presence, a military
presence, political control, economic presence.
And so there really weren't necessarily logical reasons or logical rationales for these wars.
It was decided that they should be done for other reasons, seizing the opportunities.
And I think that when we saw how long the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretched on,
and for that matter, the series of interventions in Somalia, failing to capture, kill bin Laden
for many, many years, was convenient as well.
Because as soon as they captured Saddam, the Shias in Iraq, who before were somewhat neutral,
really turned against the US occupation.
And we now see that since the killing of bin Laden, the rationale, not only in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, but even among the US public, has really collapsed for the intervention
in Afghanistan.
For most Americans, that was the reason we went in.
Now it's over.
Now it's time to get out.
And I hear that conversation over and over again.
So I think that they held off on victory in many of these cases because they wanted to
cement that influence, either through military bases or dominating the economies.
So just in conclusion, I want to go through using the analysis of kind of seeing the more
permanent domination of a country after the war as one of the reasons for a war.
We can obviously look at Iran and Syria as the foci now, whether or not it's about a
nuclear program, whether or not it's about the very real human rights violations, the
massacres really going on in Syria.
There are massacres of protesters going on in Bahrain, in Yemen.
But you don't see those on the front pages whatsoever.
It's really Syria that's a focus right now.
And same with Iran, the targeting of Iran.
I think that when it comes to the very complex question of what would be the future, the
ideal future of Palestine in the eyes of the U.S., I think there is a faction that is Israel
right or wrong.
I think it's also important to look at the possibility that there would be some kind
of a settlement in the future.
The CIA has played a large role, both in Israel and the Palestinian authority.
And I think there are some within the U.S. government that would like to see some kind
of U.S. role, permanent role, some even military bases or a military presence in the West Bank
in particular as part of some kind of settlement.
So that's something to think about whenever you hear about peace.
Peace is great, but then is peace also becoming accompanied by greater domination?
And so this is one of the things to be thinking about.
We're already at war.
It's not just drones.
There are special forces raids in both Somalia and Yemen.
There's been bombing.
There have been ground attacks.
So the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have expanded to Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in a very
systematic way.
And we don't hear about it because Americans aren't being killed.
And I think that's one of the tragedies is when you don't have Americans being killed,
but you have foreign civilians being killed, the media doesn't pay as much attention.
I think many Americans don't pay as much attention.
I think there are possibilities also along the oil and gas pipelines in both Georgia
and Azerbaijan of more direct U.S. influence.
In the Philippines, where the U.S. was kicked out of the bases in the early 90s, there's
now a very systematic attempt under the Visiting Forces Agreement and the stationing of trainers
against Muslim rebels in the south in Mindanao to have the U.S. get back into the Philippines.
And I think that is happening now.
And there's quite a large movement growing in the Philippines against that.
And of course, we see the instability just this week, possibility of renewed conflict
between North and South Korea, and a huge movement in South Korea against U.S. naval
bases, air bases, that has been quite successful in winning public support in South Korea among
farmers, among youth.
You see in Okinawa quite a powerful movement.
And so you really do see some successes in mobilizing people against these bases.
And Jeju Island in particular, where farmers have been opposing a Navy base.
And on the mainland, where farmers oppose the expansion of a base, not very successfully,
but still, the U.S. is not popular in South Korea like it used to be, or seemingly popular.
I think less so, I think Colombia, there's been a whole counterinsurgency campaign by
the United States, which is becoming more unpopular among Colombians.
In a sense, if you remember the 80s, Colombia is the new El Salvador, and Venezuela is the
new Nicaragua.
It's really not that much different.
And Chavez does seem to have some more stability than I would have thought, having been targeted
so much by the United States.
I think that the new place to really look is Africa, with AFRICOM.
And I think that the intervention in Libya and the interventions in Somalia have been
really to justify the existence of AFRICOM, or the AFRICA Command, which is headquartered
in Germany, but I'm sure will be headquartered very soon in Tripoli.
And you have a whole series of U.S. exercises of arming of the regimes in North Africa.
So the last thing I want to talk about is kind of the future, the positioning of new
bases.
And this comes out of the Rumsfeld Doctrine that's been taken up by, was taken up by Gates,
is taken up by Panetta.
And this is the idea of more small forward deployments and base access agreements.
They know how unpopular it is to have these large communities of Americans move in to
another country and kind of dominate the culture and the economy around these base communities.
And so they want smaller bases.
They want just the soldiers or airmen or marines themselves and not their families to join
them.
And so this is what we're seeing at Coffee Strong is more families are split up by deployments
than used to be the case.
More use of civilian contractors, more logistics and positioning supplies, less sprawling,
less visible kind of presence.
And this is what Rumsfeld called the lily pad strategy.
And also to kind of use the shell game to move around bases from places where they're
very unpopular, like Germany, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, South Korea, Okinawa, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan,
and to move them in places either where they're popular, which isn't very many places, or
where the governments at least support them.
So places like Romania, Kuwait, the Philippines, U.S. possessions like Guam and Hawaii.
If they're kicked out of Korea or Okinawa, have them go to Hawaii or Guam.
Peru or Colombia instead of Ecuador or Panama instead of Ecuador.
So we see these very powerful movements in Okinawa.
And when they're successful, the bases, the marines and the facilities are moved to a
U.S. position like Guam.
If there's opposition in Guam, they end up getting sent to Hawaii.
And so the shell game of not only pitting these different territories against each other,
but different anti-war and anti-bases movements against each other is a definite strategy
of the United States.
And that's why it's so important to have international unity and not just to say, not in my backyard.
So what John Lindsay Poland and I, the last thing I want to show you is we have a Google
Earth site where you can actually download a database and superimpose it on Google Earth
and show where the U.S. military bases are and be able to zoom in and actually identify
those bases.
So you can get that at the Transnational Institute.
You could also email me.
I could give you a direct link.
I could show you, I think we're online, I think, too.
And the other thing that we're doing is Militarism Watch, which is really building research skills
to help with demilitarization activism.
So one of my students, for instance, was looking at the use of depleted uranium at Joint Base
Lewis-McChord.
There are quite a few people who are doing Freedom of Information Act requests who are
trying to look at some of the social situations around various bases or just looking at military
budgets.
There's a real need.
And if there are people who are either in academia or just want to do things on their
own, this is something that's very useful.
There are very few people doing this kind of work.
And the military, believe it or not, actually reveals a lot if you know where to look.
And so it's one of the things that people can do on a low level.
You can do it as an individual.
You can do it as a small group, is to do research, either at the base near you or of bases elsewhere
or of weapons sales to a particular country and kind of pierce that veil of secrecy that
we see out there.
A really good source, I think one of the best books that's out there on bases is an anthology
edited by Katherine Lutz called The Bases of Empire.
And I've used that in my class, The People's Geography of American Empire, because it not
only gets into the depressing stuff about domination of a country or the environmental
contamination or the assaults that have taken place against civilian women around bases,
it also gets into some of the more hopeful things where we have seen in places like the
Philippines, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, Panama, many countries have ejected U.S. military
bases.
And there's been quite a successful movement even against U.S. installations like radar
in Poland and Czech Republic, places where you wouldn't expect it.
And so there really is a global network.
If you go to NoBases.org, the international network for the abolition of foreign military
bases, that's a real goal.
It's really easy for people to understand.
No foreign military bases.
No military bases by any country outside its own borders.
It's a pretty simple idea.
Would save us a hundred billion bucks a year.
And it probably would cut down on the number of wars that are happening.
Do I teach that at Evergreen?
I do teach it at Evergreen.
But I do it in a way where there's two sides and where there's debate.
I'm giving you my opinion.
I think I would say it with the facts.
Sure.
I mean we could look at the military budget.
Actually what my class has done is really interesting.
We do a little workshop.
How would you build an alliance around a military base?
I think we use a fictional town called Okikoma, which is a cross between Okinawa and Tacoma.
And we say, you know, who are the people who are affected by this military base?
So there are some students who are the environmental groups, some who are the women's groups, some
who are the workers who work on the base.
There are some, yeah, they're role play.
There are some who are local business leaders.
There are some who are soldiers or military families.
So that community you have around any military base in the world.
And what is it that you can talk with each other about?
What is it that might be a basis for dialogue between all those different people who come
from completely different places, completely different interests?
I've done that workshop now three times, and it's always the same result.
It's very interesting.
Health.
Health is the first thing that creates a common dialogue.
So the common environment, which is often contaminated around a base, and also the social
costs, the stress that is put on, in particular, women in the community, the kind of working
conditions that soldiers have to work under.
It's very dangerous work.
There are a lot of accidents.
So health and safety seems to be the one common denominator.
And I see that in some places in the world, it's been quite successful.
Like in Puerto Rico, they got rid of a naval bombing range by using that safety, health
and safety argument.
No chemicals, no unexploded ordnance, bombs flying around.
That's bad for kids.
And that's how they've gotten rid of some of these bases, is using that very human argument.
Do you have any thoughts on how our situation is similar, because we're occupied by so many
large bases nearby?
And if it's different from the Philippines, then in what way?
Well let me just give you one example in our area.
The Nisqually Nation, the Nisqually Tribe, which is down between Tacoma and Olympia.
And they were a major, they figured in the treaty rights campaign.
They had quite a large reservation, but they lost 70% of it in 1917 to form Fort Lewis.
Nisqually means people of the prairie, Squally Obsh.
And their prairie, where they gathered camas bulbs, where the women gathered camas bulbs,
and they harvested other root crops, and they had horses out there on the prairie.
That prairie is now the firing range at Fort Lewis, where they test the strikers, the
howitzers.
It's a very militarized area.
They used to shoot over the reservation into Thurston County, and the Nisqually very much
objected to that.
They objected when the army ran its tanks through salmon spawning areas, when they destroyed
part of the prairie, the groundwater became contaminated.
So Nisqually, I think, probably played a role in the canceling of a proposed missile system
that would have gone in at Fort Lewis.
So you can see the colonization of Native America was the template, was the model for
the U.S. spreading its military, its imperial domination abroad.
And you can really see that in the Philippine-American War, that movie by John Sayles about the Philippines
called, I can't remember the name of it, but it really makes the point that the soldiers
were told.
This is kind of a continuation of the Indian Wars.
And you can really see in the book Facing West, you can see how Vietnam, both the Philippines
and later Vietnam, were a westward extension of the Indian Wars and how the people were
understood.
And I think when you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, you hear all the time about Indian country,
what was Bin Laden called?
He was called Geronimo.
And so you really have the colonization of North America, of the nations of North America.
The Army forts were military bases and are military bases.
That that was the structure that was exported to other countries.
So we really can understand what's going on in these countries and how there's a kind
of a global war on tribes.
And all the talk about tribes in Afghanistan and Iraq is really modeled, it goes back into
that Western American consciousness about who are the inferior people and who are the
superior people.
So I think studying here really helps shed some light on what's going on over there.
And studying over there in the Middle East is a really good insight into our own history.
And what's weird is that in the Pentagon, they're now studying the Indian Wars and how
they divided and conquered tribes in order to study how they can do the same thing, in
particular in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And they're doing a lot of that kind of study.
So we're talking something like a trillion dollars a year, and the Iraq War itself by
Joseph Stiglitz is five trillion now, or I was in three trillions.
The consensus was the American Empire not will come up, but already is coming up.
Yeah, I think definitely all empires have overextended themselves geographically, economically,
and we can go back to the Roman Empire.
And we have two very recent examples, the British Empire, where Britain has become more
or less a second rate power, kind of licking its wounds and doesn't have the global reach
that it used to, but it's more of a normal country than it used to be.
Russia, what the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 wasn't just the end of the Soviet Union
and the end of the process that started in 1917 of the Russian Revolution, it was the
collapse of the Russian Empire that went back centuries, and I don't think many Americans
understand that.
And now you have Russia really examining what is, who are we, if we're not this large empire
and we're becoming a normal country.
And I think when we talk as the peace and justice movement about the future, we really
should look at plausible scenarios that I think most people can grasp.
And I don't think most people can grasp the sudden collapse of the United States or even
of the American Empire, but I think that they can envision the United States becoming a
normal country.
And I think that that maybe is a way that we can phrase it, is do we want to always
have these wars that are not only killing foreign civilians but killing our own, and
do we want to have our economy tied to this very shaky and risky proposition, or do we
want to try and become one of the 200 countries in the world?
And there are so many advantages to doing that.
So I don't think it's a utopian vision.
I think it's something that's very plausible.
And I think the strongest argument for it is that it's underway whether we like it or
not, and so we better get used to it.
And so I'm actually in a strange way, I'm scared to death of a war in Iran, but in a
strange way with the young people that I've met and their attitude towards war, and I'm
not just talking about it evergreen.
I think that that idea of the United States becoming a normal country without imperial
reach is attractive right now, with the economy the way it is, with our culture the way it
is.
I think it's a window of opportunity we haven't had in my lifetime.
Okay, well thank you very much.