Iraq, poison gas. Backing up the process was often the naval vessel—as at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, when somewhere between nine thousand and eleven thousand soldiers in the Mahdi’s army were killed (with a British loss of forty-eight troops), thanks to mass rifle fire, Maxim machine guns, and the batteries of gunboats floating on the Nile.
Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British expeditionary force at the time. Here’s part of his description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):
The white flags [of the Mahdi’s army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dense mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery…. About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks…. It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.
And—presto!—before you knew it, three-quarters of the world was a colony of Europe, the United States, or Japan. Not bad, all in all, for a few floating centuries. In the latter part of this period, the phrase “gunboat diplomacy” came into existence, an oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too eloquently.
Our Little “Diplomats”
Today, “gunboat diplomacy” seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past, despite our many aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making “friendly” house calls from time to time. But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out “armed diplomacy”—and under the Bush administration the Pentagon took over much that might once have been labeled “diplomacy”—then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first-century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the “platforms” are upon which we “export force,” upon which we mount our “cannons.”
What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more “mobile”
versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to the “arc of instability,” a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia well into northern Africa, and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartlands of the planet. The Pentagon’s so-called lily pads strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions—the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the “flies” as they go.
Thought about a certain way, the military base, particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our “gunboat,” a “platform” that has been ridden ever deeper into the land-locked parts of the globe—into regions like the Middle East, where our access once had some limits, or like the former Yugoslavia and the -stans of Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the cold war era once blocked access entirely. Our new military bases are essentially the twenty-first-century version of those old European warships, the difference being that, once built, the base remains in place, while its parts—the modern equivalents of those sixteenth-century cannons—are capable of moving over land or water almost
Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British expeditionary force at the time. Here’s part of his description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):
The white flags [of the Mahdi’s army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dense mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery…. About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks…. It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.
And—presto!—before you knew it, three-quarters of the world was a colony of Europe, the United States, or Japan. Not bad, all in all, for a few floating centuries. In the latter part of this period, the phrase “gunboat diplomacy” came into existence, an oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too eloquently.
Our Little “Diplomats”
Today, “gunboat diplomacy” seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past, despite our many aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making “friendly” house calls from time to time. But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out “armed diplomacy”—and under the Bush administration the Pentagon took over much that might once have been labeled “diplomacy”—then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first-century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the “platforms” are upon which we “export force,” upon which we mount our “cannons.”
What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more “mobile”
versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to the “arc of instability,” a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia well into northern Africa, and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartlands of the planet. The Pentagon’s so-called lily pads strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions—the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the “flies” as they go.
Thought about a certain way, the military base, particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our “gunboat,” a “platform” that has been ridden ever deeper into the land-locked parts of the globe—into regions like the Middle East, where our access once had some limits, or like the former Yugoslavia and the -stans of Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the cold war era once blocked access entirely. Our new military bases are essentially the twenty-first-century version of those old European warships, the difference being that, once built, the base remains in place, while its parts—the modern equivalents of those sixteenth-century cannons—are capable of moving over land or water almost
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