The American Way Of War Part 2

For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where nothing could stand up to their s.h.i.+pborne cannons, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa, as well as on the Asian mainland, they moved inland, taking their cannons upriver with them. For those centuries, the s.h.i.+p was, in modern terms, a floating military base filled with the latest in high-tech equipment. And yet s.h.i.+ps had their limits, as indicated by a well-known pa.s.sage about a French wars.h.i.+p off the African coast from Joseph Conrad's novel about the Congo, Heart of Darkness:In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech-and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight.

Well, maybe it wasn't quite so droll if you happened to be on land, but the point remains. Of course, sooner or later the Europeans did make it inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, artillery, and finally, by the twentieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or even, as in Iraq, poison gas. Backing up the process was often the naval vessel-as at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, when somewhere between nine thousand and eleven thousand soldiers in the Mahdi's army were killed (with a British loss of forty-eight troops), thanks to ma.s.s rifle fire, Maxim machine guns, and the batteries of gunboats floating on the Nile.

Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British expeditionary force at the time. Here's part of his description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):The white flags [of the Mahdi's army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dense ma.s.s, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery.... About twenty sh.e.l.ls struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks.... It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.

And-presto!-before you knew it, three-quarters of the world was a colony of Europe, the United States, or j.a.pan. Not bad, all in all, for a few floating centuries. In the latter part of this period, the phrase "gunboat diplomacy" came into existence, an oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too eloquently.

Our Little "Diplomats"

Today, "gunboat diplomacy" seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past, despite our many aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making "friendly" house calls from time to time. But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out "armed diplomacy"-and under the Bush administration the Pentagon took over much that might once have been labeled "diplomacy"-then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first-century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the "platforms" are upon which we "export force," upon which we mount our "cannons."

What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more "mobile" versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to the "arc of instability," a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia well into northern Africa, and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartlands of the planet. The Pentagon's so-called lily pads strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions-the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the "flies" as they go.

Thought about a certain way, the military base, particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our "gunboat," a "platform" that has been ridden ever deeper into the land-locked parts of the globe-into regions like the Middle East, where our access once had some limits, or like the former Yugoslavia and the -stans of Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the cold war era once blocked access entirely. Our new military bases are essentially the twenty-first-century version of those old European wars.h.i.+ps, the difference being that, once built, the base remains in place, while its parts-the modern equivalents of those sixteenth-century cannons-are capable of moving over land or water almost anywhere.

As Chalmers Johnson has calculated in his book The Sorrows of Empire , our global baseworld consists of at least seven hundred military and intelligence bases, possibly-depending on how you count them up-many more. This is our true "imperial fleet" (though, of course, we have an actual imperial fleet, our aircraft carriers alone being like small, ma.s.sively armed towns). In the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we've left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several Central Asian states after the Afghan War of 2001; and into Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

The process speeded up under the Bush administration, but you would have had almost no way of knowing this. Basing is generally considered either a topic not worth writing about or an arcane policy matter best left to the inside pages of the newspaper for the policy wonks and news junkies. This is in part because we Americans-and by extension our journalists-don't imagine us as garrisoning or occupying the world, and certainly not as having anything faintly approaching a military empire. Generally speaking, those more than seven hundred bases, our little "diplomats" (and the rights of extraterritoriality that go with them via Status of Forces Agreements) don't even register on our media's mental map of our globe.

Enduring Camps.

In Iraq, our permanent bases are endearingly referred to by the military as "enduring camps." Such bases were almost certainly planned before the 2003 invasion. After all, we were also planning to withdraw most of our troops from Saudi Arabia-Osama bin Laden had complained bitterly about the occupation of Islam's holy sites-and they weren't simply going to be s.h.i.+pped back to the United States.

The numbers of those potential enduring camps in Iraq are startling indeed. As one rare Chicago Tribune article on the topic noted, early on in the occupation of Iraq, "From the ashes of abandoned Iraqi army bases, U.S. military engineers are overseeing the building of an enhanced system of American bases designed to last for years." Some of these bases are already comparable in size and elaborateness to the ones we built in Vietnam four decades ago. Christine Spolar, who wrote the article, continues:As the U.S. scales back its military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq provides an option for an administration eager to maintain a robust military presence in the Middle East and intent on a muscular approach to seeding democracy in the region....

"Is this a swap for the Saudi bases?" asked Army Brig. Gen. Robert Pollman, chief engineer for base construction in Iraq. "I don't know.... When we talk about enduring bases here, we're talking about the present operation, not in terms of America's global strategic base. But this makes sense. It makes a lot of logical sense."

And keep in mind as well that all of this construction is being done to the tune of billions of dollars under contracts controlled by the Pentagon and, as Spolar writes, quite "separate from the State Department and its Emba.s.sy in Baghdad" (which is slated to be the largest emba.s.sy in the world).

As the Pentagon planned it, and as we knew via leaks to the press soon after the invasion began, newly "liberated" Iraq, once "sovereignty" had been restored, was to have only a lightly armed military force of some forty thousand troops and no air force. The other part of this equation, the given (if unspoken) part, was that some sort of significant long-term U.S. military protection of the country would have to be put in place. And we proceeded accordingly, emplacing our "little diplomats" right at a future hub of the global energy superhighway.

But we've made sure to cover the other on- and off-ramps as well. As James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in a rundown of some of our post-9/11 basing policies:[T]he administration has inst.i.tuted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.

The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls "lily pads." They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries-the traditional Cold War role of such installations-but as jumping-off points for future "preventive wars" and military missions.

In fact, our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all "gunboats," no colonies. The combination of bases we set down in any given country is referred to in the Pentagon as our "footprint" in that country. It's a term that may once have come from the idea of "boots on the ground," but now has congealed, imagistically speaking, into a single (and a.s.sumedly singular) boot print-as if, as it strode across the planet, the globe's only hyperpower was so vast that it could place but a single boot in any given country at any time, an eerie echo perhaps of that British sun which was never to set on their vast empire (until, of course, it did).

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was the main Pentagon architect of a plan to "realign" our bases so as to "forward deploy" U.S. forces into the "arc of instability." In a December 2003 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he offered a Pentagon version of sensitivity in discussing his forward deployment plans: "Realigning the U.S. posture will also help strengthen our alliances by tailoring the physical U.S. 'footprint' to suit local conditions. The goal is to reduce friction with host nations, the kind that results from accidents and other problems relating to local sensitivities." In the meantime, to ensure that there will be no consequences if the giant foot, however enclosed, happens to stamp its print in a tad clumsily, causing the odd bit of collateral damage, he added:For this deployability concept to work, U.S. forces must be able to move smoothly into, through, and out of host nations, which puts a premium on establis.h.i.+ng legal and support arrangements with many friendly countries. We are negotiating or planning to negotiate with many countries legal protections for U.S. personnel, through Status of Forces Agreements and agreements (known as Article 98 agreements) limiting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court with respect to our forces' activities.

Bradley Graham of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post offered a more precise glimpse at Feith's realignment strategy, which would move us away from our cold war deployments, especially in Germany, j.a.pan, and Korea:The Pentagon has drafted plans to withdraw as many as half of the 71,000 troops based in Germany as part of an extensive realignment of American military forces that moves away from large concentrations in Europe and Asia, according to U.S. officials....

U.S. officials have said before that they intended to eliminate a number of large, full-service Cold War bases abroad and construct a network of more skeletal outposts closer to potential trouble spots in the Middle East and along the Pacific Rim.

In fact, the structure of major bases and "forward operating sites" in the arc of instability and, from Eastern Europe to the Central Asian states, inside the former Soviet empire, is already in place or, as in Iraq, in the process of being built or negotiated. As Michael Kilian of the Chicago Tribune writes:[T]he U.S. now has bases or shares military installations in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials are soon expected to unveil plans for a new U.S. military "footprint" on the rest of the world. The plan is expected to include a s.h.i.+ft of resources from the huge Cold War- era bases in Western Europe to new and smaller ones in Poland and other Eastern Europe nations as well as a relocation of U.S. troops in South Korea.

In the meantime, Pentagon strategic planning for ever more aggressive future war-fighting is likely only to intensify this process. Los Angeles Times military a.n.a.lyst William Arkin wrote of the unveiling of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's plan for a new military map of the globe:The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a "1-4-2-1 defense strategy," in which war planners prepare to fully defend one country (the United States), maintain forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and Southwest Asia), maintain the ability to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and be able to "win decisively"-up to and including forcing regime change and occupying a country-in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing"....

In the Clinton era, the Pentagon planned for fighting two wars simultaneously (in the Middle East and Northeast Asia). Under the new strategy, it must prepare for four....

The planning model Rumsfeld and company have embraced is certainly more ambitious. It covers domestic and foreign contingencies and favors preemption over diplomacy, and military strikes over peacekeeping operations. The plan signals to the world that the United States considers nuclear weapons useful military instruments, to be employed where warranted.

Twenty-Second-Century Gunboat Diplomacy.

At least as imagined in the Pentagon, twenty-second-century "gunboat diplomacy" will be conducted by what the Air Force's s.p.a.ce Command refers to as "s.p.a.ce-based platforms," and the "cannons" will be a range of "exotic" weapons and delivery systems. In still unweaponized s.p.a.ce (if you exclude the various spy satellites overhead), we plan for our future "s.h.i.+ps" to travel the heavens alone, representatives of a singular version of gunboat diplomacy. Among the "five priorities for national security s.p.a.ce efforts" set out by Peter B. t.e.e.t.s, Bush's undersecretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in an article for Air & s.p.a.ce Power Journal, the most striking, if also predictable, was that of "ensuring freedom of action in s.p.a.ce"-as in freedom of action for us, and no action at all for anyone else.

s.p.a.ce, long depicted as a void, is now being reimagined as the ocean of our imperial future, thanks to s.p.a.ce weaponry on the drawing boards like the nicknamed "Rods from G.o.d." These are to be "orbiting platforms stocked with tungsten rods perhaps 20 feet long and one foot in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on Earth within minutes. Accurate within about 25 feet, they would strike at speeds upwards of 12,000 feet per second, enough to destroy even hardened bunkers several stories underground."

Planning among "high frontier" enthusiasts for the conquest and militarization of s.p.a.ce began in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, but it has reached new levels of realism (of a mad sort). Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, described a "new U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan": "The doc.u.ment details a stunning array of exotic weapons to be pursued over the next decade: from an air-launched missile designed to knock satellites out of low orbit, to ground- and s.p.a.ce-based lasers for attacking both missiles and satellites, to 'hypervelocity rod bundles' (nicknamed Rods from G.o.d).... Far from being aimed solely at the protection of U.S. s.p.a.ce capabilities, such weapons are instead intended for offensive, first-strike missions."

Ever since H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which implacable aliens with superweapons arrive from s.p.a.ce to devastate our planet. But what if it turns out that the implacable aliens are actually us-and that, as in the sixteenth century, someday in the not-too-distant future U.S. "s.h.i.+ps" will "burst from s.p.a.ce" upon the "coasts" of our planet with devastation imprinted in their programs. These are, of course, the dreams of modern Mongols.

Wonders of the Imperial World.

Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.

We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and G.o.ds. Nowadays, at least, it's easier to identify the various wonders of our world with their architects. Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable brain for the U.S. veterans of that war. Frank Gehry dreamt up his visionary t.i.tanium-covered museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim. The architectural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc.), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation's world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and Harrah's Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest wonder of all-an emba.s.sy large enough to embody Was.h.i.+ngton's vision of an American-reordered Middle East. We're talking, of course, about the U.S. emba.s.sy, the largest on the planet, being constructed on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of Baghdad's embattled Green Zone. As Patrick Lenahan, then Senior Architect and Project Manager at BDY, put it (according to the firm's website): "We understand how to involve the client most effectively as we direct our resources to make our client's vision a reality."

And what a vision it was. What a reality it's turned out to be.

Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein's mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of United Nations sanctions. Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, "The Hands of Victory," supposedly modeled on Saddam Hussein's own, holding twelve-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly.

It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad wanted their victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant's exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam's pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday's private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American emba.s.sy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose-are you surprised? -one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Iraqis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to the benighted land.

And then, as the Iraqi capital's landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration's dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even a palace roomy enough for a dictator wasn't faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet's New Rome.

Hence, BDY. That Midwestern firm's designers can now be cla.s.sified as architects to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the company seems proud of it. You could, in May 2007, go to its website and take a little tour in sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its particular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this: At a pricetag of at least $592 million, its proudest boast was that, unlike almost any other American construction project in that country, it was coming in on time and on budget (though, in the end, the cost overruns for the emba.s.sy would be humongous). Of course, with a 30 percent increase in staffing size since Congress first approved the project, it is estimated that being "represented" in Baghdad will cost a staggering $1.2 billion per year.

The BDY-designed emba.s.sy may lack the gold-plated faucets installed in some of Hussein's palaces and villas (and those of his sons), but it was planned to lack none of the amenities that Americans consider part and parcel of the good life, even in a "hards.h.i.+p" post. Consider, for instance, the emba.s.sy's "pool house." (There was a lovely sketch of it at the BDY website.) Note the palm trees dotted around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis courts discretely in the background. For an American official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily fortified, four-mile square Green Zone during a year's tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on the taxpayer's dollar) would undoubtedly be no small thing.

Admittedly, it became harder to think about taking that refres.h.i.+ng dip or catching a few sets of tennis in Baghdad's heat once the order for all U.S. personnel in the Green Zone to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times went into effect. Lucky then for the ma.s.sive, largely window-less-looking Recreation Center, one of more than twenty blast-resistant buildings BDY planned for. Perhaps this will house the promised emba.s.sy cinema. Perhaps hours will be wiled away in the no less ma.s.sive-looking, low-slung Post Exchange/Community Center, or in the promised commissary, the "retail and shopping areas," the restaurants, or even, so the BDY website a.s.sured visitors, the "schools" (though it's difficult to imagine the State Department allowing children at this particular post).

And don't forget the "fire station" (mentioned but not shown by BDY), surely so handy once the first rockets. .h.i.t. Small warning: If you are among the officials staffing this post, keep in mind that the PX and commissary might be slightly understocked. The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported at one point in 2007 that "virtually every bite and sip consumed [in the emba.s.sy] is imported from the United States, entering Iraq via Kuwait in huge truck convoys that bring fresh and processed food, including a full range of Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, every seven to 10 days."

When you look at the plans for the complex, you have to wonder: Can it, in any meaningful sense, be considered an emba.s.sy? And if so, an emba.s.sy to whom? The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland more aptly termed it a "base," like our other vast, multibillion-dollar permanent bases in Iraq. It is also a headquarters. It is neither town, nor quite city-state, but it could be considered a citadel, with its own anti-missile defenses, inside the breachable citadel of the Green Zone. It may already be the last piece of ground (excepting those other bases) that the United States, surge or no, can actually claim to fully occupy and control in Iraq-and yet it already has something of the look of the Alamo (but with amenities). Someday, perhaps, it will turn out to be the "White House" (though, in BDY's sketches, its buildings look more like those prison-style schools being constructed in embattled American urban neighborhoods) for the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, or some future s.h.i.+te party, or even a Sunni strongman.

What we know is that such an emba.s.sy is remarkably outsized for Iraq. Even as a headquarters for a vast, secret set of operations, it doesn't quite add up. After all, our military headquarters in Iraq are at Camp Victory, on the outskirts of Baghdad. We can certainly a.s.sume-though no one in our mainstream media world would think to say such a thing-that this new emba.s.sy will house a rousing set of CIA (and probably Pentagon) intelligence operations for the country and region, and will be a ma.s.sive hive for American spooks of all sorts. But whatever its specific functions, it might best be described as the imperial Mother s.h.i.+p dropping into Baghdad.

As an outpost, the vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an emba.s.sy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet's sole "hyperpower," dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Was.h.i.+ngton's dream and Kansas City's idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul-or a khan.

Completed, it will indeed be the perfect folly, as well as the perfect emba.s.sy, for a country that finds it absolutely normal to build vast base-worlds across the planet; that considers it just a regular day's work to send its aircraft carrier "strike forces" and various battles.h.i.+ps through the Straits of Hormuz in daylight as a visible warning to a "neighboring" regional power; whose Central Intelligence Agency operatives feel free to organize and launch Baluchi tribal warriors from Pakistan into the Baluchi areas of Iran to commit acts of terror and mayhem; whose commander-in-chief president can sign a "nonlethal presidential finding" that commits our nation to a "soft power" version of the economic destabilization of Iran, involving, according to ABC News, "a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions"; whose vice president can appear on the deck of the USS John C. Stennis to address a "rally for the troops," while that aircraft carrier is on station in the Persian Gulf, readying itself to pa.s.s through those Straits, and can insist to the world: "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We'll keep the sea lanes open. We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our own forces.... And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region"; whose military men can refer to Iraqi insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces"; members of whose Congress can offer plans for the dismemberment of Iraq into three or more parts; and all of whose movers and shakers, partic.i.p.ating in the Was.h.i.+ngton consensus, can agree that one "benchmark" the Iraqi government, also locked inside the Green Zone, must fulfill is signing off on an oil law designed in Was.h.i.+ngton and meant to turn the energy clock in the Middle East back several decades.

To recognize such imperial impunity and its symbols for what they are, all you really need to do is try to reverse any of these examples. In most cases, that's essentially inconceivable. Imagine any country building the equivalent Mother s.h.i.+p "emba.s.sy" on the equivalent of two-thirds of the Was.h.i.+ngton Mall; or sailing its wars.h.i.+ps into the Gulf of Mexico and putting its second-in-command aboard the flags.h.i.+p of the fleet to insist on keeping the sea lanes "open"; or sending Caribbean terrorists into Florida to blow up local buses and police stations; or signing a "finding" to economically destabilize the American government; or planning the future shape of our country from a foreign capital. But you get the idea. Most of these actions, if aimed against the United States, would be treated as tantamount to acts of war, and dealt with accordingly, with unbelievable hue and cry.

When it's a matter of other countries halfway across the planet, however, we largely consider such things, even if revealed in the news, at worst as tactical errors or miscalculations. The imperial mindset goes deep. It also thinks unbearably well of itself and so, naturally, wants to memorialize itself, to give itself the surroundings that only the great, the super, the hyper deserve.

Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley's poem "Ozymandias," inspired by the arrival in London in 1816 of an enormous statue of the Pharaoh Ramesses II, comes to mind:I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said:-Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those pa.s.sions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's giant hands are already on the road to ruin. In New York and Baghdad, our near billion-dollar monuments to our imperial moment: a 9/11 memorial, as yet unbuilt, so grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will be a reminder only of a time, already long past, when we could imagine ourselves as the greatest victims on the planet, and in Baghdad's Green Zone, a monument to Was.h.i.+ngton's conviction that we were also destined to be the greatest dominators this world, and history, had ever seen.

From both of these monuments, someday those lone and level sands will undoubtedly stretch far, far away.

How to Garrison a Planet (and Not Even Notice).

In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, "humanitarian aid" in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In a startling number of them, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that are comparable to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped-down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does-carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations."

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated thirty-seven major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had thirty-six of them planet wide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our ma.s.sive aircraft carriers which, with five thousand to six thousand personnel aboard-that is, the population of an American town-are functionally floating bases.

And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender-and it's been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its ma.s.sive expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world were our oyster; and we're still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.