Bases, Empire and Global Response

[marmar]

from AfterDowningStreet:


Bases, Empire, and Global Response
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2007-03-07 20:47. Media
By Catherine Lutz, Fellowship

From a special March issue of Fellowship magazine put out in conjunction with the International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, being held in Ecuador from March 5-9. Visit www.no-bases.net for more information about the conference and to support the global movement to close foreign military bases.

Much about our current world is unparalleled in human history: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible, but just as unprecedented, is the global omnipresence of militarism: specifically, the unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the imperial ambition with which it is being deployed.

Officially, a quarter of a million U.S. troops are massed in 737 major bases in 130 countries in facilities worth $115 billion. The U.S. military owns (or rents) over 28 million acres of land and $600 billion dollars worth of real estate, and these bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Deployed from battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet corners of Curacao, Korea, and England, its domain consists of sprawling Army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers. While the bases are literally weapons depots and staging areas for warmaking and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous, and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supply, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on U.S. military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been widespread and growing rapidly, however, in vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries' security policies in other, more humane, and truly secure directions.

Military bases are "installations routinely used by military forces." They represent a confluence of labor (soldiers, paramilitary workers, and civilians), land, and capital in the form of static facilities, supplies, and equipment. Bases are just the most visible part of the larger picture of U.S. military presence overseas. This picture of military access includes U.S. military training of foreign forces, often in conjunction with the provision of U.S. weaponry, joint exercises meant to enhance U.S. soldiers' exposure to a variety of operating environments from jungle to desert to urban terrain and interoperability across national militaries, and legal arrangements made to gain overflight rights and other forms of ad hoc use of others' territory as well as to preposition military equipment there. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/19343

[PDJane]

1. The US military

is the single biggest polluter in the world.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0327-21.htm

"The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined. (1) The types of hazardous wastes used by the military include pesticides and defoliants like Agent Orange. It includes solvents, petroleum, perchlorate (a component of rocket fuel) lead and mercury. And most ominously, depleted uranium.

The health problems that have been documented as being attributable to these various toxins in military use include miscarriages, low birth weight, birth defects, kidney disease and cancer. Military pollution most directly affects those who are targeted by our weapons, soldiers and anyone living near a military base, both in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S., one out of every ten Americans lives within ten miles of a military site that has been listed as a Superfund priority cleanup site. (2)

Given where chemical and nuclear weapons are used, tested, manufactured, stored and disposed of, the burden of health impacts and environmental destruction falls disproportionately on poorer communities, people of color and indigenous communities. Women face particularly severe problems because of their sensitive reproductive tissues and children because their immune systems are not yet fully developed. (3) "