Daniel Immerwahr

The United States has...

And this is, again, they don't quite appear on maps that we're used to seeing.

And often these places are secret.

So you have to sort of do a covert mapping of them.

But we think that the United States has about 750 military bases outside of the mainland, most of which are in foreign countries.

That's amazing that you say we think.

We think.

Yeah, we don't know.

So the United States does a basing report and does report on hundreds of those bases.

But then there are hundreds more that we're just reliant on journalists to tell us about.

And there are a lot of edge cases and a lot of we're not sure cases.

You know, in the run up to the Iraq war.

you heard rationales coming from the Bush administration and elsewhere having to do with human rights, right?

And you even had former dissident leaders in Eastern Europe supporting it.

Adam Micknick, Václav Havel, they were for this war from a human rights point of view.

And then you heard rationales obviously having to do with weapons of mass destruction.

It was an arms control situation.

You would never hear someone in the Bush administration, whether you like them or not, saying, you know why we're going in?

Oil, because Iraq's got a whole lot of oil.

That was, you know, as the cliche now goes in Washington and elsewhere, it was saying, you know, the quiet part out loud.