Empire minus one

The last U.S. military plane flew out of Afghanistan today, but don't worry. We have military forces on 800 bases in more than 70 foreign countries.

Take a guess at how many foreign countries have military bases in the United States of America.  How many foreign military bases do you think there are in Alabama, for example?  How about Alaska?  New York?  Texas is a big state.  Certainly there must be a foreign military base somewhere in Texas, right?

Zero.  That’s how many foreign countries maintain troops on U.S. soil. 

Now take a guess how many countries we have military forces in.  Make sure you subtract Afghanistan.  We’re out of there.  But how many do you figure? 

About 70.  Or 140.  Or some number.  The Pentagon won’t tell us because many of the bases where we maintain a military presence are secret.  So is the number of bases, which is 800, or at least that’s what the best estimate is. That number is secret, too.

Lots of military stuff is secret. Remember Niger?  Anyone?  Four soldiers died there in a firefight back in 2017.  It was quite a story, and you know why?  Because we didn’t even know we had troops in Niger.  It was a secret. How many soldiers did it turn out we had there?  About 800.  Even Lindsey Graham was surprised. 

What the hell were those soldiers doing in Niger?  Have you looked at Niger on a map?  Do you know which countries surround it?  Okay, Nigeria is one, and Chad, and Burkina Faso, and Mali, and Algeria, and Libya. I’ll bet you can guess what those troops were doing all the way over across the ocean smack in the middle of the African continent.  They were fighting “the war on terror,” of course.  Because, if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here…or something like that anyway. 

That’s probably the reason we’ve got so many troops overseas.  How many soldiers do we have out there where you’ve got to take a plane or a ship to get there?  Somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000.  Again, nobody really knows because the Pentagon won’t say, because…it’s a secret.  Apparently we don’t want anybody knowing how many soldiers we have overseas because…well, some reason, because the Pentagon won’t tell us that, either. 

But do you figure out there in the 70, or 140 – I’ve even seen 150 – countries we have troops in anybody knows they’re there?  You’re damn right they do.  They are their countries for crying out loud!  Let me ask you something.  If one day in say, Nashville, for example, a bunch of military vehicles showed up and seized the local Social Security office and threw out all the file cabinets and desks and computers and other stuff and moved in a bunch of army cots and other military equipment and put up some maps on the walls and then built a concrete wall around the place and strung some razor wire along the top of it – do you figure anyone in Nashville would notice? 

The reason I ask is that is where I first stayed in Mosul, Iraq, when I was there with the 101st Airborne Division in 2003:  in their local social security office.  An infantry company moved in, threw all the desks in the back yard – there was an enormous pile of them out there, maybe 30 or 40, it was a pretty big office – and then threw out all of the file cabinets and of course all the files, and then they moved in the cots and threw up the cinder block wall and the razor wire, and that’s where they stayed.  You think the good old U.S.A thought about what would happen to all those Iraqis who received their social security checks from that office once the files were all trashed and thrown outside in the rain and mud?  Nope.  We just did it.

This is what empires do.  They fly around the world and pick out places they figure they need some soldiers, and then they move all the local shit out of the way, like social security files and the livelihoods that go along with them, and then they move in some soldiers and then they sit there and wait to be told what to do.  That’s what we did in Afghanistan.  We seized buildings, airports, land, and we surrounded all of it with gigantic walls topped with razor wire, and we moved in a whole bunch of equipment and tanks and Howitzers and helicopters, and then we sat there and waited for the Taliban to attack us.  I don’t mean literally sat there.  Sometimes the soldiers got in Humvees and Mraps and helicopters and took off and moved around and looked for the Taliban, and then they went back to the base camps and slept on their cots and ate at their KBR “D-facs” or dining facilities.  Sometimes…not recently…but going back a decade or so…they got in firefights with Taliban soldiers, or with local Afghans who were just pissed off that a bunch of Americans were in their villages and towns. 

That’s what they did.  That’s what we did, because we paid for it.  It was done in our name. 

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