Expanding the American Empire--why we keep starting wars

A very important article -- about a very informative book.  http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david_swanson/27679/the_bases_of_empire

"The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts," a collection edited by Catherine Lutz, has the potential to open American eyes to both the empire they pay for and permit, and to the world's responses to it. Included in this book is an overview of the empire of bases, and a detailed look at several parts of the world, starting with Latin America and the Caribbean, where the U.S. government's driving mission is the maintenance and expansion of bases, and where communism has been replaced as an excuse by drugs as much as by terrorism. 

Each chapter provides a history as well as the current state of affairs, and in the section on Europe we learn about successful struggles from decades past to oppose bases and the deployment of nuclear weapons. The section on Iraq could have been written about Afghanistan as well. A primary purpose of those wars has been and is the establishment of permanent U.S. military bases in those countries -- a fact which makes the pretense by U.S. peace activists that those wars are ending and that all troops are leaving Iraq next year so painfully out of touch with reality.