Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
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It is not necessary to detail here the many American covert operations in Latin America. Americans supported a series of activities that ranged from the widespread use of paramilitary death squads in countries like El Salvador to military-directed genocidal campaigns in Guatemala, seriously compromising American rhetoric about human rights for the rest of the century. Similar largely covert operations continued throughout the 1980s and probably still continue. Although the CIA has done everything in its power to hide the American hand in these imperial policing actions, a pattern has developed in the revelation of Americansponsored atrocities and their ensuing blowback. An American regional newspaper—the Baltimore Sun in the case of Honduran death squads, the San Jose Mercury News in the case of the cocaine trade of our Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, the “Contras”—publishes a report based on the research of its staff reporters. The report offers evidence that an agency of the United States condoned war crimes against civilians in Central America and lied to Congress when asked about it or turned a deaf ear to evidence that “assets” under our control were engaged in activities such as drug smuggling that were extremely deleterious to the welfare of Americans. The establishment press—the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times—then accuses the regional paper of sloppy journalism; the publisher of the regional paper apologizes and fires the reporters who filed the story.
Meanwhile, the CIA orders its inspector general to investigate the charges. He duly releases a report saying that not a shred of evidence can be found in the official files to support the story. Months or even years later, a research organization, such as the National Security Archive at George Washington University, discovers that there was a second internal report by the inspector general. The second report still disputes the newspaper account but also acknowledges that the substance of its charges was accurate. As the CIA’s internal response to the Baltimore Sun’s report put it in the gingerly and euphemistic language of imperialism, “CIA reporting to Congress in the early 1980s underestimated Honduran involvement in abuses.”17
The United States now faces an agenda of problems that simply would not exist except for the imperial commitments and activities, open and covert, that accompanied the Cold War. The most common government argument for such continued imperialist activism in the wake of that half-century-long superpower confrontation is still a version of the old “domino theory,” discredited during the Vietnam War: America’s armed forces and covert warriors—for the sake of the world’s good—have no choice but to hold off “instability” wherever it may threaten. The Department of Defense’s East Asia Strategy Report of 1998 explains the one hundred thousand troops “forward deployed” in Okinawa and South Korea as necessary to maintain “stability” in the region. But instability, a nebulous concept at best, is the normal state of affairs in an international system of sovereign states. Instability as such does not threaten the security of the United States, particularly when there is no superpower rival eager to exploit it.
Actual military intervention in brutal civil wars or civil strife in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo has been justified as “deterrence by example.” Even though the United States may have no obvious or vital interest in the outcome of ethnic, religious, or internecine struggles in such places, advocates of military activism argue that it is a good thing for us to intervene because it shows allies and adversaries alike that we will not be “bullied” or “blackmailed.” Such interventions, it is thought, will cause others to respect our power and authority—and hesitate to plunge into similar bloody strife in their own areas. But deterrence by example does not work. As foreign policy analyst Barbara Conry puts it, “The aborted U.S. intervention in Haiti . . . is not going to lead to a rash of military dictatorships any more than strong American responses to Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein deterred Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic from pursuing his aims in Bosnia.”18
Not only are such military interventions often ineffective, but the use of military force in the name of democracy or human rights regularly makes a mockery of these very principles. More serious yet, an injudicious intervention can create threats where none existed before, as was the case in Truman’s intervention in the Chinese civil war and in General MacArthur’s menacing of China’s borders during the Korean War.
Thirty years ago the international relations theorist Ronald Steel noted, “Unlike Rome, we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources and energies.”19 Our economic relations with our East Asian satellites have, for example, hollowed out our domestic manufacturing industries and led us into a reliance on finance capitalism, whose appearance has in the past been a sign of a hitherto healthy economy entering decline. An analogous situation literally wrecked the former USSR. While fighting a losing war in Afghanistan and competing with the United States to develop ever more advanced “strategic weaponry,” it could no longer withstand pent-up desires in Eastern Europe for independence.
The historian Paul Kennedy has dubbed this condition “imperial overstretch.” In an analysis of the United States in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, he wrote that it too
cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the “number one” position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategic realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain these commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting patterns of global production. This test of American abilities will be the greater because it, like Imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments which had been made decades earlier, when the nation’s political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured.20
I do not believe that America’s “vast array of strategical commitments” were made in past decades largely as the result of attempts to exploit other nations for economic gain or simply to dominate them politically and militarily. Although the United States has in the past engaged in imperialist exploitation of other nations, particularly in Latin America, it has also tried in various ways to liquidate many such commitments. The roots of American “imperial overstretch” today are not the same as those of past empires. Instead they more closely resemble those that brought down the Soviet Union.
Many Americans do not care to see their country’s acts, policies, or situations compared with the Soviet Union’s; some condemn such a comparison because it commits the alleged fallacy of “moral equivalence.” They insist that America’s values and institutions are vastly more humane than those of Stalin’s Russia. I agree. Throughout the years of the Cold War, the United States remained a functioning democracy, with rights for its citizens unimaginable in the Soviet context (even if its more recent maintenance of the world’s largest prison population suggests that it should be cautious in criticizing other nations’ systems of criminal justice). Comparisons between the United States and the former Soviet Union are useful, however, because those two hegemons developed in tandem, challenging each other militarily, economically, and ideologically. In the long run, it may turn out that, like two scorpions in a bottle, they succeeded in stinging each other to death. The roots of both modern empires lay in World War II and in their subsequent contest to control the forces that the war unleashed. A stress on the costs of the Cold War to the United States also draws attention to the legacies of that struggle. America’s role as the planet’s “lone superpower”—as leader of the peace-loving nations and patron of such institutions as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—is made much more difficult by the nature of the harvest we continue to reap for imprudent, often secret operations undertaken in the past.
The American political and intellectual establishments remain mystified by and hostile to the economic achievements of Asians, just as the Soviet establishment remained mystified by and hostile to the economic achievements of Anglo-American and Western European capitalism. It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda. As sociologists Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver warn, “There are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the U.S.-centered world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of U.S. resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, U.S. adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order.”21
The United States today desperately needs a new analysis of its role in a post–Cold War world and of the sorts of policies that might prevent another major war, like its last three, in East Asia. Some of the significant changes to come in East Asia are already visible: China’s increasing attempt to emulate high-growth economies elsewhere in Asia; the reunification of Korea; Japan’s need to overcome its political paralysis; America’s confusion over how to adjust to a self-confident China and to a more independent Japan; the growing importance of Southeast Asia as a new economic center of gravity. American policy making needs to be taken away from military planners and military-minded civilians, including those in the White House, who today dominate Washington policy making toward the area. American ambassadors and diplomats in Asia should have at least an elementary knowledge of East Asian history, languages, and aspirations. The United States desperately needs options for dealing with crises other than relying on the carrier task force, cruise missiles, and the unfettered flow of capital, just as it needs to overcome the complacency and arrogance that characterize American official attitudes toward Asia today.
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades. Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price—individually and collectively—for their nation’s continued efforts to dominate the global scene. Before the damage of heedless triumphalist acts and the triumphalist rhetoric and propaganda that goes with them becomes irreversible, it is important to open a new discussion of our global role during and after the Cold War. There is no place more appropriate to begin a reconsideration of America’s imperial policies than with American behavior in East Asia.
OKINAWA:
ASIA’S LAST COLONY
At about eight P.M. on September 4, 1995, two American marines and a sailor seized a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping, bound and gagged her, drove her in a rented car to a remote location, and raped her. Marine Pfc. Rodrico Harp and Seaman Marcus Gill confessed that they violently beat her and that Marine Pfc. Kendrick Ledet bound her mouth, eyes, hands, and legs with duct tape. Described in court by an acquaintance as a “tank,” Gill was six feet tall and weighed 270 pounds. He confessed to raping the girl, while the other two claimed that they had merely abducted and beaten her. According to an Associated Press account of the trial, “The court interpreter broke down upon hearing [Gill’s] account of lewd jokes he and his companions made about their unconscious and bleeding victim.”1 Police introduced into the trial proceedings a plastic bag found in a trash can that contained three sets of bloodstained men’s underwear, a school notebook, and duct tape.
The three accused rapists—Gill, twenty-two, of Woodville, Texas; Harp, twenty-one, of Griffin, Georgia; and Ledet, twenty, of Waycross, Georgia—were in no way unusual for U.S. servicemen stationed on the island of Okinawa. Harp was the father of a nine-month-old daughter and a graduate of an ROTC program in Griffin. Ledet had been a Boy Scout and church usher. Gill had taken advanced-placement English and had won a football scholarship. All were based at Camp Hansen. Gill told the court that the three men had embarked on the rape “just for fun” and had picked the girl out at random as she was leaving a stationery store.
A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.”2 Although Macke was permitted to retire following this lighthearted comment, there was no Congressional or official inquiry into his leadership of the Pacific Command and no review of why a decade after the end of the Cold War the United States still had one hundred thousand troops based in Japan and South Korea. There was only endless public relations spin about how the gang rape of a child was a singular “tragedy,” not a consequence of U.S. basing policy, and how East Asia “needs” its American peacekeepers.
Few Americans who have never served in the armed forces overseas have any conception of the nature or impact of an American base complex, with its massive military facilities, post exchanges, dependents’ housing estates, swimming pools, and golf courses, and the associated bars, strip clubs, whorehouses, and venereal disease clinics that they attract in a land like Okinawa. They can extend for miles, dominating localities and in some cases whole nations. In South Korea, for example, huge military camptowns (kijich’on) have existed around all the American bases from the time of the Korean War. Katharine Moon writes, “They are like stage sets, in a sense, for the U.S. military presence in Korea, characterized by dimly lit alleys blinking with neon-lit bars boasting names like Lucky Club, Top Gun, or King Club. The alleys rock with loud country-western or disco music, drunken brawls, and American soldiers in fatigues and heavily made-up Korean women walking closely together with hands on each other’s buttocks.”3 Until the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Philippines in 1992, the town of Olongapo, adjacent to the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, had no industry except for the “entertainment” business, which supported approximately 55,000 prostitutes and a total of 2,182 registered establishments offering “rest and recreation” to American servicemen.
At the height of the Cold War, the United States built a chain of military bases stretching from Korea and Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, and Iceland—in effect ringing the Soviet Union and China with literally thousands of overseas military installations. In Japan alone, immediately following the end of the Korean War, there were six hundred U.S. installations and approximately two hundred thousand troops. There are still today, ten years after the end of the Cold War, some eight hundred Department of Defense facilities located outside the United States, ranging from radio relay stations to major air bases. To those living around them (and often dependent upon them), the personnel based on them may feel less like “peacekeepers” than occupiers. This is certainly the case in Okinawa, a land whose people have in any case felt themselves under occupation by Japan since the seventeenth century and by the United States since 1945.
The island of Okinawa measures 454 square miles, almost exactly the size of Los
Angeles and smaller than the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian chain. It now contains thirty-nine bases, ranging from Kadena Air Force Base, the largest airfield in East Asia, to the Sobe Communications Facility, known locally as the “elephant cage” because of its bizarre antennae, a center for communicating with submarines, intercepting other people’s telephone conversations, and intelligence operations. In the 1960s, when Okinawa was directly administered by the Pentagon, there were 117 bases, and at the time of the rape there were 42. Though few of them are contiguous to each other, in total they take up an estimated 20 percent of the prime agricultural land in the central and southern parts of the main island of Okinawa. The United States also controls twenty-nine areas of the surrounding seas and fifteen air spaces over the Ryukyus. As a prefecture of Japan, Okinawa occupies only 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land area, but about 75 percent of facilities exclusively used by the American armed forces stationed in Japan are concentrated there. With a population density amounting to 2,198 persons per square kilometer, it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Neither Japanese nor Okinawan courts or police have any jurisdiction over these American-occupied lands, seas, and air spaces.
It may be hard for Americans to imagine why a single rape case would cause such outrage among Okinawans or endanger an almost half-century-old Japanese-American security relationship. Part of the reason is because it is hard to grasp the particular imperial circumstances under which they live. A reader trying to imagine what follows would perhaps have to transpose the Okinawan situation to Greater Los Angeles, imagining the choicest fifth of it to be occupied in a similar way by an allied and “friendly” foreign military. In addition, the reader would have to understand that the very reason for the presence of those bases, weapons, and personnel, dinned into public consciousness for forty years—the enmity of an ominous neighboring superpower and its bloc of allies—had ceased to be relevant for a decade.