Today I was looking at this map on Wikipedia:
(You can click on the map for a larger version of it. Or click here for an even better (5 MB) version.)
At one level, this map is not remarkable at all. It was produced in, I think, 2002, by the US military’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and it simply shows the way the various “regional commands” of the US military divide the world up amongst themselves for the purposes of their planning and operations. Thus, it shows the areas that come under “Pacific Command”, “Central Command”, and so on.
For an update, you can go to this little (also clickable) pair of maps:
On it, you can see how the DOD is thinking of allocating the responsibility for most of Africa to a brand-new “Africa Command”, and what that command’s borders will be. (H’mm. I wonder if they had a big tussle among them, there in the Pentagon, over who “wins” control over Egypt? According to that latter map, it stays with Centcom, while Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa including Kenya get wrestled out of Centcom’s hands and allocated to the new Africom…)
At another level, though, these maps are completely outrageous and mindblowing!
Who in China do you think ever gave “permission” to the Pentagon to put the whole of their country squarely under the letters “USPACOM”? Who in Brazil or Peru gave permission for their countries to fall under the letters “USSOUTHCOM”?
Russia, you will see, has been restored not to its full former red glory– but it has been shaded in the delicate pink of USEUCOM. Reminds me of the old days, growing up in England, when so many of the old maps in our country also had a huge number of the world’s countries tinted pink, for “British Empire.”
Ah, talking of pink for British Empire, let’s look at this little (clickable) map:
It’s a reproduction of “Africa 1892” from something called Gardiner’s Atlas.
Quite a lot more complex than the “UASAFRICOM” map, you’ll notice. But the same land-mass. And descendants of the very same poor-bloody-Africans are still living there in that same terrain that’s getting divided up among outside powers with no-one seriously asking their permission.
Back in the 1880s and 1890s, it wasn’t the different branches of the US military who, arguing among themselves for bigger budgets and more flying space, had laid those lines on distant parts of the world as they laid claim to them. Instead, it was the “concert” of European powers who at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 daintily tinted huge parts of Africa pink (for Britain) and others grey (for France), orange (Germany), yellow (Portugal), or whatever.
Note that Congo (though not “French” Congo) was described on Gardiner’s map as “Congo Free State”, and marked a sort of aqua color denoting “independent.” Belgium’s King Leopold II must have been falling about laughing to see how he’d hoodwinked ’em all! Because he was at that very time running the whole darn country as his own, personal rubber-extraction plantation, and in the course of that inflicting genocidal mega-deaths on the country’s people…
Anyway, I guess my larger point is this. Mapping places and indeed other loci of knowledge is very frequently an essential concomitant to, or precursor of, the exercise of raw power.
Back in the 1980s, when I was doing graduate studies in strategic affairs at the University of Maryland, it was always kind of taken for granted that the US had somehow gotten into a position where it “had to” manage all these cumbersome strategic alliances with other powers around the globe… in its quest to “keep the international peace”.
Nowadays, though, I think its is either outrageous or hilariously funny, the idea that this one tiny country with less than 5% of the world’s people should even imagine it has the right to paint the colors of its various different “strategic commands” all over other everyone else’s countries around the world! One thing this situation certainly is not, is “natural”. It is in every way extremely un-natural, not to mention inherently unstable.
As a pacifist, too, I’d like to make the argument that this situation of the US pushing its military bases ways out beyond our own borders and into so many other different countries around the world, and George W. Bush asserting that the US has the right to use military force unilaterally and “preventively” wherever it pleases, are both manifestations of the reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory of “legitimate self-defense.”
Enough already! There really is a better way to assure the security and wellbeing of our citizenry than continuing with this arrogance and folly.
14 thoughts on “Mapping and the will to power”
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i think you raise a very interesting pt, which has much further implications than just the military command regions. think of all history books and more. we in the west tend to make the west the focal point of everything. we look at history thru our lens.
when in fact there is often other perspectives as well.
peter
Helena
I suspect you are barking up the wrong tree somewhat.
Think of them like sales teritories.
I live in what is generaly referredto as EMEA. Europe and Middle East Area
What is really off putting is not the concept of painting boundaries on maps. The really frightening thing is the concept of extraterritoriality, which essentially means that US government agencies see themselves as having the authority to impose US laws on people and countries anywhere in the world.
Helena
I suspect you are barking up the wrong tree somewhat.
Think of them like sales teritories.
I live in what is generaly referredto as EMEA. Europe and Middle East Area
What is really off putting is not the concept of painting boundaries on maps. The really frightening thing is the concept of extraterritoriality, which essentially means that US government agencies see themselves as having the authority to impose US laws on people and countries anywhere in the world.
“impose US laws on people and countries anywhere in the world”
or no law at all……
which essentially means that US government agencies see themselves as having the authority to impose US laws on people and countries anywhere in the world
Is that really what the map means? That the US hopes to conform the entire globe to its own legal system?
Obviously no one in China authorized the Pentagon to color their country blue, or Russia pink. It’s just as clear that the Pentagon doesn’t “control” either country, politically or militarily… and its hard to imagine they have designs on either one.
The Pentagon decided in February to form AFRICOM but got no takers for a headquarters site. Last month it sent a delegation to plead with a few friendly dictators but it came up empty. These included (from the CIA Factbook):
** President Abdelaziz BOUTEFLIKA in the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria,
** King MOHAMED VI in the Kingdom of Morocco, and
** Revolutionary Leader Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-QADHAFI in the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
In other words Algeria, Morocco and Libya, three repressive states, don’t want any American military presence. So General William E. Ward, US Army, the commander of AFRICOM, must command the US military efforts in the African continent from outside the continent. (So the general is obviously not incontinent.)
Your shock at the map is late coming, I think. My partner and I were using a map of US bases in 1998 to show that the US was on an aggressive front, vis-a-vis Iraq.
In the US we don’t want to see that the front we pose to the world is one of a dominating military force with battle plans galore ready to pull out at the appropriate moment. We especially don’t want to notice, as we are villifying Iraq as an Islamo-fascist state, that we have done everything we can as a nation to build a powerful military force prepared to attack and take over Iran.
Why aren’t political people talking about the need for a solid anti-imperialist party in the US, one that would not rest on the false premises of the past or overly divisive ideological stances. Nobody needs a US that is incessantly forward deployed, in all military, political and economic senses.
“US government agencies see themselves as having the authority to impose US laws on people and countries anywhere in the world.”
I would not put it quite that way. I don’t see them as trying to impose U.S. laws, but rather simply U.S. domination. In fact, U.S. laws would make it more difficult, if not impossible to do the kinds of things they are doing in many parts of South American, and the Middle East – most notably Iraq.
Please excuse a bit of OT shameless self-promotion. This morning I published a diary on Daily Kos that some might find of interest. It is a reality-based, common-sense answer to the question of whether the slaughter and violence would get worse if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq.
I would welcome feedback.
This line of investigation will make a far better book than the previously-floated project.
Africom is a menace. USA must stop it. If you do not stop it, you will inevitably come to the point where here, too, (Africa) you are at the top of the atrocity league, including King Leopold, the British in Kenya, and all the rest of it.
It is already happening, even while you are busy wringing your hands over the monstrosities of the past. Why does it all take so long? Mark Twain put it all down a hundred years ago. So far, it his good work has made no difference. Now the USA is about to make it all much worse.
What makes me sick is all the self-referential pandering that goes on, because it is part of the problem of Imperialism. I can’t bear it and it drives me away. Maybe in the USA you become less conscious of it.
This contribution is a huge improvement. It is far better to keep in mind that the USA is actually tiny in relation to the rest of us, and to deal with it in that proportion, and not according to its own deluded lights.
in its quest to “keep the international peace”.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH wrote Op-Ed titled “Iraq hasn’t even begun“, he ended the iatrical by this:
In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic.
Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.
In another discussion about Iraq Lessons Learned it’s nice to read:
Maybe after the next attacks that Chertoffs gut says we will have we will then have a Constitutional Convention and adopt a new constitution, the Declaration of Interdependence (modified from the 1975 draft). The new constitution may even confirm the unitary nature of the Executive Branch and be a global constitution (allowing other countries to join if they choose and are confirmed by congress, and changing 50 states into 10 regions – same 10 regions FEMA uses for areas of responsibility), with no term limits for Presidents, and allow ex Presidents under the old Constitution to run for President. One hundred years from now the UNA (United Nations of America) will include most countries of the planet, except for our enemies, who we will be at a permanent state of war with
(eg. China, Russia).
The military command regions may be a prophetic indicator that the New World order is in the works.
It’s impossible to disagree with Kitty on “the need for a solid anti-imperialist party in the US”.
However, such a party would have to espouse a concrete, overall critique of the US situation and its relation to the rest of the world. In other words, to all intents and purposes, it would have to be a communist party. With or without the name.
The opposition to such a project from monopoly capitalist interests is inevitable and predictable, and perhaps even to a degree welcome, because the aim must be to divorce the general polity from their pernicious domination.
The problem with building a vanguard (i.e. not empirical) party of this type lies not with its natural opponent, who must be faced in any case.
The problem lies with the subjective unwillingness of the partizans of the popular interest to embrace the full implications of the vanguard role, and its full and necessary place within the history of anti-Imperialism.
You want the dog, you get the fleas. You want the anti-Imperialist dog, you have to accept Lenin and Fidel and not turn your noses up at them or flinch from standing side by side with their supporters and their equivalents around the world. In fact you must do so with pride.
It is the unwillingness of US people in sufficient numbers (and yes, “better fewer but better”, but there must be some) to do this that dooms the US people to the role of complicity in their own and others’ oppression.
You are conflating two different things-physical occupation as in colonialism and organizational charts.I assure you that China,Russia,United Kingdom,France,Italy,Iran,Israel etc…all have military contingencies “mapped-out.” Finally,no one requires permission to plan ahead.Does the State Department need permission to have a Sec. of South Asian Affairs for instance?
U