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IPFS News Link • Military Industrial Complex

From the Archives of TomDispatch: America's Empire of Bases

• Truthdig

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Introduction by Nick Turse.

There's a secret world out beyond the horizon, a world of austere airstrips and shadowy commandos, a world of screens filled by streaming full-motion video of armed young men in the backlands of the planet, a world of musty storage depots and warehouses, pallets and fuel drums just waiting for sailors and soldiers and airmen to come calling. It's the American "baseworld," a huge but hidden network of far-flung outposts and tucked-away compounds stretching from North America to the Middle East, Asia to Africa. If you follow the subject, you may not be surprised by some of the sites now mentioned in connection with this empire of bases, like Romania, where a major U.S. military transit hub became fully operational last year; Senegal and Ghana, where the Marine Corps recently established "cooperative security locations"; and Bashur airfield in Iraqi Kurdistan, which was reportedly being turned into a training site for the fight against the Islamic State in 2014. You might, however, be surprised to learn that plans for each of these locales were mentioned more than a decade ago in an article by the late Chalmers Johnson.

After an ideological shift that took him from diehard Cold Warrior to anguished patriot and critic of American militarism, Johnson got in the habit of being ahead of the curve. If you had, for instance, read his groundbreaking book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire when it was published, you wouldn't have been shocked when September 11, 2001, rolled around. His 2004 article "America's Empire of Bases" shares the same profound prescience. Some, perhaps most, articles go stale days or weeks after they're published. (Some even expire before they hit the printed page or webpage.) But only now—nearly five years after his death—are we finally catching up to one of TomDispatch's greatest oracles and most eloquent writers.


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