The bipartisan war consensus
Hawks such as Sen. John McCain and commentators such as former New York Times columnist Bill Keller and Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens fret about America’s growing isolationism and the potential for a de-Americanized world, in which the absence of our stabilizing presence leads to chaos.
If you share their fears, rest assured: The U.S. military isn’t retreating to our shores. It’s already deeply entrenched in a global archipelago of virtually countless bases in at least 38 countries (PDF) around the world. And that’s just troops and bases, to say nothing of the tertiary influence of arms sales.
One of the more interesting recent encroachments of our military, which has received only intermittent attention, is the growth of our troop presence in Africa. Nominally, the United States has just one active military base in Africa. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti serves as the headquarters of Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa and acts as the launch pad for drone strikes in the region.
Despite the 4,000 troops stationed there, Lemonnier alone doesn’t begin to illustrate the full scope of our presence in the continent. As Nick Turse reported in Tom Dispatch, the U.S. military is involved in the affairs of more than 90 percent of African countries. A discreet mission creep in Africa has led to our government’s quietly building military infrastructure, expanding an intelligence network and training local militias.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/1/democrats-republicanswarhawks.html
