Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

Some analysts say the US – bogged down in wars and pressed by emerging powers – will have to rethink its role in world affairs. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, a peace and conflict expert, goes further by predicting the fall of the “US Empire”. “Iraq is not at all turning out the way they hoped, certainly not Afghanistan either. The same will happen in Yemen and Somalia and a number of other countries where they now have undercover operations,” he told RT.

From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling, girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said: “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette. “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.” …

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning …

In a rare appearance at the Pentagon, he unveiled a far-reaching defence review [see link below] under which thousands of troops are expected to be axed.

The tide of war was receding and the US must renew its economic power, he said.

The strategy is designed to accommodate at least $450bn (£290bn) in Pentagon cuts over the next decade.

The defence budget could also lose another $500bn at the end of this year after Congress failed to agree on deficit reduction following a debt-ceiling deal in August.

“So yes, our military will be leaner,” Mr Obama told reporters, “but the world must know – the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats.” …