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THE WAR OF POINTS
Of all the dots on the map that the United States would claim, few were as initially unpromising as Dhahran. The site itself was a blank spot in the desert. The nearest town, Khobar, wasn’t much more—a “few mud huts,” one observer wrote. And Dhahran was situated in Saudi Arabia, a monarchy not known for welcoming outsiders.
Yet Saudi Arabia had oil, and oil makes the world go round. A U.S. conglomerate called Aramco (it included Standard Oil, Texaco, and later Exxon and Mobil) bought the rights to explore for that oil. It was Aramco that established the initial settlement at Dhahran in the 1930s. And it was Aramco that built it up.
Or, at least, it was Aramco that paid. The construction itself was done by workers from the region. One, a Yemeni bricklayer named Mohamed, seemed particularly capable. He was illiterate and had only one eye, but he was “friendly and energetic,” as one of his colleagues put it, and a good builder. His story wasn’t all that different from Akio Morita’s at Sony or John Lennon’s in Liverpool—Mohamed was someone who’d figured out how to prosper in the shadow of a U.S. enclave. Like Morita and Lennon, he learned the ropes and then set off on his own. With Aramco’s blessing, he and his brother started their own construction firm: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.
It was the right time to break into the market. Aramco was expanding. The oil-rich Saudi royal family was building palaces and roads. The United States, which had come to see Saudi Arabia as a node in its world transportation network, also had plans. The country was like “an immense aircraft carrier lying athwart a number of the principal air traffic lanes of the world,” a State Department cable put it. And so Washington arranged in 1945 to lease a large air base at Dhahran. That, too, would need building.
But the base was a delicate matter. The Saudi royals worried how it might look to let a U.S. flag fly over the land of Mecca and Medina. So nervous was the king that he forbade the U.S. consulate at Dhahran from physically planting a flag. Instead, the Stars and Stripes was attached to the side of the building to prevent its touching Saudi soil. And the site was to be called an “airfield,” never a base.
Still, the deal went through, and Dhahran—half company town, half base—grew larger. Aramco would claim that it was the largest concentration of U.S. citizens abroad. It looked, wrote a visitor in the 1950s, “just like a bit of U.S.A.—modern air-conditioned houses, swimming pool, movie theater etc.”
Just as the king feared, many Muslims blanched. The Dhahran complex brought Christians and Jews to the Holy Land, making the House of Saud complicit in the kingdom’s desecration. Internally, the royal family could (and did) quash the grumblings of dissent. But it could do little to silence the Voice of the Arabs, an Egyptian radio station critical of the Saudi state, which invoked Dhahran as its prime example of U.S. imperialism. Eventually the Saudi government relented and ended the lease. The U.S. military left the base in 1962.
These were choppy political waters, but Mohamed bin Laden surfed them adroitly. He became the Saudi government’s preferred builder. At the same time, he did so much business with the United States that he retained an agent in New York. He built classified projects for the U.S. military, including air bases and garrisons around Saudi Arabia’s western coast. He sent his oldest son, Salem, to England for a Western education. Four other sons would go on to study civil engineering in the United States.
Bin Laden died in 1967 in a plane crash (his pilot, like most of the men who flew him around, was a U.S. Air Force veteran). He left his fifty-four children shares in his construction firm, worth hundreds of millions. Some of his sons were happy to simply take the profits. Others got involved in the family business, which continued to win large defense and infrastructure contracts. One son, Osama, took up the work with a special zeal. He seemed to have a knack for the technical details.
Osama bin Laden also took an interest in politics. He’d learned it in school—the brother of the famed Islamist Sayyid Qutb had lectured at Osama’s university in Jeddah. As Osama came to see it, there was a great conflict between Islam and Western empires. Muslim lands, he concluded, must be defended against imperialists.
Unfolding events confirmed that view. In 1978, communists in Afghanistan staged a coup, deposing the elected president. Not only was this a revolution led by infidels, it gave the Soviet Union a foothold in the region as it sent troops to support the faltering new regime. Moscow intended this as temporary. “It’ll be over in three to four weeks,” predicted Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader.
It wasn’t. Resistance fighters, known as the mujahidin, made protracted war on the Soviet-backed state. The Saudi government, eager to establish itself as the world defender of Islam, supported them. So did the United States, which enjoyed watching the other side expend its energies in a luckless war in Asia. It was time to “finally sow shit in their backyard,” as National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said. The two governments agreed to bankroll the mujahidin via a matching arrangement: one U.S. dollar for every Saudi one.
Osama bin Laden, keen to take on the godless superpower occupying Muslim lands, joined the mujahidin. He began by traveling back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Peshawar, just on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border, to raise funds and recruit fighters. But eventually he moved to Peshawar. He brought with him what he estimated to be a hundred tons of heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia: bulldozers, dump trucks, and trench-digging equipment. He dug tunnels and built roads. He put up air-raid shelters. He built a hospital.
Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.
Was al-Qaeda a big deal? Not really. It played only a small part in ousting the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. But the experience had taught Bin Laden an important lesson. He’d seen one of the world’s great armies beaten back by a ragtag (though well-funded) guerrilla alliance. In 1989 the Red Army retreated to Uzbekistan. By 1991, the whole Jenga tower of European communism had come crashing down.
“The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden reflected. And if one superpower could collapse easily, why not another?
Bin Laden wasn’t the only one thinking along such lines. In 1990 Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. It was a bold and sudden attack. Within four hours of crossing the border, the Iraqi army had reached Kuwait’s capital, attacked the emir’s palace, and set it aflame. Days later, Hussein annexed Kuwait. This gave him control of two-fifths of the world’s oil supply. And it looked very much as if he might invade Saudi Arabia next.
Bin Laden, who regarded Hussein as unconscionably secular, volunteered to fight. He had driven the infidels from Afghanistan. Surely he could do the same on the Arabian Peninsula.
But the Saudi government balked. “There are no caves in Kuwait,” the government’s representative, Prince Sultan, reminded Bin Laden. “What will you do when he lobs the missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?”
“We will fight him with faith,” Bin Laden answered.
The House of Saud knew from faith, but it had little confidence in Bin Laden’s plan. Instead, King Fahd had agreed to meet with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who’d flown to Jeddah a day after the invasion with General Norman Schwarzkopf and the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz in tow. Cheney wanted to reopen Dhahran to the U.S. military. “After the danger is over, our forces will go home,” he promised.
“I would hope so,” Crown Prince Abdullah responded under his breath, in Arabic.
Abdullah was nervous, but King Fahd agreed. “Come with all you can bring,” he told Cheney. “Come as fast as you can.”
They did. The first planes landed at Dhahran within twenty-four hours, and they kept coming. The Pentagon put “everything aloft that could fly,” wrote Colin Powell—nearly all the transport planes the air force could spare plus 158 civilian planes drafted into service. Measured in ton-miles per day, the airlift to Saudi Arabia was ten times the size of the Berlin Airlift.
Major coalition airfields used in the Gulf War
“You could have walked across the Mediterranean on the wings of C-5s, C-141s, and commercial aircraft moving across the region,” one pilot marveled.
The frenzy of the airlift reflected the severity of the threat. For years Hussein had funneled Iraq’s oil revenues and foreign aid (some from the United States) into its military, and it showed. Iraq had seized Kuwait with some three hundred thousand seasoned troops, four thousand tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft. The Iraqi army was the fourth largest in the world (ranking just below the U.S. Army), the Iraqi air force was the sixth largest. Garrisoned in Saudi Arabia, General Norman Schwarzkopf worried, he recollected, “about getting kicked back into the sea and losing thousands and thousands of lives.”
Schwarzkopf’s apprehensions weren’t just related to the size of Iraq’s military. The larger fear, hanging thickly in the air, was that the Gulf War would become “another Vietnam.” The generals in 1990 had all lived through that humiliating ordeal. They’d seen a superpower armed with the latest technology locked in an interminable and ultimately unwinnable fight. Quagmire was the metaphor they used: the ground that sucks you in.
Military planners in the Vietnam War had hoped to avoid that ground and triumph through airpower, leveraging the United States’ considerable technological advantages. They sent B-52s on carpet-bombing runs and equipped helicopters with napalm. When trees interfered with the pilots’ views, the crews sprayed them with the defoliant Agent Orange. (“Only we can prevent forests” was their unofficial slogan.)
In all, the United States dropped 5 million tons of bombs, more than 250 pounds for every person in Vietnam. But dropping bombs and achieving goals are two different things. One of the most important targets was the enormous Thanh Hóa Bridge, which carried both a highway and a railroad and served as a crucial link between the north and the south. The United States spent years trying to bomb it, flying more than eight hundred sorties and losing eleven aircraft in the process. Yet it succeeded in knocking the bridge out of commission only in 1972, at the very end of the war.
Bombs and planes were, in the end, not enough. More than 2.5 million U.S. service members cycled through Vietnam during the war. But they fared no better than the planes did. In 1973 the last combat troops left. The greatest military power on earth had fought a peasant army and lost.
So it was with understandable trepidation that Schwarzkopf and his colleagues watched Saddam Hussein ready his forces. Hussein’s tanks were “dug in,” stashed in sand-covered bunkers that would make them impossible to see until they attacked. He was preparing for a war of attrition, the kind of drawn-out, bloody confrontation that the United States had lost in Vietnam and the Soviet Union had lost in Afghanistan.
It would be, Hussein promised, the “mother of all battles.”
Operation Desert Storm, the name for the coalition campaign against Iraq, began in Louisiana. Seven B-52G Stratofortresses took off from Barksdale Air Force Base on a bombing run. Their arrival in Baghdad fifteen hours later was timed perfectly to coincide with a virtual explosion of the skies. Bombers from England, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the remote island of Diego Garcia dropped their payloads. Tomahawk missiles fired from ships in the Gulf tore down Baghdad’s streets. Stealth planes entered Iraqi airspace and released precision-guided bombs.
Ten minutes into the attack, much of Iraq’s infrastructural network, including the Baghdad power grid, had been disabled. Within hours, Hussein’s communications were knocked out.
The barrage continued for forty-three days. Fighting an air war over a desert was much easier than fighting one over a jungle, it turned out. Yet the real key was technology. This was the first major conflict where the global positioning system (GPS) was used. That, plus “smart” bombs—some guided by laser, others with built-in navigation systems—yielded stunning results.
“You pick precisely which target you want,” boasted the commander of the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing. “You can want the men’s room or you can want the ladies’ room.”
Of course there was still Iraq’s army to worry about, with its thousands of dug-in tanks. But an important fact about those buried metal tanks was that they cooled at a different rate than the sand around them did. This meant that during the enchanted hours between dusk and midnight, fighter pilots could switch on their infrared vision and see the tanks clearly. They dropped five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs on them. “Tank plinking” is what the pilots called it. Plink, plink, plink—there went the tanks.
Ultimately, Schwarzkopf marched across Iraq’s border. Yet the promised mother of all battles proved to be anything but. Schwarzkopf led his troops in a GPS-guided charge across the desert and caught the remnants of Iraq’s battered army by surprise (the Iraqis, assuming no army could navigate the trackless expanse, had expected the invasion to come via the roads). The ground war lasted one hundred hours, cost the coalition forces 366 lives, and consisted mainly of accepting Iraqi surrenders. Iraq was wrecked: its military hobbled, its troops terrified, and its infrastructure in ruins—a consequence of the war that Iraqis would have to live with for years to come.
Several high-ranking Iraqi prisoners confessed that the ground campaign probably hadn’t even been necessary. A couple more weeks of the air war, and Iraq’s army—again, the world’s fourth largest—would have withdrawn without ever having faced an adversary on the ground.
This was astonishing. It confirmed the thought, batted around by Soviet and U.S. theorists in the seventies and eighties, that technology was changing the face of war. A “revolution in military affairs,” they called it. What was the use of armored divisions, heavy artillery, large infantries, and foreign occupations in the age of GPS? Why even field an army when you could just call in air strikes from a nearby base?
The Russian military theorist Vladimir Slipchenko noted that the very spatial categories of war were changing. In the future, he suggested, area-based military concepts such as front, rear, and flank would be irrelevant. There would be only “targets and non-targets.” Further, Slipchenko predicted, “there will be no need to occupy enemy territory.” Controlling territory wouldn’t matter, because war was no longer about area. It was about points.
It wasn’t only the fighting that had gone pointillist. To launch planes and fire missiles, the United States needed platforms. Bases and ships, not too far from the combat zone, were essential. Hence the buildup of a basing network in Saudi Arabia, especially at Dhahran.
But hosting U.S. forces at Dhahran was no less of a touchy subject in the 1990s than it had been in the 1950s. Saudis near the base were unnerved by seeing female service members driving vehicles and wearing T-shirts. And radio broadcasts from Baghdad charged that U.S. forces were defiling Islam’s holiest sites.
Washington had worried about exactly this. After the deal to reopen the base was struck, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia had confided to Robert Gates his terror about what would happen if a soldier “inadvertently pissed on a mosque.” Great efforts were taken to prevent friction. The military banned pornography and alcohol, told Christians to wear their crucifixes under their shirts, and took the extraordinary step of helicoptering Jewish service members out to ships anchored in the Gulf for their religious services, lest Saudi complain of rabbis in the Holy Land.
“We had to avoid giving the impression that western ‘colonialists’ had unilaterally imposed their will,” explained Schwarzkopf. To that end, he convened a regular “Arab reaction seminar” to assess how locals might perceive the military’s actions.
Yet no amount of precaution could change the basic fact that one country was stationing its troops in another’s land. It’s not hard to imagine how the people of the United States would have reacted to a Saudi base in, say, Texas. In fact, it’s not even necessary to imagine. In the eighteenth century, the stationing of British soldiers in North America was so repellent to the colonists that it fueled their revolution. Their Declaration of Independence denounced the king for “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” and exempting those troops from punishment for crimes.
So it was not entirely a surprise when Saudi clerics complained. For Osama bin Laden, the bases weren’t only an affront to religion, they were maddening hypocrisy. At the behest of his government, Bin Laden had risked his life to oust infidels from the Muslim country of Afghanistan. And now that same government was inviting nonbelievers in? To the land of Mecca and Medina?
“It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers—their filthy feet roaming everywhere,” he fumed. The United States, he charged, was “turning the Arabian Peninsula into the biggest air, land, and sea base in the region.”
At the urging of the nervous Saudi government, Bin Laden left the country, making his way eventually to Afghanistan. But he did not drop the issue. That the U.S. troops stayed in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, in breach of Cheney’s promise, only added fuel to Bin Laden’s fire.
In 1995, a car bomb went off in Riyadh in front of a U.S. training facility. It killed seven people, five from the United States, and wounded thirty-four others. The Saudi government arrested four suspects who confessed that they’d been inspired by Bin Laden. Whether or not he was responsible, he took credit.
The next year, another bomb exploded, this one at a housing facility at Dhahran. Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel died, and 372 people were wounded. Again, Bin Laden claimed responsibility. It’s genuinely unclear whether he was involved, but someone hated the base enough to bomb it.
In search of security, the air force issued a contract for a $150 million compound in a remote location in the Saudi desert. “You can see something coming for miles,” the spokesman explained. It was to be a military oasis, with forty-two hundred beds and eighty-five buildings, including a dining hall, a gym, a swimming pool, and a recreation facility. What was most remarkable, though, was the builder that the Saudi government hired to erect the base: the Bin Laden firm.
If there is one episode that perfectly captures the dual nature of the U.S. basing empire, it’s this one. Participation and protest—the Beatles and the peace sign, Sony and the Okinawa riots—braided within a single family. The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them.
Osama bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” in 1996, after the Dhahran bombing. On the face of it, this seemed an absurdly imbalanced war: an exile living in a cave complex in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, taking on the most powerful military in existence. Yet Bin Laden had absorbed the lessons of the revolution in military affairs. From his mountain base, he could, like some sort of Central Asian Doctor No, order pinpoint strikes without needing an army.
What he did need was technology, and Bin Laden proved to be an astute consumer of it. The same year he declared jihad, he acquired one of the first commercially available satellite phones. It was the size of a laptop and retailed for about $15,000, but it allowed him to communicate globally. (This happened just as his brothers had become key investors in a different satellite phone company.)
Bin Laden used his phone to coordinate the first attacks that we are certain were his doing: bombings, five minutes apart, of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people died, and several thousand were wounded. It was as if the first day of the Gulf War had been reflected in a mirror: satellite technology used to coordinate synchronized strikes on key targets, all ordered from another continent.
It was no accident that the bombs went off on August 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the arrival of U.S. troops at Dhahran.
Thirteen days later, President Bill Clinton ordered Tomahawk missiles fired simultaneously at al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan (Bin Laden was believed to be at one) and at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was suspected of having manufactured chemical weapon precursors for al-Qaeda. This was called Operation Infinite Reach.
It was a disaster. Not only was Bin Laden not at the Afghan base, no other al-Qaeda leader was killed. The Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was destroyed, but it is doubtful that it had any role in making chemical weapons. The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials. Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths—Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands”—in one of the world’s poorest countries.
The botched missile strikes added to Bin Laden’s fame and gave him rich material for recruitment—The Economist warned that they might create “100,000 new fanatics.” The strikes also suggested a target for revenge. In 2000, suicide bombers in a small fiberglass boat approached the USS Cole, a billion-dollar, high-tech destroyer anchored off Yemen that had launched missiles in Operation Infinite Reach. The bombers set off hundreds of pounds of explosives, killing seventeen U.S. servicemen and disabling the ship, which had to be towed back home.
The United States wasn’t the only one whose reach was infinite, in other words.
The climax came the next year, with what al-Qaeda called its “planes operation.” Nineteen hijackers, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, commandeered four commercial aircraft. One hit the Pentagon (“a military base,” Bin Laden explained). Two more struck the World Trade Center. (“It wasn’t a children’s school!”) The fourth, en route to the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden had found a way to make air strikes without an air force.
The attacks baffled many in the United States. “To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away,” wrote the members of the 9/11 Commission. So why was a Saudi man there attacking Washington and New York?
The answer is that for Bin Laden, the United States was not “very far away.” “Your forces occupy our countries,” he wrote in his message to the U.S. populace. “You spread your military bases throughout them.” Bin Laden’s list of grievances against the United States was long, ranging from its support of Israel to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (“Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history?” he asked.) But his chief objection, voiced consistently throughout his career, was the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia.
This is worth emphasizing. After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.
Al-Qaeda’s planes operation seems to have been guided by a larger strategy: provoke the United States, draw it into a war in the Middle East, force infidel governments there into crisis (they would have to either accommodate the unpopular occupiers or fight them), and then defeat the United States on the ground, just as the mujahidin had defeated the Soviet Union. But for this to work, Bin Laden needed Washington to send troops, not just shoot a few Tomahawk missiles. He wagered that the resulting war would be a quagmire.
In a way, Bin Laden got lucky with George W. Bush, who had recently succeeded Bill Clinton. Bush could have treated the 9/11 attacks as a crime, arrested the perpetrators, and brought them to justice. Instead, he declared a “war on terror” of global expanse and promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”
Yet despite his grand ambitions, Bush had little interest in the sort of ground campaign typical of the age of colonialism, the sort Bin Laden was banking on. As a presidential candidate, he’d come out strongly against occupations: “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you.” Instead, he called for an agile military, able to strike quickly and then leave. It was the revolution in military affairs.
Bush gave the job of remaking the military to his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who’d served in the same position in the Ford administration. You could see why Bush chose him. Not only was Rumsfeld obsessed with thrift, but since the Ford years he’d served as CEO of two technology companies. The first was Searle Pharmaceuticals, which had patented the first birth control pill and then, under Rumsfeld’s direction, brought a synthetic substitute for sugar, aspartame, to the market. The other company was General Instrument, which specialized in satellite television equipment. Now back in government, Rumsfeld was given the job to create a small-footprint, tech-savvy military: fewer tanks, more GPS-guided air strikes.
He succeeded, at first. The initial invasions of Afghanistan, in 2001, and Iraq, in 2003, were, as Bush had hoped, swift and decisive. Air defenses were knocked out, major cities seized, and the Afghan and Iraq militaries left in shambles. Rumsfeld estimated that in the two months it took the coalition to dislodge the Taliban from Afghanistan’s main cities, it had killed between eight and twelve thousand Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, at a cost of 11 U.S. lives. The 122 U.S. service members killed in the first three weeks of the Iraq War largely died from accidents or friendly fire.
But the war on terror wasn’t ultimately a fight between countries, as the Gulf War had been. It was a “very new type of conflict,” Rumsfeld told the press a week after 9/11. “We’ll have to deal with the networks.”
This metaphor of the network—a set of connected points—became ubiquitous, acquiring the same sort of buzzword cachet that quagmire had possessed in the Vietnam War. The connotation pointed in another direction, though. If quagmire described a fight on the ground, network suggested that the space of the battlefield would be different, or that it might not even make sense to speak of battle as taking place on a field.
Having identified the adversary as a series of points, Rumsfeld happily deployed the precision weaponry that had come to dominate the military’s arsenals. In the early weeks of the Afghan war, coalition forces established a pattern. Special forces teams, CIA operatives, and their Afghan allies would scout enemy strongholds on the ground and then call out the coordinates to the planes overhead. The pilots called it “Taliban-plinking.”
From the cockpit, it was a video game, but it felt different from the ground. “The planes poured down their fire on us,” remembered Osama bin Laden, who was nearly killed. “The American forces barraged us with smart bombs, bombs weighing a thousand pounds, cluster bombs, and bunker busters. Bombers like the B-52 circled above us, one of them for more than two hours, dropping twenty to thirty bombs at a time.”
Bombers and smart munitions were one thing. But the United States quickly debuted another, even more remarkable technology: the armed drone. Drones were almost perfectly adapted for the fight against Bin Laden. In fact, the Bush administration had first taken an interest in them when, shortly before September 11, counterterrorism officials had tested an unarmed Predator drone over Kandahar and spotted a tall man in white, flowing robes surrounded by a security detail—quite likely Bin Laden himself. Arming the drones would ensure that the United States could act should it sight him again.
Drones carried pointillist warfare to its logical endpoint. Unlike manned planes, they could hover for hours, gathering information with high-resolution cameras. With information collection handled from the sky, even the small special forces teams on the ground weren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. What is more, by patiently stalking their prey, drones could target not just buildings but individuals—they could put “warheads on foreheads,” as the military vernacular had it.
The face of battle in a war of points
The enemy in this style of warfare was not a country, but a GPS coordinate.
Thanks to drones, battles could be replaced by the targeted killing of individuals. With this, the lines of war blurred. What was a combat zone and what wasn’t could be confusing. The most conspicuous use of armed drones has been, in fact, in “friendly” nations. Drones have killed (by the CIA’s estimate) more than two thousand people in Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden’s son Saad. Drone warfare has crept into Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, too.
What the revolution in military affairs promised was immaculate warfare: precise strikes, few civilian casualties, and, above all, no occupying armies. The Vietnam-learned aversion to territorial entanglement was, in fact, a key theme of the Bush administration. “We’re not a colonial power,” Rumsfeld told reporters. “We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate.”
There is every reason to think that Rumsfeld spoke from the heart. One of his greatest blunders in Iraq was banking on what one official called a “Wizard of Oz moment,” when the wicked witch would be killed (perhaps in an air strike) and the liberated inhabitants of Oz would joyously take over. Expecting a seamless transition, the Pentagon’s planning for the postwar occupation was last-minute, haphazard, and badly underfunded. The occupation leadership didn’t even arrive in Iraq until weeks after Baghdad’s fall, by which point the city had no electricity, was running low on water, and was seeing its ministries and museums stripped of records and valuables.
“We need to create a colonial office—fast,” wrote Max Boot, a conservative critic of the administration. The British historian Niall Ferguson agreed. The United States had proved to be “a surprisingly inept empire builder” and should take a page from Britain’s history. Zapping targets from above, Boot and Ferguson argued, was no substitute for governing.
This criticism met with little sympathy in the White House. “We’re not an imperial power,” Bush insisted. “We’re a liberating power.” Rumsfeld was determined to keep the occupying force small. And so for the first three years of the Iraq War—until Rumsfeld’s resignation—troops kept mainly to their bases, most notably the heavily fortified “Green Zone” around the grounds of the former Republican Palace in Baghdad. In the Red Zone, outside, the city was collapsing. Inside, service members enjoyed air-conditioning, pools, gyms, bars, and the sounds of Freedom Radio.
“We covet no one’s land”—it was a line Rumsfeld and his colleagues repeated over and over. And it was right. However often the Bush administration was accused of imperialism, it exhibited very little interest in colonizing. “If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth’s surface,” noted Vice President Dick Cheney, not without warrant.
Yet if the Bush administration had no evident lust for sheer acreage, there were certain small spots that it cared about very much. Even drones needed launchpads, and the war on terror relied on a string of bases running from the U.S. mainland to the hot spots and war zones.
The problem, Rumsfeld confessed, was that often “the presence and activities of our forces grate on local populations.” In fact, the military had been kicked out of place after place. In Hawai‘i, activists in the 1990s wrested Kaho‘olawe, the smallest of the state’s main islands, from the hands of the military. Filipino politicians wrote a clause into their 1987 constitution banning the storage of nuclear weapons, and they evicted the United States entirely in 1992. The large naval base in Puerto Rico at Vieques provoked such fierce protest, including from Puerto Ricans in New York, that the military abandoned it in 2003. That was the same year the Saudi government once again closed its bases, including Dhahran, to the United States. Uzbekistan, which had granted the United States bases close to Afghanistan, followed suit two years later. In 2009, politicians in Kyrgyzstan voted to expel the United States, too.
Even Okinawa, a bastion of U.S. power in Asia, looked shaky. When three marines raped a twelve-year-old girl in 1995, it provoked another long wave of protest. The next year, the politician Yukio Hatoyama established a new political party, the Democratic Party of Japan, and set out to remove bases from Japanese soil entirely. In 2009 he became the prime minister and promised that he’d close at least the major marine base at Futenma. Ultimately, Hatoyama failed and, as a consequence, resigned. It was the second time a Japanese prime minister was brought down by the U.S. basing system.
The more other bases faltered, the more military planners turned to Guam. Stationing forces on Guam, unlike stationing them in Saudi Arabia or Okinawa, did not require negotiating with foreign governments. Nor did Guamanians have congressional representation, as residents of Hawai‘i did directly or as Puerto Ricans did indirectly through the New York diaspora. When protests imperiled the Okinawa bases, the government proposed transferring some seventeen thousand marines and their dependents to Guam—a decision made without consulting anyone from the island.
Had they been consulted, Guamanians would have voiced mixed opinions. Guam was already a crucial node in the U.S. military network—the “tip of the spear,” as many call it. As such, its economy depended utterly on the military; Guam has far more military enlistment than any state. Many on Guam saw in the base expansion the prospect of more jobs. Yet, at the same time, activists put up determined resistance, noting how the base expansion would plow under the ancient village of Pågat and draw Guam even more tightly into the military economy.
“This is old-school colonialism all over again,” protested LisaLinda Natividad, a professor at the University of Guam. “It boils down to our political status—we are occupied territory.”
Whether Guamanians supported the move was irrelevant, as a graduate student who secured an interview with a surprisingly candid air force analyst discovered. People on Guam were forgetting that “they are a possession, and not an equal partner,” the analyst explained. “If California says they want to do this or that, it is like my wife saying that she wants to move here or there: I’ll have to respect her wish and at least discuss it with her. If Guam says they want to do this or that, it is as if this cup here,” he continued, pointing to his coffee mug, “expresses a wish: the answer will be, you belong to me and I can do with you as best I please.”
The planned move from Okinawa to Guam has stalled owing to complications on the Okinawan side. Yet one thing is clear: Guam may be a small island, but it matters tremendously that there is this one spot, far into the Pacific, that the U.S. military can use without asking anyone’s permission.
Guam wasn’t the only point in the U.S. Empire to prove useful. The Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Dick Cheney went on television and announced that the government would have to work “the dark side.”
“It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,” Cheney explained. In practice, this meant indefinitely detaining and forcefully interrogating suspected terrorists. Laws prohibited this—both international treaties outlawing torture and constitutional guarantees of the right of due process. Yet as the Bush administration discovered, those laws didn’t hold with the same force everywhere.
The United States by law couldn’t torture. But it could transfer suspects to its allies for interrogation, even allies known for their loose adherence to international conventions. Through a process known as “extraordinary rendition,” the CIA used a secret air fleet to fly more than a hundred and possibly thousands of detainees to foreign countries, particularly Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Jordan. “They are outsourcing torture because they know it is illegal” is how one victim of the system put it. He’d been held and tortured for months (due to a false confession elicited from another torture victim) before being released without charges.
The government also made use of what it called “black sites.” In these, detainees were held in CIA custody, but covertly and on foreign soil, where they could be dealt with more harshly. The program remains swathed in secrecy, but it appears that more than a hundred suspected terrorists were held this way in at least eight countries. In a throwback to the days of 1898, a small handful were waterboarded, a torture reminiscent of the “water cure” used on Filipino rebels.
Extraordinary rendition and black site prisons required foreign partners. Yet the Bush administration figured out that it could use the U.S. Empire to similar effect. After considering erecting a prison on the U.S. islands of Tinian, Wake, and Midway, the administration fastened on Guantánamo Bay, held on indefinite lease from Cuba since 1903—a prize from the 1898 war with Spain.
The lease gave the United States “complete jurisdiction and control” over Guantánamo Bay, though Cuba retained “ultimate sovereignty.” Similar legal frameworks had been used for the Panama Canal Zone and Okinawa. The virtue of this, advised lawyers John Yoo and Patrick Philbin of the Office of Legal Counsel, is that it gave the government a spot of land under its exclusive control that was nevertheless “foreign territory, not subject to U.S. sovereignty.”
The CIA established a prison at Guantánamo Bay. The officers named it after the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields,” on the presumption that detainees would linger there “forever.”
Permanent detention was feasible, however, only if Guantánamo Bay was indeed foreign. Was it? Lawyers representing the detainees tested the matter. They filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the base was a “fully American enclave,” with a shopping mall, a McDonald’s, a Baskin-Robbins, a Boy Scout contingent, and a Star Trek fan club. The idea that Cuba retained sovereignty was, they maintained, a fiction. They noted that Fidel Castro refused to recognize the lease (he made a point of never cashing the annual $4,085 checks that the United States sent) and insisted repeatedly that the navy leave. If the United States wouldn’t leave when Castro asked, how could Cuba be the sovereign?
This was one of those “Is it the United States or not?” questions that had dogged the empire for more than a century. The case went to the Supreme Court in 2004. To the White House’s surprise, the court ruled that Guantánamo detainees could seek justice in federal courts. Guantánamo Bay was held by lease, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, but “this lease is no ordinary lease.”
In its peculiar legal status, Guantánamo Bay was not far off from Guam. They’re a fitting pair: two U.S. outposts, spoils of a not-much-remembered nineteenth-century war, both in the United States without being of it. Such places may seem like bizarre vestiges of a long-ago imperialist era, but they aren’t. Small dots on the map like these are the foundation of the United States’ pointillist empire today.
Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.