favor of moving Futenma Air Base entirely out of Japan.82 On these developments, Masaaki Gabe wrote, “Historians in the future may note that the bilateral alliance between Japan and the United States gradually declined after it peaked in November 2005. In the ongoing talks between the Japanese and U.S. governments over the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, the Japanese government neglected to seek public support. An alliance that is not supported by the people is fragile.... The interim report has encountered a deep-seated backlash from Okinawa and Kanagawa prefectures.... If the U.S. troops do not have the support of the local base-hosting communities, the troops will probably have to withdraw from their bases.”83
To resolve this impasse, at least for the time being, the Japanese government resorted to the old tried-and- true practice of bribery. It offered huge amounts of central government money to Okinawa and other affected communities if they would go along with what the U.S. and Japanese governments had already agreed to do. Prime Minister Koizumi made clear that acceptance of the planned reorganization of American forces—even if it amounted to a de facto rewriting of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty—was settled national policy and could not be further modified. In view of this stance, most of the localities, despite some ambiguous responses, caved in. On May 30, 2006, the cabinet formally approved the planned realignment of U.S. forces in Japan.
The terms of the May 30 decision are extraordinary. They include an agreement by the United States to remove some 8,000 marines from Okinawa and relocate them to new facilities to be built on the American island of Guam. Secretary Rumsfeld estimates that this transfer will cost some $10.3 billion and take at least six years to accomplish. Astonishingly enough, the Japanese government agreed to pay $6.1 billion—a highly unusual decision in that the funds will be used to build quarters for American forces and their families on American territory. In addition, Japan will construct a new seaside airport within Camp Schwab in northern Okinawa for the troops and aircraft now based at Futenma. Japan will also accept a new army command center to be located at Camp Zama and a nuclear aircraft carrier to replace the conventional one homeported at Yokosuka.
Article 4 of the cabinet decision says, “[These accords] are among the government’s most critical policy measures to ensure bilateral security arrangements in order for Japan to maintain its peace and security.... The government will consider the wishes of local public entities to be additionally burdened in implementing the realignment-related steps. In return for their great contributions to Japan’s peace and national security, the government will implement economic stimulus packages, including measures for the development of local communities.”84
This may work. It has in the past. But the complex negotiations failed even to address the Japanese-American disagreements over the SOFA and Japan’s criminal justice procedures. Meanwhile, American servicemen continue to make sensational headlines in the Japanese press. In early July 2005, a drunken air force staff sergeant molested a ten-year-old Okinawan girl on her way to Sunday school. He at first claimed to be innocent, but then the police found a photo of the girl’s nude torso on his cell phone. In November, a Japanese court sentenced him to eighteen months in prison, suspended for four years. On November 2, 2005, six marines from Okinawa who had been dispatched to the Philippines to “train” Filipino soldiers in antiterrorist tactics allegedly raped a Filipina student outside the former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay. The mayor of Okinawa City commented, “No matter how many times we ask the U.S. military to strengthen discipline, such incidents are repeated.” In June 2006, a court in Kanagawa prefecture sentenced a twenty-two-year-old crew member of the USS
The Koizumi government and its right-wing supporters, eager to come out of the military closet and into the world as a rearmed major power, acceded to various unpalatable U.S. basing decisions despite popular opposition. They did so because their perceptions of the security situation and their desire not to be marginalized by China overrode any difficulties that living with American military forces pose for citizens of their country. They ignored the facts that they themselves were responsible for much of the deterioration in their relations with China and that America’s doctrine of preemptive war threatened to draw them into conflicts not of their choosing. Far from bringing stability to international relations in East Asia, the United States and Japan are contributing to heightened tensions with China and North Korea. How long this increasingly fragile situation can be perpetuated is an open question.
6
Space: The Ultimate Imperialist Project
Our vision calls for prompt global strike space systems with the capability to directly apply force from or through space against terrestrial targets.
—AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND,
Space offers attractive options not only for missile defense but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions. It truly is the ultimate high ground. We are exploring concepts and technologies for space-based intercepts.
—PAUL WOLFOWITZ,
deputy secretary of defense, October 2002
Whoever has the capability to control space will likewise possess the capability to exert control of the surface of the Earth.
—GENERAL THOMAS D. WHITE,
air force chief of staff, November 29,1957
On March 23, 1983, in a speech promoting greater defense spending against the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan challenged the “scientific community”—”those who gave us nuclear weapons”—and Americans in general to launch a huge research and development (R&D) effort to create an impermeable antimissile shield in space. He would call this endeavor the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, and, in his vision, it would employ new high- concept technologies such as chemical lasers in space and on Earth to make nuclear weapons forever “impotent and obsolete.”1
The proposal was meant in part to deflect a large-scale antinuclear movement that had developed in the United States and that had, the previous June, put almost a million protesters on the streets of New York. It was promptly attacked by these same critics and derisively labeled “Star Wars” (after director George Lucas’s space opera). However, Reagan proved why he was known as the “Teflon president.” He promptly appropriated the term. (“If you’ll pardon my stealing a film line—the Force is with us.”) And so a vast military-industrial undertaking to conquer and militarize space began into which billions of dollars have since been poured.2
As it happened, Reagan’s impenetrable shield in space was a mere fantasy and, over the years, all that remains in practicable terms is a fabulously expensive, ground-based, minimalist antiballistic missile system. A series of futuristic conceptions, still in various stages of research and, in some cases, actual development, is aimed not at protecting the American people from a nuclear attack by another country but at the future control of the planet from space and the militarization of the heavens. These new devices included not only antisatellite satellites but weaponry in space that could be fired at Earth.
On the air force’s developmental drawing boards, for instance, are ideas that would once have been found only
