Obama Must Dismantle America's Empire: America's Last Best Hope.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our costly empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas US territories. "We" deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In Japan , at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to US military forces living and working there - 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan. These massive concentrations of military power outside the United States are NOT needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries, and they are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, our United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of these expenditures is to gain control over as many nations on our planet as possible. Like the British at the end of World War II, we are desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed, and can no longer afford.
Please check Chalmers Johnson's new book: Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope, from Metropolitan Books, 2010.