Obama's Global Vandalism: The New Arc of Instability

It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.” It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet.

A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them -- from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia -- Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.

Garrisoning the planet is just part of it. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war.

But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved.

Tomgram: Nick Turse, How Washington Creates Global Instability

It was built for... well, not to put too fine a point on it, victory. I’m talking, of course, about the ill-named Camp Victory, the massive military complex, a set of bases really, constructed around an old hunting lodge and nine of former dictator Saddam Hussein’s opulent palaces near Baghdad International Airport.

Within months of American troops entering Baghdad in April 2003, it was already “the largest overseas American combat base since the Vietnam War.” It would become the grand visiting place for American politicians -- back when the U.S. was still being called the global “hyperpower” -- arriving in what was almost imagined as our 51st state. It was the headquarters for the American military effort and later “surge” strategy in Iraq. It was also the stomping grounds for at least 46,000 U.S. troops stationed there and who knows how many spooks, contractors, hire-a-guns, Defense Department civilians, and third-world workers. It had its own Cinnabon and Burger King, its massive PXs, and it’s 27-mile perimeter of “blast walls and concertina wire,” as well as its own hospital and water-bottling plant. It was a “city,” a world, unto itself. more