America's Empire of 1000+ Military Bases (listed and unlisted)

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"What luck for rulers that men do not think" -  Adolf Hitler

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Lest this seem to be the bellicose pipedream of some dyspeptic desk soldier, let us remember that the military deal of our country has never been defensive warfare. Since the Revolution, only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country has ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war. And at the rate our armed forces are being implemented at present, the odds are against our fighting one in the near future." - --Major General Smedley D. Butler, America's Armed Forces: 'In Time of Peace', 1935. 1898-1914: The Phillipines.

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Once is an anomaly; twice is the beginning of a pattern.  Right now, we’re seeing the same sequence of events for the second time in less than a decade, and it looks like the signature American way of war in our time is coming into focus. 

In 2003, when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, the Pentagon already had on its drawing boards plans for building a series of permanent mega-bases in that country.  (They were charmingly called “enduring camps.”)  Once Baghdad fell and it turned out that, Saddam Hussein or no, the U.S. was going to have to fight rather than settle in and let the good times roll, hundreds of micro-bases were added to the mega ones -- 106 of them by 2005, more than 300 in all.  Then, in 2005, Washington decided to trade in its embassy in one of Saddam’s old palaces for something a little spiffier.  In its place, on a 104-acre plot by the Tigris River in the middle of Baghdad, for at least three-quarters of a billion dollars after cost overruns, it built the largest, most expensive embassy on the planet.  It was planned for a staff of 1,000 “diplomats” with all the accoutrements of the good life and plenty of hired help.  (Even now, despite much discussion about “ending” the American role in Iraq, further plans are reportedly being made for the embassy’s staff to double.)  This was clearly to be U.S. mission control for the Greater Middle East. 

Building of this expansive kind is, of course, a staggering imperial undertaking.  It implies a global power with resources beyond measure, for which waste means nothing.  The mega-bases and the embassy were, in that sense, American wonders of the world, our own ziggurat-equivalents in Mesopotamia, right down to the multiple PXs, familiar fast food outlets, and miniature golf.  No empire had ever launched a base-building program quite like it (if, that is, you leave out the precursor to this whole experience, the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s). 

The Iraqi base-building project alone had already absorbed several billion taxpayer dollars in just the first half-year of construction in 2003.  But it did look like a one-of-a-kind architectural adventure -- until, that is, the “forgotten war,” the one in Afghanistan, came back into view.  Starting in 2008, base building ramped up there, went into overdrive in 2009, and hasn’t come out of it yet.  The result: according to Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an even more staggering base-construction splurge, and with it, the announcement last year that another monster embassy would go up, this time in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, for another cool near-billion. (The already large U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, would also be further expanded to the tune of $175-200 million).  And keep in mind that none of this even includes the huge ring of supporting bases for America’s Afghan and Iraq operations in the Persian Gulf, South and Central Asia, and even on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 

Does anyone see a pattern here?  The American military must be the heaviest occupation force in history.  According to reports, it now has 1.5 million pieces of equipment, micro to mega, to get out of Iraq as U.S. forces draw down.  This is war and occupation of Guinness World Records proportions, a veritable Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of imperial military construction.  The only thing that won’t make the record books, of course, is the results: in war-fighting terms, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the world’s mightiest military has been battled to at least a draw by rag-tag, lightly armed, minority insurgencies. 

Who would believe any of this, if it weren’t happening?  Given how our media reports on such things, who would even know about it if you didn’t read it first here at TomDispatch.com?  Tom

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BLACK SITES IN THE EMPIRE OF BASES 
By Nick Turse, Feb 11, 2010

In the 19th century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the 20th century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, United States troops joined members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country. 

Nearly a decade after the George W Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces. Such bases range from relatively American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year. 

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the US will still be garrisoning Afghanistan. 

400 foreign bases in Afghanistan 
A spokesman for the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) tells TomDispatch that there are, at present, nearly 400 US and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. In addition, there are at least 300 ANA and Afghan National Police bases, most of them built, maintained, or supported by the US. A small number of the coalition sites are mega-bases like Kandahar airfield, which boasts one of the busiest runways in the world, and Bagram air base, a former Soviet facility that received a makeover, complete with Burger King and Popeyes outlets, and now serves more than 20,000 US troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors. 

In fact, Kandahar, which housed 9,000 coalition troops as recently as 2007, is expected to have a population of as many as 35,000 troops by the time President Obama's surge is complete, according to Colonel Kevin Wilson who oversees building efforts in the southern half of Afghanistan for the US Army Corps of Engineers. On the other hand, the Shinwar site, according to Sergeant Tracy J Smith of the US 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, will be a small forward operating base (FOB) that will host both Afghan troops and foreign forces. 

Last autumn, it was reported that more than US$200 million in construction projects - from barracks to cargo storage facilities - were planned for or in-progress at Bagram. Substantial construction funds have also been set aside by the US Air Force to upgrade its air power capacity at Kandahar. For example, $65 million has been allocated to build additional apron space (where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded) to accommodate more close-air support for soldiers in the field and a greater intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability. Another $61 million has also been earmarked for the construction of a cargo helicopter apron and a tactical airlift apron there. 

Kandahar is just one of many sites currently being upgraded. Exact figures on the number of facilities being enlarged, improved or hardened are unavailable but, according a spokesman for ISAF, the military plans to expand several more bases to accommodate the increase of troops as part of Afghan war commander Stanley McChrystal's surge strategy. In addition, at least 12 more bases are slated to be built to help handle the 30,000 extra American troops and thousands of NATO forces beginning to arrive in the country. 

"Currently we have over $3 billion worth of work going on in Afghanistan," says Colonel Wilson, "and probably by the summer, when the dust settles from all the uplift, we'll have about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion worth of that [in the South]." By comparison, between 2002 and 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $4.5 billion on construction projects, most of it base-building, in Afghanistan. 

At the site of the future FOB in Shinwar, more than 135 private construction contractors attended what was termed an "Afghan-Coalition contractors rodeo". According to Lieutenant Fernando Roach, a contracting officer with the US Army's Task Force Mountain Warrior, the event was designed "to give potential contractors a walkthrough of the area so they'll have a solid overview of the scope of work". The construction firms then bid on three separate projects: the renovation of the more than 30-year-old Soviet facilities, the building of new living quarters for Afghan and coalition forces and the construction of a two-kilometer wall for the base. 

In the weeks since the "rodeo", the US Army has announced additional plans to upgrade facilities at other forward operating bases. At FOB Airborne, located near Kane-Ezzat in Wardak province, for instance, the army intends to put in reinforced concrete bunkers and blast protection barriers as well as lay concrete foundations for Re-Locatable Buildings (prefabricated, trailer-like structures used for living and working quarters). Similar work is also scheduled for FOB Altimur, an army camp in Logar province. 

The Afghan base boom 
Recently, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan District-Kabul, announced that it would be seeking bids on "site assessments" for Afghan National Security Forces District Headquarters Facilities nationwide. The precise number of Afghan bases scattered throughout the country is unclear. 

When asked by TomDispatch, Colonel Radmanish of the Afghan Ministry of Defense would state only that major bases were located in Kabul, Pakteya, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif and that ANA units operate all across Afghanistan. Recent US Army contracts for maintenance services provided to Afghan army and police bases, however, suggest that there are no fewer than 300 such facilities that are, according to an ISAF spokesman, not counted among the coalition base inventory. 

As opposed to America's fast-food franchise-filled bases, Afghan ones are often decidedly more rustic affairs. The police headquarters in Khost Farang district, Baghlan province, is a good example. According to a detailed site assessment conducted by a local contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers and the Afghan government, the district headquarters consists of mud and stone buildings surrounded by a mud wall. The site even lacks a deep well for water. A trench fed by a nearby spring is the only convenient water source. 

The US bases that most resemble austere Afghan facilities are combat outposts, also known as COPs. Environmental specialist Michael Bell of the Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan Engineer District-South's Real Estate Division, recently described the facilities and life on such a base as he and his co-worker, Realty Specialist Damian Salazar, saw it in late 2009:

COP Sangar ... is a compound surrounded by mud and straw walls. Tents with cots supplied the sleeping quarters … A medical, pharmacy and command post tent occupied the center of the COP, complete with a few computers with Internet access and three primitive operating tables. Showers had just been installed with hot [water] ... only available from 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm. 

An MWR [Morale, Welfare and Recreation] tent was erected on Thanksgiving Day with an operating television; however, the tent was rarely used due to the cold. Most of the troops used a tent with gym equipment for recreation ... A cook trailer provided a hot simple breakfast and supper. Lunch was MREs [ meals ready to eat]. Nights were pitch black with no outside lighting from the base or the city.

What makes a base? 
According to an official site assessment, future construction at the Khost Farang district police headquarters will make use of sand, gravel and stone, all available on the spot. Additionally, cement, steel, bricks, lime and gypsum have been located for purchase in Pol-e Khomri City, about 135 kilometers away. 

Constructing a base for American troops, however, is another matter. For the far less modest American needs of American troops, builders rely heavily on goods imported over extremely long, difficult to traverse and sometimes embattled supply lines, all of which adds up to an extraordinarily costly affair. "Our business runs on materials," Lieutenant General Robert van Antwerp, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told an audience at a town hall meeting in Afghanistan in December 2009. "You have to bring in the lumber, you have to bring in the steel, you have to bring in the containers and all that. Transport isn't easy in this country - number one, the roads themselves, number two, coming through other countries to get here - there are just huge challenges in getting the materials here." 

To facilitate US base construction projects, a new "virtual storefront" - an online shopping portal - has been launched by the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). The Maintenance, Repair and Operations Uzbekistan Virtual Storefront website and a defense contractor-owned and operated brick-and-mortar warehouse facility that supports it aim to provide regionally-produced construction materials to speed surge-accelerated building efforts. 

From a facility located in Termez, Uzbekistan, cement, concrete, fencing, roofing, rope, sand, steel, gutters, pipe and other construction material manufactured in countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan can be rushed to nearby Afghanistan to accelerate base-building efforts. "Having the products closer to the fight will make it easier for warfighters by reducing logistics response and delivery time," says Chet Evanitsky, the DLA's construction and equipment supply chain division chief. 

America's shadowy base world
The Pentagon's most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea. Perhaps even more notable than the Pentagon's impressive public foreign property portfolio are the many sites left off the official inventory. While bases in the Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are all listed, one conspicuously absent site is al-Udeid air base, a billion-dollar facility in nearby Qatar, where the US Air Force secretly oversees its ongoing unmanned drone wars. 

The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases and outposts. Similarly, US bases in Afghanistan - a significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered across the country - are noticeably absent from the Pentagon inventory. 

Counting the remaining bases in Iraq - as many as 50 are slated to be operating after President Barack Obama's August 31, 2010, deadline to remove all US "combat troops" from the country - and those in Afghanistan, as well as black sites like Al-Udeid, the total number of US bases overseas now must significantly exceed 1,000. Just exactly how many US military bases (and allied facilities used by US forces) are scattered across the globe may never be publicly known. What we do know - from the experience of bases in Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea - is that, once built, they have a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities, or even outright peace, has a way of not altering. 

After nearly a decade of war, close to 700 US, allied, and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Until now, however, they have existed as black sites known to few Americans outside the Pentagon. It remains to be seen, a decade into the future, how many of these sites will still be occupied by US and allied troops and whose flag will be planted on the ever-shifting British-Soviet-US/Afghan site at Shinwar. 

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com. 

(Copyright 2010 Nick Turse.) 

(Used by permission Tomdispatch.)

Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB11Df05.html

and  http://www.tomdispatch.com/

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.” - Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress

"HABITS OF EMPIRE" - A Book on American Expansion, into Imperialism and Neocolonialism/Globalism

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know" - U.S. Pres. Harry Truman (1884-1972)

"To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful." - Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965)

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LET US NOT KEEP OUR HEADS IN THE SAND

“The HISTORY of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.” - Meridel Le Sueur, American writer, 1900-1996 

Hi All,

I am a firm believer in the fact that ignorance of the (country's) historical past, especially of its mistakes --much by deliberate omission in its history, guarantees its repeat. 

Knowing or learning only the good part of one's national history tends to mold one into believing in its exceptionalism, and with a delusion of grandeur, into believing the country and its people are the "chosen" and thus become self-righteous: that his country is always right.

For centuries, all these characterized the minds of Western European colonizers who began to lose their treasured colonial possessions after WW2 -- British India and French Indochina to name a couple --with the blossoming of African and Asian nationalism. Thereafter, having led the victory against the Axis/fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan, this characterization started to permeate and stay in the closed and ignorant American mind.

Any serious survey of American history textbooks and related publications will show that the period of American intervention and colonization of our Philippine homeland is glossed over, barely and briefly mentioned, if not completely deleted. A survey of these same books and various publications, then and now, for the overhyped Spanish-American War which probably every American grade and high schooler is aware of, yields a wealth of information, of course not necessarily objective too! As is often alluded to: "history is written by victors".

The hijacking of our forefathers' nationalist revolution against the Spaniards and American duplicity that resulted in the brutal, longer American Hidden War against our revolutionaries were and are hidden from view, submerged and /or relegated to a footnote, at best a page or two and if so mentioned as the "Philippine Insurrection."

Given such a dearth background about our homeland, the common American in the street has been miseducated and made ignorant of truth (like we native Filipinos were and still are); thus his unquestioned belief in American Innocence and blind adherence to American Exceptionalism.

Note that it was only in 1999 that the American Library of Congress recognized and referred to the so-called "Philippine Insurrection" as the Philippine-American War.

Once in a while, a book can be found which coherently demonstrates and reminds us about the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" of American foreign policy, its hypocrisy in the American gospel of Manifest Destiny or Benevolent Assimilation. One such book is entitled "Habits of Empire," its review by the Chicago Tribune is posted below and followed by an interview of the author Prof. Walter Nugent.

[ NOTE: We Filipinos, at home and abroad, seem to have arrived and deteriorated to a similar intellectual emptiness and predicament, but with greater and worst results for our fellow countrymen "left behind". As time went and goes by, given the miseducation, misinformation, disinformation, and omission in the study, knowledge, and understanding of our homeland's history; we were and are continuously led to ignorance of our peoples' nationalist history; all thanks to our 50-years of colonial and thereafter the continuing neo-colonial education, which caused and perpetuates our naïve sentimentality and thus openness and preference for the American, and/or other white foreigners before we learn/know about and understand our Filipino selves.

And thus we as "a people"are not really a people, but have turned into individualized strangers in our own homeland; a homeland we never knew because we neither did care nor learned nor desire to know. And so our neglect of and ignorance about the homeland make us lose it; and our great loss is a great gain to foreigners: American, Australians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, their convenient hybrids/mestizos, etc. who have made our homeland a paradise only for themselves and their few compradors, supposedly "westernized" and monied native Filipino partners.

Do we think and believe these foreigners are in our homeland for the short and most importantly, long-term benefit of native Filipinos and that of our next generations?

Remember Pilosopong Tasio. Let's do something about this: do study, inform ourselves and understand, therefrom act, maybe too late for our generation but, for the next generations of native, Malay Filipinos.]


-- Bert


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CHICAGO TRIBUNE BOOK REVIEW:

Many of those who oppose U.S. intervention in Iraq say President Bush has recklessly abandoned America's long tradition of peaceful diplomacy and replaced it with an aggressive policy of starting wars, seizing lands, and oppressing nations. 

 Not true, argue others who are familiar with American history. They point out that the U.S. has been pursuing this policy for more than a century since President Benjamin Harrison landed troops in Hawaii in 1893 and President William McKinley seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines five years later. 

Walter Nugent, an eminent historian who spent decades teaching at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University, agrees with this argument but takes it a step further. The real roots of American expansionism, he asserts, lie farther back than the 1890s. 

When the U.S. won its independence, it was only a string of colonies along the Atlantic Coast. How did it expand so far so quickly, coming to occupy much of a vast continent? That is the story Nugent sets out to tell. 

His book, "Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion," begins with the first migration of settlers into the Appalachians, and then proceeds to explain how the U.S. acquired Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and California.

"Americans acquired each parcel of real estate . . . by diplomacy, filibustering, armed conquest, cheating and lying, ethnic cleansing, even honest purchase, and negotiation," he writes. "Without the easy victories of the continental conquest, Americans might have paused and reflected before extending themselves across the western and southern oceans and, after 1945, around the world." 

 By making this case, Nugent joins a growing number of scholars and others who view American history—and the modern history of the world—in a new way. 

They have two essential insights. The first is that this history can be best understood by studying the record of American—what shall we call it?—expansionism, interventionism, imperialism, or simply, as U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge named it more than a century ago, "the large policy." During the 20th Century, the course of American and world history has been profoundly affected by U.S. interventions from Iran to Vietnam to Chile. Nugent argues that these interventions were a logical extension of early U.S. expansion within North America. 

The second insight helping Americans see their history more clearly is that to study these interventions as a series of separate, unrelated episodes is to miss their grand historical importance. Only by studying them together, as part of a single, long continuum, do patterns and lessons become clear. The spectacular doubling of U.S. territory that resulted from the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Nugent finds, was highly suspect on three grounds. 

By law and treaty, France had no clear title to Louisiana, had promised upon acquiring it from Spain never to sell it to any other power, and could, in any case, make no such sale without the permission of parliament. That led historian Henry Adams to describe the purchase as " 'trebly invalid.' " 

President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison knew all this but, as Nugent writes, "The temptation, the opportunity, was too great for even Madison the constitutionalist and Jefferson the arch-democrat. Imperialism trumped honesty." 

No such opportunity presented itself in Florida, Texas, or the Oregon Territory, which includes not only today's Oregon but also Washington, Idaho, and large parts of Wyoming and Montana. In those places, U.S. presidents used variations on a tactic that their successors would later use to seize lands overseas. 

They encouraged white settlers to migrate into lands the U.S. coveted, then waited for inevitable incidents or fomented them and used these incidents as pretexts to invade and seize the territory they wanted. " 'A revolt, or at any rate, a united representation, exhibiting every appearance of spontaneity, would best serve the purpose,' " Secretary of State Robert Smith wrote to the territorial governor of Mississippi as the U.S. used this tactic to capture Florida from Spain in the second decade of the 19th Century. 

Texas was perhaps the purest example of what Nugent describes as the U.S. strategy of "infiltration, insurrection, and an American military takeover 'to restore order.' " Mexican leaders agreed to accept white colonists in Texas, then part of Mexico, as a buffer against hostile Indians. Lured by cheap land, colonists poured in by the thousands. The Mexicans realized too late that, as Nugent puts it, "the buffer policy had become the fox-in-the-chicken-coop policy."

The deliberate fomenting of rebellion in Texas and its subsequent annexation to the U.S., part of a carefully laid plan designed in Washington, led to the first great anti-imperialist outburst in American history. Former President John Quincy Adams called it " 'the apoplexy of the Constitution.' " Future President Ulysses Grant, then an army general, described the Mexican War of the 1840s as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." 

Their dissent set a pattern for protests against U.S. attacks on foreign countries: They would be persistent, often articulate, but ultimately unsuccessful. Americans, it seems, are deeply attached to the idea that their country has much to teach others and should use whatever means are necessary to spread its influence and power. The U.S. has intervened in more countries further from its shores than any nation in modern history. Why is this? 

Historians have come up with a variety of answers. The push for expansion has always been largely based on:

1. economic, whether it involved the desire for land in Texas, markets in China, or oil in Iraq. 

2. the diffuse sense of American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. does not need to play by rules that bind other countries because the American cause is so transcendently just and American hegemony so universally beneficial. 

3. Racism has also played an important role by underpinning the view that certain nations and races—our own, for example—are inherently more qualified to rule than others. 

To these explanations, Nugent adds the idea that the American instinct to invade and overthrow grew in part from "a newly conscious masculinity, a seeking of power abroad (military or maritime) as a kind of chest-thumping." 

Nugent's work is deeply valuable to all who seek to understand not only American history but the ways that history has shaped the world. He recounts events coolly and authoritatively, without offering much in the way of suspenseful stories or insightful background about key figures. 

This book's drama lies in its historical sweep rather than page-turning tales of intrigue, war, and conquest. Some readers might wish Nugent had offered more sweeping reflections on the meaning of the story he tells. Simply presenting the story in a coherent way, though, is an enormous contribution to our national self-knowledge. 

"Habits of Empire" returns often to the fate of Indian tribes that were displaced or wiped out by U.S. takeovers of their land. President James Monroe insisted such takeovers " 'promote the interest and happiness of those tribes' " so " 'we become in reality their benefactors.' " 

Today's rhetoric about bringing the blessings of democracy and globalization to backward nations sounds not much different. All who must help decide the future course America should follow in the world—meaning every voter—should be aware of the history of U.S. intervention, including the early episodes Nugent describes in this book.

"Since its beginning, the United States has oscillated between republic and empire, the institutions and ideals of the first coexisting uneasily with the behavior of the second," he concludes. "The rhetoric of the republic continues, but the realities of statecraft, with wide popular support, have become increasingly imperial. The past is indeed irreversible, but the future demands a choice, and a historically informed one: republic or empire? The balance, never perfect, present since this country's first days, has been perilously tipping."

Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/chi-walter-nugent-05jul05,0,1908929.story


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Habits of Empire: An Interview with Walter Nugent

By David Liebers Mr. Liebers is an HNN intern. Historian Walter Nugent is the author of the just-published book: Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Knopf, 2008). He is a member of HNN's advisory board. He was interviewed by email in June.

Q: America’s history is rife with institutions that were both lamentable and profitable. Did American empire-building take hold as an economic force, or do you argue that there were other equally important forces at work? 

A: Economic interests certainly played a role. In what I call our first empire, the continental one by which we grew from thirteen Atlantic coast colonies all the way to the Pacific in less than seventy years, the settling of successive Wests meant economic opportunity for millions of homesteading families and others. It also involved grabbing land from Indians and others who were in the way of the settlement process. 

In our second, offshore empire across the Pacific and around the Caribbean, commerce was a major motive. William H. Seward, years before he bought Alaska, proclaimed that “the commerce of the world is the empire of the world.” 

Our third, post-1945 empire has involved globalization. 

But most of my book is on the first empire, where we learned the habit of empire-building. And that continental empire involved not only economic interests but ideology – Jefferson’s “empire for liberty,” the 1840’s “Manifest Destiny,” and other phrases – and certainly demography. The extraordinary fecundity of nineteenth-century frontiers people allowed us to occupy and settle the landmass and solidify what was gained from diplomacy and conquest. 

Q: In your mind, what was the most important moment in American history that cemented the notion of imperialism and empire-building in the political ethos and cultural conception of America? 

A: I don’t see anyone's moment as decisive. The idea that we had a right, even a duty, to spread civilization and push back “savagery” is as old as the wars against the Powhatans and the Pequots. Beginning in 1782, when we acquired Transappalachia (without either conquering or, as yet, settling it), we reinforced the imperial habit with each successive acquisition. The majority of Americans, historically, have regarded that as natural and normal. Opponents there have been, to be sure, as in 1846, 1898-1900, 1968, and today, but they have seldom or only tardily prevailed. 

Q: Thinking counterfactually, and given our knowledge of colonial American history, is there a viable alternative to the empire-building America that became? 

A: Not likely, given attitudes toward Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and others along the way. The habit of empire seems to me too deeply ingrained, throughout our whole history, and too often reinforced, particularly by our relatively quick and easy capture of the continental landmass. 

Q: When one thinks of empires and their sequel, great collapses, clashes of civilization or prudent contraction all come to mind as the “historical next step.” This is outside your role as a historian, but how much confidence do you have in America’s habits and what they might mean for us (as Americans) in the 21st century? 

A: I suspect that the habit is still with us, and strongly. We have lived for over two centuries with the contradiction in Jefferson’s phrase, “empire for liberty.” We have had the forms and the rhetoric of a republic but have very often behaved imperially, i.e. imposing our view of things on others, benignly or forcefully, whether they wanted it or not. We’ve been warned about “imperial overreach” but done little to heed the warning. We don’t like to think of ourselves as an empire, because (as Gibbon taught us), empires decline and fall, and we don’t want to contemplate that. We prefer to think of ourselves as a people of frontiers – because frontiers can (in theory) go on indefinitely. 

Q: What was your intention in writing the book? 

A: At the outset, I wanted to tie together the territorial acquisitions (traditionally the domain of diplomatic historians) with the settlement process (traditionally done by Western historians), which seem to me to be two sides of one historical coin. Further, I wanted to write a continuous narrative of all of the U.S. acquisitions, not just one or a few. And I wanted to do it with empathy for the positions of those who gave up the territory: the Indians, the Spanish, the Mexicans, especially, and after 1850, the Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos, and others. 

To get the “other sides,” I read Spanish, Mexican, and other documents and monographs. I had expected to stop with the conquest of the Southwest and the 1848 treaty with Mexico, but of course, we kept on going, at first territorially, and later (and nowadays) through economic, political, and military power. 

Each acquisition, for me, became an episode in a continuous story, and together they comprise the historical foundation of where we now are. 

Walter Nugent is Tackes Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame. He taught history at the University of Notre Dame for sixteen years and at Indiana University for twenty-one years before that. As a visiting professor, he has also taught, lectured, and lived in England, Israel, Germany, Poland, and Ireland. He has published eleven previous books and nearly two hundred essays and reviews. He is a past president of the Western History Association and a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Source: http://hnn.us/articles/51708.html

Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune

HABITS OF EMPIRE (American Expansionism/Imperialism, later as Neocolonialism, then Globalization)

WHAT WE FILIPINOS SHOULD KNOW: (Note: This posting is also in blogsite: http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/Bold and/or underlined words are HTML links. Click on them to see the linked postings/articles. Forwarding this posting (and other ones in this blogsite) to relatives and friends, especially in the homeland, is greatly appreciated. To write or read a comment, please go to the bottom of the post and click on "Comments.")

“The HISTORY of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.” - Meridel Le Sueur, American writer, 1900-1996

I am a firm believer in the fact that ignorance of the (country's) historical past, especially of its mistakes --much by deliberate omission in its history, guarantees its repeat; that knowing only the good part of one's history, tends to mold one into believing in its exceptionalism, and with a delusion of grandeur, into believing the country and its people are the "chosen" ones and thus become self-righteous: that his country is always right.

For centuries, all these characterized the minds of Western European colonizers who began to lose their treasured colonial possessions after WW2 -- British India and French Indochina to name a couple --with the blossoming of African and Asian nationalism. Thereafter, having led the victory against the Axis/fascist powers of Germany, Italy and Japan, this characterization started to permeate and stay in the closed and ignorant American mind.

Any serious survey of American history textbooks and related publications will show that the period of American intervention and colonization of our homeland is glossed over, barely and briefly mentioned, if not completely deleted. A survey of these same books and various publications, then and now, for the Spanish-American War which probably every American grade and high schooler is aware of, yields a wealth of information, of course not necessarily objective too! As is often alluded to: "history is written by victors".

The hijacking of our forefathers' nationalist revolution against the Spaniards and the American duplicity that resulted in the brutal American Hidden War against our revolutionaries were and are hidden from view, submerged and /or relegated to a footnote, at best a page or two and if so mentioned as the "Philippine Insurrection."

Given such dearth background about our homeland, the common American in the street has been miseducated and made ignorant of truth; thus his unquestioned belief in American Innocence and blind adherence to American Exceptionalism. It was only in 1999 that the American Library of Congress recognized and referred to the so-called "Philippine Insurrection" as the Philippine-American War.

Once in a while, a book can be found which coherently demonstrates and reminds us about the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" of American foreign policy, its hypocrisy in the American gospel of "Manifest Destiny" or “Benevolent Assimilation.” One such book is entitled "Habits of Empire," its review by the Chicago Tribune is posted below and followed by an interview of the author Prof. Walter Nugent.

[ NOTE: We Filipinos, at home and abroad, seem to have arrived and deteriorated to a similar intellectual emptiness and predicament, but with greater and worse results for our fellow countrymen "left behind". As time went and goes by, given the mis-education, mis-information, dis-information, and omission in the study, knowledge and understanding of our homeland's history; we were and are continuously led to ignorance of our peoples' nationalist history; all thanks to our 50-years of colonial and thereafter neo-colonial education, which caused our naïve sentimentality and thus openness and preference for the foreign and the foreigner before we learn/know about and understand our Filipino selves.

And thus we as "a people"are not really a people, but have turned into individualized strangers in our own homeland; a homeland we never knew because we neither did care nor learned nor desire to know. And so our neglect of and ignorance about the homeland make us lose it; and our great loss is a great gain to foreigners: American, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. who have made our homeland a paradise only for themselves and their few, westernized and monied native Filipino partners.

Do we think and believe these foreigners are in our homeland for the Filipino natives' benefit and that of our next generations? Let's do something about this: do study, inform ourselves and understand, therefrom act.]

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." - George Kennan, U.S. State Department memo, 1948

"The chief business of America is business" - President Calvin Coolidge, 1925

*********************

Walter Nugent's "Habits of Empire"
Historian Walter Nugent contends that expansionism has ruled, nearly from the beginning
By Stephen Kinzer
July 5, 2008


Many of those who oppose U.S. intervention in Iraq say President Bush has recklessly abandoned America's long tradition of peaceful diplomacy and replaced it with an aggressive policy of starting wars, seizing lands and oppressing nations. Not true, argue others who are familiar with American history. They point out that the U.S. has been pursuing this policy for more than a century, since President Benjamin Harrison landed troops in Hawaii in 1893 and President William McKinley seized Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines five years later.

Walter Nugent, an eminent historian who spent decades teaching at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University, agrees with this argument but takes it a step further. The real roots of American expansionism, he asserts, lie farther back than the 1890s.

When the U.S. won its independence, it was only a string of colonies along the Atlantic Coast. How did it expand so far so quickly, coming to occupy much of a vast continent? That is the story Nugent sets out to tell. His book, "Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion," begins with the first migration of settlers into the Appalachians, and then proceeds to explain how the U.S. acquired Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Oregon and California.

"Americans acquired each parcel of real estate . . . by diplomacy, filibustering, armed conquest, cheating and lying, ethnic cleansing, even honest purchase and negotiation," he writes. "Without the easy victories of the continental conquest, Americans might have paused and reflected before extending themselves across the western and southern oceans and, after 1945, around the world." By making this case, Nugent joins a growing number of scholars and others who view American history—and the modern history of the world—in a new way.

They have two essential insights.The first is that this history can be best understood by studying the record of American—what shall we call it?—expansionism, interventionism, imperialism, or simply, as U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge named it more than a century ago, "the large policy." During the 20th Century, the course of American and world history has been profoundly affected by U.S. interventions from Iran to Vietnam to Chile. Nugent argues that these interventions were a logical extension of early U.S. expansion within North America.

The second insight helping Americans see their history more clearly is that to study these interventions as a series of separate, unrelated episodes is to miss their grand historical importance. Only by studying them together, as part of a single, long continuum, do patterns and lessons become clear.The spectacular doubling of U.S. territory that resulted from the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Nugent finds, was highly suspect on three grounds. By law and treaty, France had no clear title to Louisiana, had promised upon acquiring it from Spain never to sell it to any other power, and could in any case make no such sale without the permission of parliament. That led historian Henry Adams to describe the purchase as " 'trebly invalid.' " President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison knew all this but, as Nugent writes, "The temptation, the opportunity, was too great for even Madison the constitutionalist and Jefferson the arch-democrat. Imperialism trumped honesty."

No such opportunity presented itself in Florida, Texas or the Oregon Territory, which includes not only today's Oregon but also Washington, Idaho and large parts of Wyoming and Montana. In those places, U.S. presidents used variations on a tactic that their successors would later use to seize lands overseas. They encouraged white settlers to migrate into lands the U.S. coveted, then waited for inevitable incidents or fomented them and used these incidents as pretexts to invade and seize the territory they wanted." 'A revolt, or at any rate, a united representation, exhibiting every appearance of spontaneity, would best serve the purpose,' "

Secretary of State Robert Smith wrote to the territorial governor of Mississippi as the U.S. used this tactic to capture Florida from Spain in the second decade of the 19th Century.Texas was perhaps the purest example of what Nugent describes as the U.S. strategy of "infiltration, insurrection, and an American military takeover 'to restore order.' " Mexican leaders agreed to accept white colonists in Texas, then part of Mexico, as a buffer against hostile Indians. Lured by cheap land, colonists poured in by the thousands. The Mexicans realized too late that, as Nugent puts it, "the buffer policy had become the fox-in-the-chicken-coop policy."

The deliberate fomenting of rebellion in Texas and its subsequent annexation to the U.S., part of a carefully laid plan designed in Washington, led to the first great anti-imperialist outburst in American history. Former President John Quincy Adams called it " 'the apoplexy of the Constitution.' " Future President Ulysses Grant, then an army general, described the Mexican War of the 1840s as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." Their dissent set a pattern for protests against U.S. attacks on foreign countries: They would be persistent, often articulate, but ultimately unsuccessful.Americans, it seems, are deeply attached to the idea that their country has much to teach others and should use whatever means are necessary to spread its influence and power.

The U.S. has intervened in more countries further from its shores than any nation in modern history. Why is this?

Historians have come up with a variety of answers. The push for expansion has always been largely economic, whether it involved the desire for land in Texas, markets in China, or oil in Iraq. It is also based on the diffuse sense of American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. does not need to play by rules that bind other countries because the American cause is so transcendently just and American hegemony so universally beneficial. Racism has also played an important role by underpinning the view that certain nations and races—our own, for example—are inherently more qualified to rule than others. To these explanations, Nugent adds the idea that the American instinct to invade and overthrow grew in part from "a newly conscious masculinity, a seeking of power abroad (military or maritime) as a kind of chest-thumping."

Nugent's work is deeply valuable to all who seek to understand not only American history but the ways that history has shaped the world. He recounts events coolly and authoritatively, without offering much in the way of suspenseful stories or insightful background about key figures. This book's drama lies in its historical sweep rather than page-turning tales of intrigue, war and conquest.

Some readers might wish Nugent had offered more sweeping reflections on the meaning of the story he tells. Simply presenting the story in a coherent way, though, is an enormous contribution to our national self-knowledge."Habits of Empire" returns often to the fate of Indian tribes that were displaced or wiped out by U.S. takeovers of their land. President James Monroe insisted such takeovers " 'promote the interest and happiness of those tribes' " so " 'we become in reality their benefactors.' "

Today's rhetoric about bringing the blessings of democracy and globalization to backward nations sounds not much different. All who must help decide the future course America should follow in the world—meaning every voter—should be aware of the history of U.S. intervention, including the early episodes Nugent describes in this book.

"Since its beginning the United States has oscillated between republic and empire, the institutions and ideals of the first coexisting uneasily with the behavior of the second," he concludes. "The rhetoric of the republic continues, but the realities of statecraft, with wide popular support, have become increasingly imperial. The past is indeed irreversible, but the future demands a choice, and a historically informed one: republic or empire? The balance, never perfect, present since this country's first days, has been perilously tipping."

Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion
By Walter Nugent, Knopf, 387 pages, $30

SOURCE: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-walter-nugent-05jul05,0,2208997.story

******************** ********
Habits of Empire: An Interview with Walter Nugent
By David Liebers
Mr. Liebers is an HNN intern.

Historian Walter Nugent is the author of the just published book: Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Knopf, 2008). He is a member of HNN's advisory board. He was interviewed by email in June.

Q: America’s history is rife with institutions that were both lamentable and profitable. Did American empire-building take hold as an economic force, or do you argue that there were other equally important forces at work?

A: Economic interests certainly played a role. In what I call our first empire, the continental one by which we grew from thirteen Atlantic coast colonies all the way to the Pacific in less than seventy years, the settling of successive Wests meant economic opportunity for millions of homesteading families and others. It also involved grabbing land from Indians and others who were in the way of the settlement process. In our second, offshore empire across the Pacific and around the Caribbean, commerce was a major motive. William H. Seward, years before he bought Alaska, proclaimed that “the commerce of the world is the empire of the world.” Our third, post-1945 empire has involved globalization.

But most of my book is on the first empire, where we learned the habit of empire-building. And that continental empire involved not only economic interests but ideology – Jefferson’s “empire for liberty,” the 1840’s “Manifest Destiny,” and other phrases – and certainly demography. The extraordinary fecundity of nineteenth-century frontierspeople allowed us to occupy and settle the land mass and solidify what was gained from diplomacy and conquest.

Q: In your mind, what was the most important moment in American history that cemented the notion of imperialism and empire-building in the political ethos and cultural conception of America?

A: I don’t see any one moment as decisive. The idea that we had a right, even a duty, to spread civilization and push back “savagery” is as old as the wars against the Powhatans and the Pequots. Beginning in 1782, when we acquired Transappalachia (without either conquering or, as yet, settling it), we reinforced the imperial habit with each successive acquisition. The majority of Americans, historically, have regarded that as natural and normal. Opponents there have been, to be sure, as in 1846, 1898-1900, 1968, and today, but they have seldom or only tardily prevailed.

Q: Thinking counterfactually, and given our knowledge of colonial American history, is there a viable alternative to the empire-building America that became?

A: Not likely, given attitudes toward Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and others along the way. The habit of empire seems to me too deeply ingrained, throughout our whole history, and too often reinforced, particularly by our relatively quick and easy capture of the continental land mass.

Q: When one thinks of empires and their sequel, great collapses, clashes of civilization or prudent contraction all come to mind as the “historical next step.” This is outside your role as a historian, but how much confidence do you have in America’s habits and what they might mean for us (as Americans) in the 21st century?

A: I suspect that the habit is still with us, and strongly. We have lived for over two centuries with the contradiction in Jefferson’s phrase, “empire for liberty.” We have had the forms and the rhetoric of a republic but have very often behaved imperially, i.e. imposing our view of things on others, benignly or forcefully, whether they wanted it or not. We’ve been warned about “imperial overreach” but done little to heed the warning. We don’t like to think of ourselves as an empire, because (as Gibbon taught us), empires decline and fall, and we don’t want to contemplate that. We prefer to think of ourselves as a people of frontiers – because frontiers can (in theory) go on indefinitely.

Q: What was your intention in writing the book?

A: At the outset I wanted to tie together the territorial acquisitions (traditionally the domain of diplomatic historians) with the settlement process (traditionally done by Western historians), which seem to me to be two sides of one historical coin. Further, I wanted to write a continuous narrative of all of the U.S. acquisitions, not just one or a few. And I wanted to do it with empathy for the positions of those who gave up the territory: the Indians, the Spanish, the Mexicans, especially, and after 1850, the Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos, and others. To get the “other sides,” I read Spanish, Mexican, and other documents and monographs. I had expected to stop with the conquest of the Southwest and the 1848 treaty with Mexico, but of course we kept on going, at first territorially, and later (and nowadays) through economic, political, and military power. Each acquisition, for me, became an episode in a continuous story, and together they comprise the historical foundation of where we now are.

Walter Nugent is Tackes Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame. He taught history at the University of Notre Dame for sixteen years and at Indiana University for twenty-one years before that. As a visiting professor he has also taught, lectured, and lived in England, Israel, Germany, Poland, and Ireland. He has published eleven previous books and nearly two hundred essays and reviews. He is a past president of the Western History Association and a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations.



Source: http://hnn.us/articles/51708.html