Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (9 page)

Stu realized, however, that opportunities for acquiring such islands were rapidly disappearing as territories around the world were gaining their independence. If the United States was going to secure islands as potential base locations, it would have to move quickly to purchase them outright or win guarantees from the remaining colonial powers not to grant independence and to provide the United States with long-term basing access.

COMING TO TERMS WITH EMPIRE

From the Roman Empire to the British and French empires in the Indian Ocean and around the globe, bases have long been essential tools for securing empires and political, economic, and military control over vast lands. Prior to World War II, the United States had few bases outside its territory, although as we shall see, a series of U.S. Army forts played a critical role in enabling the westward conquest by the original thirteen states. By the end of World War II, the nation had more than 30,000 installations at more than 2,000 base sites globally.
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Today the United States has what is likely the largest collection of military bases in world history, totaling more than 5,300 globally and an estimated 1,000 bases outside its own territory of the 50 states and Washington, DC.
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Slowly, awareness has been growing about this massive deployment of U.S. forces on the sovereign territory of other nations. Many have started referring to the United States as an “Empire of Bases.”

People in the United States have long had trouble seeing their nation as an empire of any kind, given its powerful and important founding ideologies of democracy and freedom.
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Many thought that if the country was ever an empire, it was only briefly and perhaps absent-mindedly so around the 1898 Spanish-American War and the acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto
Rico, and Guam. (Interestingly, many of the founders had little trouble reconciling imperial and democratic visions of the nation: George Washington referred to the United States as the “rising American Empire.”)

Following the rapid invasion and conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, however, political scientists, historians, pundits, and others began acknowledging widely that the United States is indeed an empire.
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The notion is no longer dismissed as an accusation or conspiracy theory; debate now revolves around what kind of empire the United States has become and the legitimacy of imperialism.

Some scholars and commentators like Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff have embraced and even promoted the idea of the United States as a benign “liberal empire” or as a kind of humanitarian “empire lite.”
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Ferguson believes “many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule.” People, he suggests, would benefit under an empire “that enhances its own security and prosperity precisely by providing the rest of the world with generally beneficial public goods: not only economic freedom but also the institutions necessary for markets to flourish.”
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Ignatieff says the question “is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough.” Arguing in 2003 in support of invading Iraq, he asked, “Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world’s most inflammable region? . . . The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”
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Skeptical of such claims, others have long been critical of the U.S. Empire. They doubt that increasing U.S. power will do anything more than just that—increase the power and wealth of the United States and its economic elites. Focusing especially on the economic dynamics of U.S. Empire, revisionist historians and others have generally held that following the conquests of 1898, the United States primarily became an empire of economics, as exemplified by Open Door trade policies initiated in China after the Boxer Rebellion.
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These scholars argue that the nation largely avoided the colonialism of the European powers based on territorial expansion and direct rule over subject peoples in favor of a more discreet, nonterritorial kind of economic imperialism. Economic control and exploitation, scholars say, have largely emanated from policies of the Open Door and later the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. “The best-preferred strategy,” says geographer Neil Smith, “was to organize resource and commodity extraction through the market rather than through military or political occupation.”
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The market and the use of state power to open up capitalist opportunities became the basis for exploitation and continued imperialism, with geopolitical and military tools of only secondary importance.
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Figure 2.1 The Global U.S. Military Base Network.

Other scholars have pointed to the significance of military bases. Among them, Chalmers Johnson argues that unlike older European empires that relied on a series of colonies and direct rule over other peoples to exert their power, the United States has for the most part avoided colonial rule. Since World War II the United States has instead used its bases to exert control, influence, and economic domination over weaker nations. Bases, he and others say, have become a primary means by which the United States keeps other nations within a global political-economic order most favorable to the United States, thus maintaining its global political and economic supremacy.
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Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Air Force Undersecretary James Blaker describes the role of bases most bluntly when he says the United States came to use bases to “structure the character of other nations” and shape the future of the world.
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Harnessing all its power, the nation has, like previous empires, exerted significant and substantive control over the affairs of other nations and peoples by combining a collection of bases in other people’s lands with other forms of economic, political, and military power.

The economic power can be seen as the influence exercised over other nations through organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. The political power can been seen in the system of Cold War alliances and client regimes nurtured since World War II and in the use and manipulation of the United Nations, NATO, and other multinational organizations for political and economic ends. The military power can be seen in frequent military interventions and wars abroad including more than 200 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and the invasion of Iraq, the maintenance of the world’s most lethal nuclear and nonnuclear armed forces (with funding equaling that of all the other nations in the world combined), the deployment of military advisers and arms transfers to other nations, public displays of military force, and numerous CIA-orchestrated coups and other covert and paramilitary activities to intervene in the domestic affairs of other nations.

Exploring how the United States came to possess its 1,000 overseas bases is critical to understanding the history of Diego Garcia and requires us to turn to the earliest days of the nation and its westward expansion. As we shall see, from the first days of independence to the development of a base on Diego Garcia, bases have played an increasingly important role in the expansion of the United States and its development as an empire.
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BASES AND AN EXPANDING EMPIRE

When the thirteen North American colonies began moving toward independence from Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, the colonies’ leaders looked to the European empires as models for what the colonies might become. An “expansionist consensus” helped unify the revolutionaries around the “notion of preemptive right to the continent” and the vision of a united continental empire stretching across North America.
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(The idea that the land might rightfully belong to native groups was hardly considered.)

Fueled by such expansionist desires, surging feelings of nationalism, a growing population, fears about the other imperial powers in North America, and a government desperate to pay off its war debts by selling western lands (inconveniently occupied by Native Americans), waves of settlers and speculators moved westward after independence, pushing Indians progressively away from the east coast. According to Horsman, “land and more land” is what settlers and many state governments wanted. To the settlers, native peoples were mere obstacles “to drive out or annihilate”; their land claims were simply “invalid.”
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Assisting the process, the U.S. Army became what one scholar calls the “advance agent” and “pry bar” of Euro-American westward expansion. The Army was aided by a growing chain of forts marking the line of expansion.
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By the mid-nineteenth century, there were more than 60 major forts west of the Mississippi River, from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to the Presidio in San Francisco. Forts helped enable and protect what became a mass migration west, assisting the Army in forcing indigenous groups off their lands, into treaties, and onto “reservations.”
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Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the major native peoples in the east were forced into western reserves. Federal forts encircled the reserves to keep native peoples in and whites out, though the new reserves would soon face white encroachment. The Cherokee’s 1832 “Trail of Tears” forced march westward, during which one in four may have died, was just one example of the systematic population displacements.
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It’s estimated that the government expropriated approximately 100 million acres of land from native groups in the east alone.
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Across the continent, Indians faced starvation and the growing dissolution of their societies.
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By 1853, the United States had conquered most Native Americans, invaded and conquered large parts of Mexico, and seized or annexed Texas, the southwest, and Oregon. After the Civil War, interest in bases shifted
primarily to the Pacific and increasingly, to island bases. The nation increased its commercial capabilities in the Pacific with the establishment of coaling stations—necessary for new steamship travel—in 1857, on Jarvis Island, Baker Island, and Howland’s Island, southwest of Hawai‘i.
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In 1867, the same year that the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, the government increased its possessions in the Pacific by acquiring Midway Island. Within a decade, the United States had signed an agreement to lease a naval station in Samoa; while the Senate failed to ratify it, the United States eventually gained possession of what became American Samoa in 1899, the same year it acquired Wake Island.

In this period, the most powerful proponent for increasing the nation’s collection of island bases and building up a powerful navy to protect a growing commercial empire was naval historian Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. Called the “prophet” of the Navy by World War II Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Mahan has proved the most influential U.S. naval thinker for over a century. Based largely on an analysis of the wars between Britain and France from 1660 to the fall of Napoleon in 1812, Mahan argued that “sea power,” or the lack thereof, had determined the course of every major conflict as a result of each power’s relative ability to control the enemy’s commerce.
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Applying these historical lessons to the United States, Mahan (and soon others) argued for the maintenance of a navy equal to or greater than Britain’s, able to operate globally, and supported by new coaling stations and bases from China to Hawai‘i to the Caribbean.
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Spurred by Mahan, the Navy grew interested, beginning in the 1890s, in creating additional bases in the Pacific to support U.S. commerce in Asia. In 1894, the United States gained access to a base in Hawai‘i as part of a U.S.-supported overthrow of the local Hawai‘ian monarchy by white sugar planters and settlers. The islands maintained limited sovereignty until the United States formally annexed Hawai‘i in 1898; the annexation was realized in no small part because the growing empire needed a halfway base from which to deploy its power into Asia.
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The major movement of the United States into Asia came with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and the largest seizure of territory by the United States since the completion of its continental expansion. In what was a rapid and ignominious defeat for a once mighty empire, the United States routed Spanish forces, claiming the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and (as a “protectorate”) Cuba. The Philippines alone included more than 7,000 islands and a population of 7 million.
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Although scholars will continue to debate the motivations of President William McKinley and the nation for acquiring the distant Spanish possessions, it is beyond debate that the United States expanded its territory, and with it the basing
of military forces outside North America, in dramatic fashion. The Navy ultimately gained an indefinite lease for a base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (now the oldest U.S. base on foreign territory), control of a base in the Philippines’ Subic Bay, and bases that came with Hawai‘ian annexation. After warships again steamed eastward to stamp out the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Navy proposed to Congress the creation of additional bases in both the Far East and the Caribbean.