The US War Machine, the anti-bases movement, and gender

The reflections in this post were prompted by a chapter I read today in Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, beaches, and bases: Making sense of international feminist politics. The chapter I read was brilliantly written and talks about the feminist section of the anti-bases movement. I will briefly discuss the reading a bit later, but firstly, I'd like to give an overview of US bases around the world, as I see it.

The US maintains thousands of military facilities outside of its own borders, with several hundred thousand personnel serving at these facilities at any given time. One of their more notorious bases is Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but this is only one of many. Since the war on Afghanistan, the US has established several new bases throughout Central Asia, and they continue to maintain bases in Japan and Germany ever since its occupation of these countries following World War II. Likewise, the US has maintained bases in South Korea and Vietnam to this day, decades after its involvement in the wars in those countries. For certain, the US will establish a new permanent base in Iraq, as a means with which to maintain dominance in the region, even after the formal occupation is over.

Two of the US's biggest and most strategically important bases - Subic naval base and Clark airforce base - were located in the Philippines; that is, until 1991 when Corazon Aquino (under pressure from the wave of social movements that overthrew Marcos and swept her into power) ordered the bases closed and the US to leave. However, the US military is now back in the Philippines in a different guise. The Visiting Forces Agreement, implemented after September 11, allows the US military a presence in the islands for purposes of counter-insurgency training for the Philippine Defence Forces in their campaign against Muslim guerrillas in the south and communist guerrillas elsewhere.

Even in Australia, where I'm from, the US maintains several key military installations. The most crucial is Pine Gap in the middle of the desert in the very centre of the Australian continent. This is one of the world's largest spy-bases and is integral to the CIA's Echelon program, picking up intelligence from wiretapping facilities all over the world. Pine Gap was also crucial to the war in Iraq, being a central cog in terms of military intelligence. There have been sporadic protests against this base, but its sheer isolation unfortunately means "out of sight, out of mind" to most Australians. Even in my city (Perth/Fremantle), we have a US program by the name of Seaswap which has turned the port of Fremantle into a de-facto US military base. Navy ships dock regularly coming to and from Iraq to swap crews and perform maintenance on their ships. Everytime a ship is docked, the streets are be flooded with up to 8000 US soldiers at a time, preying on young women. Furthermore, the US Navy does target-practice bombing exercises in their fighter jets in the sand dunes a few hundred kilometres north of Perth. The local community of Lancelin has mounted protests against this, but they are very small in number. And just this year, a new US military base was established in Geraldton - 500 km north of Perth - as reported in The Age. So it's getting worse.

The militarisation of Australia is only a very small part of what's going on around the world. The latest base in Geraldton is part of a circle of bases around the entire Indian Ocean Rim, which includes a base on the island of Diego Garcia near Mauritius. So the US has the Indian Ocean Rim covered, but also the Pacific Rim (think of the bases in San Diego, Anchorage, Guam, Samoa, Darwin, Townsville, Wellington, etc.) and the Atlantic. And we haven't even begun to discuss the US's Star Wars / Missile Defence Shield program yet, which aims at the militarisation of space - putting missile-launchers into orbit to "protect" the US from anywhere at anytime. But we know that the real reason behind the militarisation of the Earth, the oceans, and space isn't to protect the US, but rather, to advance the US's imperial interests and the interests of US-based transnational corporations. Any country that refuses to obey US dictates remains under threat of oblitaration, as we have seen in Iraq.

This all seems pretty dire and nightmarish, but despite it all, I like to remain optimistic about it and forecast that the US empire (and the whole neo-liberal empire of which it is a part) will soon fall to what we might call "imperial overstretch". This overstretch, combined with the resistance of millions of ordinary people in all corners of the empire, will see the demise of the US as a dominant economic force, and perhaps even of neo-liberalism itself. No empire has lasted forever. Just as the invading Barbarian hordes helped contribute to the collapse of the Roman Empire, we need to form new Barbarian hordes today.

A lot of people are against war and militarism, but not many people know about the hundreds of US bases across the world which support its war machine. Bases are a good place to start if we want to begin dismantling that machine or at least sticking a few spanners into its works. Walden Bello, for one, has been a strong supporter of the global anti-bases movement. And new coalitions are in the process of being formed. The local community in Diego Garcia has actually recently entered into an alliance with anti-bases campaigners elsewhere, such as in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and in Fremantle, Australia.

And here, I would like to turn to Cynthia Enloe's book once more. She offered a unique perspective on the anti-bases movement, by analysing it through a feminist lens. The gist of her argument is that there is a "global gender structure on which each individual base depends" (pp. 91-92) and that anti-base activists should take this into account in their struggles. Enloe looks at the positions of five different groups of women in relation to military bases: military wives who live at the bases with their husbands (who perform crucial, albeit unpaid, work in the maintenance of the military base), females serving in the military, prostitutes, girlfriends of servicemen living in adjacent communities, and female anti-base/anti-nuclear/peace activists who maintain protest camps outside the bases.

Here is Enloe in her own words (pp. 91-92):

"All together, these women's seemingly different experiences add up to a gendered government bases policy. But it is the very divisions between these women that provide a military base with its security. The armed forces need women to maintain their bases, but they need those women to imagine that they belong to mutually exclusive categories. Women from different countries are separated by distance, and often race and inequalities of political influence. Prostitutes, girlfriends, wives, peace activists and women soldiers have learned to view each other as sexual or ideological rivals. An anti-bases movement uninformed by feminist questioning leaves these divisions in place. In this sense, an anti-bases movement that ignores the armed forces dependence on the complex relationships between women leaves the structure of military bases in tact even if it manages to close down a particular base."

There is a lot more to her argument, but that is the gist of it. I think that will do for now. I just think that this question of the production and reproduction of subjectivities (in particular, masculinities and femininities) in the service of US militarism and capitalism is such an important one. I now feel that we really can't afford to neglect this gendered dimension of militarism and capitalism, and I am glad that Enloe opened my eyes to this, as it wasn't something I had thought much about previously.

Realising the constructedness of subjectivities which reproduce capitalism is surely the first step towards withdrawing our hitherto unconscious complicity in the system, thereby allowing us to fashion new subjectivities that would make another world possible.

Posted by J A G U A R I T O (Marco Hewitt)