Must be all occupied by illegal immigrants then, or is the entire country moving overseas?Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You asked Sam to point out the obvious...and when she does you dive for cover! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
That "guide" appears to be short by a factor of about 10. If the US averages around two embassies/ consulates per country, that wold be about 300 civilian bases. They are AFAIK much smaller than the larger military bases - except the embassy in Iraq, of uncertain "civilian" status - but we should probably not get into complications like that. The relative monetary investment is a factor, though. To quote the CEO's favorite philosopher: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also".
So gross arithmetic matters? That's ridiculous. I can easily think of several scenarios where it would be advisable to have multiple bases in a country, for strategic purposes, but only one embassy, etc. Holding ground and having access to other ground is a matter of geography, whereas an embassy or a consulate can perform all its requisite tasks from a centralized location. This seems obvious to me...
There are 260 U.S. Embassies, but to try and count the Consulates, and Missions would take some time, but there are a bunch.
How normal it seems, apparently, for the United States to have "strategic purposes" involving military force in hundreds and hundreds of places all over the planet. Kind of an expensive way to manage political discourse, and a bit odd for the locals one would think, but a one trick pony is going to do its trick.
It is normal, and has been since the close of the Second World War, so what's your point? Furthermore, I can't think of any time in history when one nation or a handful of nations didn't have forces scattered about the world, keeping order and ensuring stability, can you? I don't think we're managing political discourse at all. Or if we're trying to, we're doing a damn lousy job. Nobody (including you) seems to like the US. Even those locals who would be loath to see our troops leave places like Germany, South Korea, Japan and so on and so forth seem to spend a lot of time moaning about the "evils" of the US.
Keeping order and ensuring stability - so that's what they were doing. Big of 'em. And that's what the US is doing now, planetwide - what those other empires and such were doing? The Mongols, the Romans, the Brits ? The US taxpayer, the one getting stuck with the bills and the debt, is certainly a selfless and charitable soul, paying that high a price for other people's order and stability - including the occasional corporate interest, purely by coincidence no doubt.
Oh sure, every year I mail in my taxes and I always write on the checks "spend this money on more war please" and then I wait for my corporate kickbacks to come in the mail.
I asked what your point was, remember? Yes, that is largely what they're doing. Or do you think we send our Navy around the world because it's fun and we want our boys to sail the deep blue? Sure, we're projecting power, but we are also guarding the world's shipping lanes and maintaining stability on the Oceans. Bases in Europe and Asia are where they are for obvious reasons. Sure, some are detritus from the Cold War, but there are plenty of reasons to keep most of them or the BRAC would have shut them down. And isn't it interesting that some of the more troubled parts of the world, that is places like Africa and the Middle East, are places where no great power (like the US) has any significant footprint? I made no such direct comparisons, because direct comparisons aren't all that easy when one is comparing eras of history separated by great lengths of time. My point is that there always will be and always has been a great power that projects itself well beyond its borders, and your statements acknowledge as much. So again, what's your point? To criticize the US? I don't know about you, but I'd rather have the US projecting its power than nations like China, Russia or India... I hate to break it to you, Mr. Socialist, but those corporations provide jobs for America and sell our products overseas. And arguing that the US taxpayer is suffering from overseas spending seems more than a little foolish when one considers the abject pork involved in domestic spending bills... But as usual, that doesn't fit with your anti-Imperialist, anti-American, anti-Capitalist template, so you have to reach for the familiar.
If you have said anything more obliviously ludicrous than that the US has no significant footprint in Africa and the Middle East, I've forgotten what it was. Well we should have realized you didn't know what you were posting, when you directly compared US military bases planetwide with the colonial and predatory military establishments of "order" so familiar in history. Not that the comparison lacked either relevance or accuracy. And, increasingly, supplement the government supplied military with their own more adaptable forces. Yes, we know.
The US has a significant footprint in the Middle East now, but it was not always so. We haven't been welcome in most ME countries, which is why we've largely had to work covertly and through proxies there. We have some installations in Africa, but I'd wager there aren't that many (I don't know off-hand). I'd also wager we don't have many on the continent's interior, which is where much of the recent strife has erupted (Darfur aside). So what about my earlier statement is so ludicrous? I made a very general statement about world powers and military projection. This is vastly different from comparing the current thrust of the US to specific empires from history, all of which had specific goals vastly different from one another. The devil, as they say, is in the details. So again, I'm still not sure what your point is, other than the usual: To lob clumsy grenades at American foreign policy?
One of the military bases of the US was a target in the WWII; this incident led to the nuclear bombing of two Japanese cities. Another was in Saudi Arabia and purportedly led to 9/11 Why was there a military base in Pearl Harbor? Why one in Saudi Arabia? What do these military bases accomplish? For whom? Why do we need so many US military bases around teh world? With policies like this in the current admin: and pre-emptive wars like Iraq (and Afghanistan), what is the necessity for greater global distribution of trigger happy rednecks with guns?
They are accomplishing what we consider the Best Interest of our Countries Policies, in containing bomb happy Raghead Moslem Terrorist.
So the best interest of your country policies entail US military bases around the world, including the countries of those Raghead Moslem Terrorist What would you say if those Raghead Moslem Terrorists decided their best interests lay in having their troops in your country? Or is this a one way street?
They are trying to impose their people and will in our country by warfare, so we have the right to take the war to them or is it only a one way street?
You mean the military bases of the Raghead Muslim Terrorist in your countries? Or you mean the US military bases in the countries of the Raghead Muslim Terrorist?
A questionable source to be certain, but the only one I could find in a few minutes of searching with an easy-to-read map. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_military_bases_in_the_world_2007.PNG Africa doesn't have that many bases or personnel, as I suspected. The Middle East seems to have deployments that are recent and related to the War on Terror, etc.
