Pete Willows

Toronto Canada

Revised: April , 2010.

Word count: about 600.

David Vine. Island of Shame: the secret history of the US military base on Diego Garcia.
Princeton University Press. 2009. Pp. 259. $27.00 USD/$33.00 CDN. ISBN 978-0-691-13869-5.

The logistics of running an empire took a different tack as World War II ended

and the Cold War began. Colonialism collapsed under its own weight as Briton, France

and other European nations lost their possessions across the globe to revolutions and

independence movements. When Gamal Abdel Nassar seized control of the Suez Canal

in 1956, there was an undeniable power-vacuum in this region of the world—and the

United States had already begun to rearrange pieces on the chess board of empires with

the Sino-Soviet bloc.

The US policy of establishing foreign soil military bases marked a trend in

imperialist expansion, which moved away from colonialism. This stratagem of military

bases was partly how the United States began to assert itself as a superpower, and

through a more detached approach than maintaining colonies. Colonies, which require

administration, budgets and policing, are vulnerable to sedition.

The United States today stables armour, personnel, aircraft and sundry military

supplies in about 1,000 military bases outside its borders, and in about 150 nations.

Further numbers become staggering. Infrastructure—in the form of over a half million

buildings with utilities at these foreign bases—is conservatively estimated by the US

Department of Defense to hold a value of over 700 billion dollars. Secret bases in

Afghanistan and Iraq, inter alia, do not answer to Congressional budget review.
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Like Germany, where there remain some 50,000 US troops, Iraq and Afghanistan

should expect to see their US military bases operational for decades impended, if trends

persist. And trends are expected to persist. Balad Air Base near Baghdad is one of the

‘mega bases’ in that theatre, holding not just troops and munitions, but private contractors

in the form of fortified fast food and retail outlets: Pizza Hut, Burger King and Subway

restaurants, along with sprawling shopping centres. Seen in the desert from the air after

dark, “the base resembles Las Vegas ... where the lights never go out.”

David Vine has spent much time and intellectual energy researching the joint

British-American military base on the island of Diego Garcia, which is strategically

located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles south of India. Vine tells us,

“the military’s goal is to be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.”

After a controversial depopulation of Diego Rivera’s two thousand inhabitants, starting in

early 1972, the military established an operational communications station there that was

able to fly surveillance aircraft for Israel in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

Today, the island is home to one of five monitoring stations for the Global

Positioning System, long range bombers, submarines and missiles. Diego Garcia is also a

crucial mid-ocean refuelling station, and serves as home to a major invasion force at the

ready, with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and its own mobile field hospital. The

island base was used as support for invasions in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Vine, an anthropologist, has documented the stories of the displaced islanders,

called Chagossians, and their forced migration. Diasporas and refugee studies are

certainly sad stories often filled with despair, confusion and disorientation. Some groups

have been more resilient than others, and are able to prosper after resettlement. Sadly,
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this has not been the case with Diego Garcia’s Chagossian population—uneducated

plantation farmers whom were forcibly taken to, and left unwelcomed in, the islands of

Mauritius and Seychelles.

Vine, like many left-leaning academics, views the world through the narrow

prism of imperialism, and is dismissive of the pragmatism that comes with Realpolitik.

And though there are legitimate criticisms of an established network of foreign soil

military bases worldwide, Vine does not offer an alternative means for protecting US

interests.

Willows is a contributing writer to the Egyptian Gazette. He attended the American University in
Cairo and now lives in Toronto.