TY - JOUR
AU - Heefner,, Gretchen
AB - Using the case study of Libya, this article examines how U.S. policymakers sought to rationalize their appropriation of sovereign territory for strategic needs in the 1940s. This article also demonstrates how scholars can use the often-overlooked infrastructure of the U.S. military to historicize the bottom-up construction of U.S. global power. On September 20, 1947, Lt. Jack R. Volin of the U.S. Army Air Force received new—though not entirely unexpected—orders. He was to take command of a meager crew of ten charged with dismantling Mellaha Air Field, a base the U.S. Army had first occupied in 1944. Since arriving in Libya the previous February, Volin had in many ways been preparing for such an assignment; for months his job as post engineer had been to maintain the status quo rather than upgrade or improve facilities. No new construction was authorized. No new missions arrived. In fact, supplies rarely seemed to arrive. Volin reported having to travel over 1,000 miles to Casablanca to “beg, borrow and steal” for provisions.1 He was not the only one. In 1947 the U.S. military was contracting, pulling back in from its wartime high. Around the world bases like Mellaha were readied for closure, looked over by skeleton crews waiting for their own orders to head home. While no one imagined that the United States would return to its pre-war posture of just 14 overseas bases, there was little justification for maintaining the thousands of bases and installations it operated during World War Two. Already by 1947, nearly half of all wartime bases were abandoned.2 So many people left Mellaha that year that Volin sardonically noted he had been promoted to base “quartermaster, Sales Officer, Laundry and Bakery officer.” He was also apparently base historian and scribe, since it was under his name that unit histories and reports were issued. “Someone had to take over,” he reported. And the boys got “their own socks back now and again.”3 Dismantling a military base was curious work. Volin and his crew inventoried what remained, padlocked vacant buildings and helped load any “surplus” items onto cargo planes that took off and never came back. Everything that anyone else could use was whisked away: transmitters, spare parts, technical manuals, even baseball supplies.4 Volin must have been aware that the moment he departed, Mellaha Field would be erased. Taken over by the desert sands and picked apart by locals who, like the U.S. Army, would find a use for surplus materials. That did not happen. In January 1948 Volin’s orders were abruptly reversed. He was told to help reconstruct Mellaha, renamed Wheelus, for the United States Air Force. By the end of the month 50 airmen were stationed at the base; by May there were 500.5 The reconstruction of Wheelus was not an isolated event. Rather it was part of the massive peacetime re-expansion of the U.S. military around the world, what would become the country’s Cold War posture. In 1949, the U.S. military operated just 582 bases overseas. By 1957, that number nearly doubled.6 Scholars have alternately called this network a “leasehold empire,” a sign of “liberal imperialism,” an “informal empire,” and an “empire of bases.”7 As the qualifiers suggest, the projection of U.S. power and influence is seen as somehow distinct from that which came before; this is not merely European-style imperialism with Uncle Sam at the helm. Of course, to many of the people living with the realities of U.S. power abroad, the distinction hardly mattered. Regardless of the moniker—“leasehold,” “liberal”—the American form of military empire could be as unrelenting as Old World versions. But there are ways in which the distinction has merit. The United States in the 1940s and 1950s did not seek to acquire territory and incorporate new countries into its political union. Instead it sought a network of military sites, small plots of extraterritorial space around the world where U.S. military personnel and machines could operate outside the purview of foreign governments, citizens, and justice systems. The United States rented out what one State Department officer in Libya called a “slice” of “sovereignty,” in order to create an infrastructure of material power that spanned the globe.8 This article is the story of how the United States reconstituted and renegotiated its empire of military bases, as told through the case of Libya. While scholars have explored the strategic and ideological reasons that the United States re-expanded its defense apparatus in the early Cold War, less well understood is what this process looked like—how base rights were negotiated, rationalized, and contested on the ground. If the empire of bases is thought of at all, it is generally assumed that bases such as Wheelus emerged wholesale from the war, or were simply imposed on weaker states in its aftermath. In Libya, both narratives may sound plausible; but both are incomplete. Libya was a former Italian colony in postwar political limbo. Not until 1952 did it achieve independence. As U.S. diplomats quickly learned, reconstructing military bases in a time of peace required a level of nuance and compromise that war had obscured. Around the world the diplomats had to hammer out compromises about territory, criminal jurisdiction, taxes, and border control, to name a few. These sorts of agreements would later come to be known as Status of Force Agreements, or SOFAs, but in the late 1940s they had been exceedingly rare and were ill defined. For the diplomats whose job it was to negotiate early base rights—such as the one in Libya—there was simply no precedent. In tracing the creation and maintenance of Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya from the late 1940s through 1954, this article makes two interlocking arguments. First, I argue that military deployments and base negotiations led U.S. policymakers to formulate and accept a limited view of sovereignty and independence that justified their new “informal” empire. Base rights were never simply about some airplanes and a few thousand acres of the Sahara. Instead, in every country where the U.S. sought strategic access, negotiations over base rights were quickly tied up in larger debates about self-determination and sovereignty, economic aid, and the postwar order. What would be the relationship between the U.S. military and colonialism? Could the United States construct a ring of bases while still promoting self-determination? Could a country be independent and still occupied by foreign forces? As Andrew Lynch, chargé d’affaires to Libya, noted in 1951, the days “when Peter Minuit could buy Manhattan Island from the Indians for $24” were long gone. “The question of sovereignty was not then involved.” Making matters more complex, “the Indians did not have the advice and assistance of the United Nations nor the menace of the Arab League.”9 Lynch understood that the Americans would have to find the right balance between strategic necessity and sovereignty—and then they would have to pay for it. “We are not hiring their cow pastures or their deserts,” he explained, but bits of their sovereignty. How precisely to define and restrict that “sovereignty” would be hammered out during base negotiations and in the final agreement signed in 1954. Second, and more broadly, this article argues for the power and possibility of using military histories to enrich our understanding of the United States and its interactions with the world. To be sure most scholars agree that military power has been central to the operation of American hegemony in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet the military is still treated like a black box, something that just is and that does not warrant the same scrutiny scholars have aimed at corporate interests, cultural products, ideological arguments, and transnational exchanges. There are, of course, exceptions. Anthropologists, geographers, scholars of gender, and environmental historians have made notable contributions to our understanding of this phenomenon.10 But still the history of the U.S. military needs to be integrated into the larger history of the United States in the world. There are practical and intellectual reasons for doing this. The U.S. defense apparatus has a long and rich paper trail. Throughout this essay I will point out ways that military-related archives provide novel approaches to the internationalization of U.S. history. Also important are the ways that the U.S. military provides theoretical insight into the structure and maintenance of U.S. global power. The American defense apparatus is a massive transnational network: it deploys people, goods, properties, and ideas around the world. While the intention is clear, to promote U.S. strategic aims, in practice the relationships are far messier and multi-directional. Indeed, there is still much to be learned by taking the U.S. military as a unit of analysis and zooming down and examining the ways that American military power took shape. I argue that historians should follow the sinews of global military power to find and tell highly local stories. Indeed, recent trends to internationalize the study of U.S. history require a fresh look at the U.S. military. It is both the most nationalist and international; though firmly rooted in the nation-state, it is the conduit for transnational exchanges.11 The U.S. military is a global network of people, ideas, and goods. Local histories open us up to protest and contestation; to the fuzzy edges of this military empire. In Libya, for example, local people pushed back against U.S. efforts to tie their newly won independence to U.S. strategic goals. This article is thus also a reminder that the projection of American military power is dependent on the people who live next to it. While this piece is not about the Libyans per se, I have tried to include their voices when possible. Daily interactions shape how the U.S. military operates and expands, making U.S. military power far more malleable than fences and roaring twin-engines of C-47s suggest. Security and Independence The reactivation of Wheelus in 1948 was meant to be a quiet affair. No one, it seemed, wanted unnecessary attention focused on U.S. military plans in Northern Africa. When word leaked to the press, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal quickly insisted that Wheelus was simply a “weigh station on a trunk line to Athens.”12 Semantics, too, were used to deflect curiosity: Wheelus would be called a “field” not a “base.”13 The international press was told that a “small housekeeping detachment” would be stationed there to deal with communications.14 Lt. Volin would have been surprised to read those particular bits of news. Within months of its reactivation Wheelus was a “beehive of activity.” The baseball field was cleared; the mess hall painted and the runways repaired. Films were shown to the 500-plus airmen who made the base their home.15 Volin’s supply problems disappeared. In March the Air Force ordered additional runway repairs and expansion for the use of “long-range heavy bombers.”16 The initial purpose was to get the “people of the Middle East accustomed to the sight of American military planes,” and to get U.S. airmen “accustomed to the terrain.”17 But officials in the British Military Administration, which oversaw much of Libya from 1943 through independence, complained that there was no mistaking what was going on: the Americans were building a strategic bomber base on the shores of the Mediterranean.18 There were legitimate—though not particularly noble—reasons for the Americans to dissemble. The United States was both trying to secure its own strategic position in the region while also honoring ongoing conversations about Libya’s political future. Indeed, what makes the Libyan case noteworthy is that precisely as the United States sought strategic rights, the country gained its independence from Italy. In 1948 the Council of Foreign Ministers, the group that oversaw postwar peace settlements, failed to agree on what to do with the former colony and so the question was sent to the United Nations. In late 1949 the General Assembly declared that Libya would achieve independence in January 1952. In the intervening years a jumble of groups vied for influence in Libya. The British, who had their own strategic interests in the region, continued to see to the day-to-day operations of much of the country, slowly turning responsibility over to local elites. The United Nations Commission to Libya, led by Adriaan Pelt, arrived to plan for the transition. For two years these advisors streamed across the region collecting data, interviewing locals, cultivating leaders, and trying to determine the best course of development and governance for the new country.19 And so it was that when American State Department officials arrived in Tripoli in 1950 and 1951 to negotiate a long-term base agreement, they were dealing not only with the new, provisional Libyan government, but also with an international organization intent on seeing Libya succeed. As Pelt reminded the U.S. consul, the UN “considers Libya its baby,” and feels it is “absolutely essential to make Libya a viable state.”20 No one doubted that the task would be difficult. As report after report lamented, Libya was a place “almost completely devoid of economic and natural resources.”21 Given the dire economic outlook the Americans believed they would have little trouble acquiring their base rights. This supposition was reinforced by the widespread belief that the value of Libya “lies mostly in the strategic significance of [its] geographic location.”22 The Libyans would be fools not to cash in on it. Indeed, precisely because of its “geographic location,” by the late 1940s, the United States military was already rather attached to the country. The base was first reactivated in response to the Truman Doctrine (1947), which committed the United States to the economic and military aid of non-communist governments in Greece and Turkey. Libya was seen as an important supply node for materials being shuttled around the Mediterranean. So valuable was the base that in 1949 John Foster Dulles, then U.S. Ambassador to the UN, declared: “the future of Libya, indeed, intimately effects the whole strategic position in the Mediterranean and the Near East.”23 Two years later the New York Times provided a primer on the reasons that Libya and the Mediterranean more broadly were crucial for U.S. interests. It all came down to geography. Centrally located on the North African coast, Wheelus was important to maintaining the integrity of sea and air lanes, and to protecting the region’s oil fields, and it was within striking distance of the Soviet Union.24 By 1950 the Strategic Air Command (SAC) officially added Wheelus to its constellation of overseas bases meant to ring—and thus contain—the Soviet Union. The stakes were high with the Korean War raging half a world away. The U.S. policy of containment depended on the military’s ability to deliver weapons to targets behind the Iron Curtain. But in the early 1950s weapons of intercontinental range remained the stuff of science fiction. As a result SAC had to deploy its bombers within striking range of their intended targets. Wheelus occupied a perfect geostrategic position. By 1950, then, the American intention to stay on at Wheelus was not in doubt. Less certain was how precisely to make that happen. It was to that task that U.S. diplomats Andrew Lynch (Chargé d'Affaires ad interim from 1949–1952) and, following independence, Ambassador Henry S. Villard (1952-1954), devoted the majority of their time in Libya. Each official oversaw a unique set of negotiations. The first round under Lynch led to an agreement in late 1951 that was never ratified by the new parliament. The second round of negotiations took place under Villard in 1953 and 1954. A final agreement was signed later that year. In this task there was little guidance. Wartime base arrangements ranged from formal treaties to informal agreements, sometimes sealed by a handshake. U.S. forces initially occupied Wheelus in 1944 through an informal exchange of notes with the British Military Administration in Tripolitania. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff found this ad hoc situation untenable. In a 1949 report, “Military Rights in Foreign Territories,” they argued that such an erratically constituted basing structure was time-consuming and costly, a condition that would only grow worse if plans for military expansion were followed. The Joint Chiefs thus advised the State Department to “standardize in nature, scope and duration” such military arrangements.25 By the end of the 1950s the United States entered into 50 SOFA agreements with foreign countries, some of which remain classified today.26 Diplomats in Libya, however, did not have the benefit of learning from dozens of previous agreements. That is because, along with accords negotiated for bases in French Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iceland, the Philippines, and the Bahamas, the Libyan agreement was one of the first.27 Though they had little guidance for acquiring strategic rights, the U.S. diplomats in Libya were attuned to the potential difficulties of making a base deal work. For example, Lynch and Villard clearly recognized that in the midst of worldwide decolonization struggles, their appropriation of territory for military bases could be perceived as somehow imperial.28 Lynch understood that it would simply not do for the U.S. government to be seen as taking advantage of a new state.29 Nor did he think the United States could walk away. Instead, they had to be prepared to pay whatever was necessary to assuage the political sensitivities of a new state. “We must bear in mind that the Libyans themselves have a serious political problem,” he wrote to the secretary of state. “They must be able to present to their own people what will be acceptable as a sound proposition … if it is not a good deal for the Libyans, or even if they simply think it is not a good deal for them, it will not in the long run be a good deal for us.”30 The American diplomats thought it would be possible to shift that story—to cast U.S. strategic aims in positive terms. As a result, Lynch and his colleagues justified U.S. basing rights through contemporary ideas about statehood and sovereignty—two notions usually linked in these documents. Contrary to criticism that base rights weakened the new Libyan state, U.S. diplomats from 1949 until independence argued that entering into a base agreement actually legitimized it. Signing a treaty was itself an act of sovereignty. Though this effort at ignoring the real issues proved insufficient, it demonstrates how U.S. diplomats tied sovereignty to military necessity. The first step on this path of circular logic was Libyan statehood. In late 1949, the United States threw its full support behind complete independence for Libya because it was the smoothest path to signing a long-term strategic deal.31 In fact it was the only path. If Libya had become a UN trusteeship, as many UN delegates suggested, the United States would have been unable to station troops there, according to the UN Charter. Though the UN allows for “strategic” trusteeships, Article 84 stipulates that those areas are under the direction of the Security Council. The Soviets were unlikely to grant the U.S. basing rights in Northern Africa. In fact they had been complaining already about the foreign occupation of the country.32 And so it was that the United States pressed for Libyan independence. It was a calculated risk. Many allies—including the British—thought that independence was premature and preferred a trustee arrangement. The British had their own strategic interests in the country. They wanted installations along the Mediterranean shore, particularly in the province of Cyrenaica. Despite the UN prohibition on the militarization of trustees, as late as mid-1949 the British advocated for a trustee arrangement where they saw to Cyrenaica, the Italians returned to Tripolitania and the French held onto the Fezzan. Only massive protests and riots throughout Libya in May of that year convinced the British to abandon their plan.33 In this context, U.S. officials used statehood and sovereignty to their advantage. An independent Libya was useful to Americans for two reasons. First, Americans could gesture to their support for Libyan independence as proof of their anti-colonial credentials. American diplomats frequently wrote of how well they were received compared to their British and French counterparts.34 Second, support for independence proved U.S. support of the postwar international order. The UN’s preferred path for decolonization was eventual statehood. In many cases this was preceded by years of tutelage, making the UN’s trusteeship system appear to be little more than a continued “effort to exercise colonial paternalism.”35 But the end result was always the same: former colonies would eventually take their place as “sovereign equals” in the world body. These ideas about decolonization fit well with the United Nations’ commitment to an international system of nation states; if the nation state was the central unit of international relations, then it made sense to create more of them out of the ashes of empire.36 As scholars have shown, this approach to decolonization and self-determination was somewhat limited.37 In the UN Charter self-determination applied to states, not people or national groups per se. Only later would self-determination become a right rather than a principle.38 In the late 1940s sovereign statehood was the political end-point, not a set of aspirational goals for greater inclusion and popular governance. Indeed, within the documents about Libya “self-determination” rarely appears; instead “sovereignty” is used to signify the goal of independent statehood. While sovereignty and statehood often meant the same thing, they too, were loosely defined and frequently under revision in the postwar decades. The prevailing definition came from the 1933 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. In that document statehood required that these four conditions were met: a bounded territory, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.39 Sovereign claims were legitimized by the sovereign’s ability to exercise authority over said territory.40 Recognizing the limitations of that definition as well as the absence of a firm definition in the UN Charter, in 1947, the General Assembly requested a preparatory study for the redrafting of a new Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. In their work the UN’s International Law Commission worked to expand the responsibilities of a “state” to include issues of human rights and non-interference.41 But their draft convention was never approved in the General Assembly, leaving the 1933 convention largely intact.42 It was thus the four conditions for statehood that the UN—and the Americans—would apply to Libya. When the UN decided to grant Libya its full independence, it immediately recognized the first two conditions of statehood—a bounded territory and population capable of being a state (though not everyone agreed on those definitions: the Egyptians and Libyans squabbled about boundaries and a large nomadic population continued to migrate across the region). The third and forth conditions required more work. To that end Pelt and his council of advisors worked to help the Libyans establish a constitutional monarchy, with an elected parliament all under the leadership of King Idris.43 In setting up this new state, the Americans carefully suggested that they could help Libyan politicians consolidate authority. In conversations with members of the provisional government, Lynch asserted that the state’s legitimacy could be demonstrated by successfully negotiating a base rights deal. The fourth condition of statehood could thus be met in signing a bit of sovereignty away. It was more than mere rhetoric. Lynch and his small staff spent much of 1951 thinking that they were helping the Libyans help themselves. In October Lynch sent inquiries on behalf of the Libyans for outside legal assistance in negotiating a base deal.44 He coached his Libyan counterparts on the protocols of negotiation. He sent frantic telegrams to Washington, DC, pleading with his higher-ups to be sensitive to the inexperience of their Libyan counterparts. The Libyans have “begged us to approach the problem [of negotiations] with kindness and understanding,” he told Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Later he requested a smaller than usual U.S. negotiating team so as not to “frighten the skittish Libyans by an imposing array of talent.”45 Throughout much of 1951 it was Lynch’s job to get the Libyans ready to sign a base deal. The Americans pressed their view subtly, to be sure. Their goal in helping the Libyans with negotiations was to have a signed exchange of notes before independence. It could then be presented as a fait accompli to the Libyan people, the United Nations, and the international community. Lynch wrote that if there was any criticism of the deal, the Libyans would be able to say “‘yes, we have entered into agreement with the United States which is subject to approval of our elected Parliament and also ratification of our King under Article 69 of our Constitutions.’”46 By justifying the agreement as an early act of sovereignty, the Libyans themselves could help deflect criticisms of U.S. “aggression” and “imperialism.” The American strategic vision of Libyan sovereignty was limited, but it would be erroneous to think it was merely imposed on the Libyans from outside. Libyan leaders well understood the precariousness of their new state and the necessity of external assistance. Not even the UN experts stationed in Libya could sugarcoat this reality: “The Libyan economy offers discouragingly little with which to work,” a representative report warned.47 While internally various ideas were thrown around—UN assistance, Arab League aid—many Libyan leaders agreed with Pelt that their strategic location was their best asset and should be “auctioned off” accordingly.48 Even Bashir al-Sa’adawi, one of the most vocal opposition leaders whose articulate nationalism the British and Americans feared, lamented that a base deal was critical for his country.49 But the question remained how to channel its benefits. How could the Libyans gain most from selling off what one newspaper described as “three things – land, sea, and sky”?50 Pelt explained that any base agreement had to be “so advantageous to the Libyans that they could not regard its existence as anything other than a benefaction.” This agreement, he later said, needs to “take wind out of Arab criticism that new type of colonialism or imperialism is developing in Libya.”51 On the eve of independence one thing was abundantly clear: the provisional government had not done enough to secure Libya’s future. The base deal arranged with the Americans was considered insufficient—not enough money was involved and too many rights were given away. The new Libyan parliament refused to hear it, instead insisting that a new document be negotiated. The provisional deal, the paper Al Manar insisted, “would mean that Libya would commit suicide for a trifle.”52 Under mounting criticism members of the provisional government insisted that they had worked in good faith and acted like any other state would.53 But they also said that they had been duped: that the Americans had taken advantage of their inexperience. Given another chance, it would not happen again. Many public officials concurred. “The Libyans are no fools as some foreign powers may think,” a member of the Ministry of Finance told the U.S. consul. “We will wait and see so that [we] will be able to obtain the best terms.”54 Property and Payment Far from the abstractions of sovereignty and the intricacies of diplomatic negotiation, Paul D. Troxler had a job to do. In January 1951, Troxler moved to Tripoli where he took command of the newly created U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Middle East District. His task: to expand Wheelus Air Force Base. Troxler’s list of projects was long; his budget substantial. The Air Force anticipated spending over $60 million in the coming years to expand runways, upgrade facilities, and build additional military sites in Libya.55 Troxler got to work immediately. By February his crew arrived. In March the first shipment of supplies sailed into the Port of Tripoli: some 770 tons of construction and camp equipment.56 By the end of the year Wheelus was ready to welcome thousands of new airmen and their families. Whether or not Libya would accept them remained an open question. The work of Troxler and the Corps of Engineers signals one of the many ways that the U.S. military constituted a transnational network. Through this web, men, materials, and ideas flowed around the globe, jumping from one construction site to the next. For example, military engineers and contractors shipped 69 pieces of heavy construction equipment into Libya. Fifty-thousand bags of cement came from Yugoslavia. Air conditioners were ordered. Rock asphalt was found in Portuguese West Africa. Soil samples were sent to Mississippi for study. To operate and maintain these materials Libyans were hired and trained. By 1954 the Corps of Engineers had a workforce of thousands.57 Local materials and practices, too, were adapted for Air Force construction needs. For example, traditional base housing consisted of wood-frame barracks and family houses. But Troxler had neither the time nor money to ship wood in from overseas. Instead, he adopted the practice of using the masonry, tile, and stone seen in the small Libyan houses scattered around Tripoli. Through the engineering network the specifications for this sort of construction found their way to American projects in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.58 Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Aerial view of Wheelus Air Force Base, September 4, 1954. This image features the newly constructed east-west runway (west is at the top of this photo). The original runway ended at the bottom of the salt marsh (the large circle). Troxler and the Corps of Engineers acquired the property below the salt marsh from 1951 – 1953. Military Doc Files XII, box 30, folder 1; Digital image filed in Military Images: box 86, folder 21. Courtesy of Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Aerial view of Wheelus Air Force Base, September 4, 1954. This image features the newly constructed east-west runway (west is at the top of this photo). The original runway ended at the bottom of the salt marsh (the large circle). Troxler and the Corps of Engineers acquired the property below the salt marsh from 1951 – 1953. Military Doc Files XII, box 30, folder 1; Digital image filed in Military Images: box 86, folder 21. Courtesy of Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The work of the engineers also demonstrates the surprisingly intimate ways that U.S. strategy intersected with local realities. The job of expanding and upgrading a runway was quickly ensnared in local land-use customs and politics. Troxler had to acquire over 1,500 acres of agricultural land, something that proved particularly troublesome and slowed down Air Force deployments. The landowners “cling to their land with a tenacity almost unbelievable,” the U.S. engineers wrote in an annual report.59 The engineers also learned about local ownership patterns. It was possible for a man to own just a small percentage of any given plot of land, or a single date palm within a larger family plot.60 Contracts had to be written up for each item. Not only was it time consuming but local Libyans understood that they could—and should—ask for more than the engineers offered. In many cases they ended up with 50% more than initially offered. They also demanded that local boards be established to determine property values and help with resettlement.61 Many Libyans saw the purchase of their land as a direct affront to their hard-won independence. “If the Libyans are not careful,” one paper warned, “they will find that the U.S. has taken over the whole country.” Nodding to international events the paper continued, “it took twenty years for the Palestinian Arabs to sell their country; Tripolitania will be sold in five.”62 The Libyans were not the only ones concerned. As Lynch understood the small local moments of protest could add up to something more significant. “If [land acquisition is] not suitably handled, the situation may develop to a point where it will make it more difficult to secure the strategic position necessary to us in this country.”63 Regardless of how it seemed the Air Force was not actually ignoring local politics. To be sure Air Force redeployments and troop levels were based on calculations and decisions made in the Pentagon. But the documents also suggest that in Libya, the Air Force was simply playing its own sort of politics based on two assumptions. First, the United States would not abandon (or be thrown out of) Libya if Wheelus was an established air base.64 Second, continual work on Wheelus would prove how important U.S. military dollars were to the local economy. Similar to the impulse behind early base negotiations, the goal was to build out Wheelus as fast as possible so as to ensure its survival. Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Local workers construct an arch for a drainage culvert at Wheelus Air Base (July 28, 1951). Local materials and workers were used as frequently as possible by the Army Corps of Engineers. Signal Corps #383552, Military Images: box 86, folder 21. Courtesy of Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Local workers construct an arch for a drainage culvert at Wheelus Air Base (July 28, 1951). Local materials and workers were used as frequently as possible by the Army Corps of Engineers. Signal Corps #383552, Military Images: box 86, folder 21. Courtesy of Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In many ways the strategy worked. From the very beginning the construction work sucked men and materials towards Tripoli. Wheelus was an economic beacon in an otherwise difficult desert environment. From as far away as Benghazi men came, lining up at the gates of the base, loitering outside of one of the administrator’s office, and hanging around the Corps of Engineers headquarters. “Everybody wants a job,” acknowledged William M. Macdonald, the British commissioner of the Souk El Giuma district near Wheelus. On a daily basis he fielded dozens of inquiries about finding work “anywhere in the U.S.A unit.”65 A fair number of Libyans were successful: At the peak of construction the United States employed some 10 percent of the local Tripolitania labor force.66 So powerful was the draw that communities around the country asked the American consul if the military would consider facilities elsewhere so as to share the wealth. King Idris asked Lynch about naval facilities near Benghazi.67 This was a reality that the Americans sought to exploit in their quest for that elusive base agreement. Indeed, they pressed the idea of Wheelus’s economic importance everywhere. Increasingly Villard linked the viability of the Libyan state not only to signing a base agreement directly, but also to the monies U.S. defense installations could bestow. Without Wheelus, Villard upheld, “Libya could not hope to exist as an economic unit.”68 To support these claims studies of the U.S. military’s economic impact were commissioned; local reporters and dignitaries were invited to tour the base.69 In the summer of 1952, information sent to the Prime Minister, Mahmoud Bey Muntasser, and the local press spelled out how much money was spent annually on local salaries, construction contracts, and materials. The grand total: $9,695,493.20.70 As diplomats and engineers were coming to learn, the narrative of economic gain could not be controlled or contained. On the contrary Libyans from every sector of society were coming to understand the power of U.S. defense spending. Just as local landowners understood they had one chance to make a deal about the value of their property, Libyan politicians grasped the stakes in selling off their strategic location.71 The Libyan Defense Minister, Ali Bey Jerbi, told the consul in Benghazi that he wanted “a firm contract in which he can show Libyans that they are specifically benefiting from military concessions to foreign powers … . And that the Libyan government will have full discretion as to how such money used.”72 The problem for the Americans involved was that, like the purchase of plots of land, the price of a slice of Libya kept going up. The initial offer of $600,000 per year was rejected and raised to $1 million in late 1951 and then—after independence—to $2 million.73 By 1954 that figure had increased to over $4 million annually with additional aid promised. If the sum seems tragically small, it was far more than the Americans actually wanted to pay—which was zero. In fact, in attempting to streamline the process of acquiring base rights, the Joint Chiefs of Staff explicitly advised diplomats to downplay the possibility of direct payment, or quid pro quo. Instead, the deployment of U.S. forces was to be understood as an integral part of a larger common security program that included the host country. Any economic benefit would accrue from spill-over effects of having U.S. troops and activity in the country, supplemented with economic and technical aid packages distinct from base rights. The rationale was simple: the U.S. military feared blackmail.74 U.S. officials were willing to pay for strategic rights, but the payments had to be indirect. Making matters even more opaque, it was up to diplomatic officers like Villard to negotiate both aid and strategic deals, often at the same time. It is thus nearly impossible to disentangle the two within the documentary record. Despite their exhortations to the contrary, the Americans themselves usually linked the two processes and outcomes. It was simply too tempting to use aid as both carrot and stick. In early 1954, with negotiations still dragging on, Secretary of State Dulles wrote to the legation asking if a special gift of grain aid might speed things along.75 Villard concurred. In pencil he scribbled down that providing such aid might prove U.S. good intentions and: “provide better psychological atmosphere for base negotiations.”76 Later, hoping to force the Libyans to a deal, Villard recommended planting stories in the international press that the U.S. was “reappraising” its position in Libya.77 Underneath the obvious linkage of military aid with assistance, the Libyans came to a more subtle but equally important realization about U.S. defense dollars: They were more efficient and plentiful than much-touted but slow-to-be-delivered aid. Thus not only was U.S. aid increasingly militarized from its point of origin, but also at the point of reception. Criticism of “standard” aid programs began immediately. UN, American, and other foreign assistance efforts were accused of merely using money to pay foreign salaries, hire outsiders, and buy nice cars that drove through the streets of Tripoli with diplomatic plates.78 Aid money was both insufficient and shockingly slow to get to where it was needed. By comparison there were very real and tangible economic benefits of living near Wheelus Base, precisely as U.S. propaganda had promised. Over 150 local subcontractors had been used by 1954 and 70% of the workforce was Arab.79 Projects undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were finished quickly and without seemingly endless rounds of study and red tape. The benefits extended beyond the base fences. The Air Force had its own public works funds for road construction, fixing structures, and most visibly, repairing the Karamali Breakwater in Tripoli Harbor. In April 1953, a check for $100,000 was presented to the Libyan government on behalf of Wheelus Field for that purpose.80 It was quite clear, then, that the fastest way to get direct assistance was through the U.S. Air Force. This militarized dimension of aid has been widely overlooked in the scholarship on postwar development programs.81 But the U.S. defense apparatus was in many places the most visible and welcome face of U.S. assistance. It was faster and leaner and had fewer strings attached. As a secret report on overseas basing admitted, “in Africa our military presence through our bases provides a convenient peg on which to hang the cloak of economic and military support.” Those levels of support then helped keep countries from Soviet influence.82 Little wonder that Libyans went to Wheelus when they wanted to get things done; or threatened to withhold support for Wheelus when things did not go their way. In 1952, for example, with drought devastating Cyrenaica, the new Libyan government sought aid. They did not ask Villard at the consulate, but instead approached the authorities at Wheelus and pleaded for them to hire 600 men from Benghazi.83 Crime and Sovereignty In the early spring of 1954, the Libyan prime minister, Muhammad al-Saqizli, took a moment to share some thoughts on human nature with the American negotiating team. “Unfortunately,” he reminded his colleagues, “soldiers [are] human and, unlike angels, [are] likely to err from time to time.”84 His comment was dropped into one of many discussions about Article XX of the base agreement, which covered criminal jurisdiction over U.S. service people stationed in Libya. Villard had little choice but to agree. Over the previous few years U.S. airmen had been accused of a variety of serious crimes—including violent attacks, vehicular homicide, manslaughter, and sexual assault. The British reported that an American GI was in custody for “criminal assault on an Arab girl aged about eight.”85 This was not the conversation Villard wanted to have. Already he had spent two years negotiating a base deal with his Libyan counterparts, far more time than he ever imagined.86 When he arrived in 1952 he assumed it would be done quickly; that the Libyans would be desperate for U.S. aid money. Yet still, in 1954, two major issues remained unresolved: payment and jurisdiction. The Americans tended to link the two, believing that if they found the right price the Libyans would give in on the latter. In a June telegram Villard complained that the Libyan government is “determined to hold out for highest possible price … . They will use the question of jurisdiction as top bargaining card … showing little change from Barbary pirate tradition.”87 But Villard misunderstood how deeply the Libyans tied this question to their own viability as a new state and government. Since independence, local leaders had worked assiduously to establish a modern state, even if that meant encroaching on U.S. strategic interests and the actions of U.S. military personnel. For example, in 1952, the Libyans banned military uniforms from non-military installations; airmen had to wear civilian clothes off base. The next year an Arab language law demanded that all signage be in Arabic, not English or Italian. Later the government tried to force foreign contractors to pay customs and get local work permits. Over protest from officials at Wheelus, the Libyan government established its own Port Authority to monitor the flow of goods in and out of Tripoli Harbor.88 More significant from an operations standpoint the Libyans demanded that airplanes avoid flying over Tripoli, but instead head out over the sea. For the Libyans the portrayal of sovereignty and control were clearly vital. In response to the prime minister, Villard hurriedly reminded the Libyans that all criminal cases over the past few years had been dealt with quickly and appropriately by Air Force authorities. There was thus nothing to worry about. But the prime minister pounced. Public opinion was now aroused, he argued, and without Libyan jurisdiction over crimes committed against Libyans “national honor would be reduced to nothing.”89 All U.S. soldiers would be seen as possible monsters—or demons—immune from Libyan codes and laws. Public opinion had, indeed, been stirred—a fact that Villard blamed on the Libyan government, which he suspected was “leaking information” specifically to “crystallize public opinion against our position.” As the American legation reported back to the State Department, the “average Libyan” now believes that “under America’s terms for jurisdiction an American soldier can go into a café or bar, take drinks, break things, assault people and the police can do nothing … no one can do anything.”90 While the legation scoffed at this idea, the U.S. goal was, in fact, to make sure that Libyan courts had virtually no right to try and convict Americans accused of crimes, either petty or heinous. The U.S. authorities wanted exclusive jurisdiction over U.S. personnel. As a Joint State-Defense task force admitted, “keeping U.S. personnel out of foreign courts has always been … one our most important objectives.”91 If exclusive jurisdiction was not forthcoming, diplomats were to press for primary jurisdiction. That the rumors and newspaper stories may not have been true did not matter. Villard understood that perception mattered more than fact. Particularly when it came to determining the status of foreign forces in a host country. Did giving up criminal jurisdiction mean giving up a slice of your national dignity? International law and U.S. diplomatic practices were still catching up with these questions. In fact, through the mid-1950s the question of criminal jurisdiction for troops serving overseas—much like base negotiations themselves—was dealt with on a case-by-case basis; there were no permanent rules and guidelines. In hindsight it is easy to see how important these questions would be, particularly for newly independent countries. But at the time the implications of jurisdiction and behavior were not as clear. The Americans believed that their strategic project was different than the foreign impositions that had come before; strategic troops were not the same as imperial occupations. The belief came easily out of wartime arrangements and postwar occupations of enemy territory. In places like Germany and Japan, U.S. forces remained to keep a hard-fought peace. Security arrangements in the postwar decade were thus seen as insurance policies—the premiums for which the Americans paid—taken out for world peace. In Libya the Americans seemed to find proof of their righteousness everywhere. Not only would Wheelus help the new country economically, but U.S. efforts could help Libya pull away from the imperial powers. Over and over again U.S. diplomats remarked upon this relationship.92 “To an embarrassing degree,” Villard wrote, “the Libyans desire us to take over responsibility for their country and underwrite its economic future.” Libyan politicians, he continued, “wish that US would replace UK in leading role in Libya because US has no colonial ambitions.”93 The truth of these claims is less important than the U.S. insistence of the virtue of its cause. It allowed U.S. diplomats—without any sense of irony—to believe that asking for jurisdiction was not an egregious elision of sovereignty, but part of a shared project of peace. Yet it was also clear that few others—in Libya or beyond—agreed. The conflict was mirrored in the different types of base agreements signed at the time. In 1953, Villard received copies of two recently completed agreements with diametrically opposed views on jurisdiction. The Dhahran agreement gave exclusive jurisdiction to the Saudis. The agreement in Greece allowed the United States to keep that privilege for itself.94 Adding to the confusion, the just-completed NATO agreement (1952) introduced the idea of concurrent jurisdiction, in which both the host country (“receiving” state) and the country stationing troops abroad (“sending” state), shared jurisdiction. In general the receiving state would have primary right of jurisdiction, but would consider waivers when requested by sending state (usually expected to be American) authorities.95 For example, if a soldier was convicted of murder off of the base, the host country could decide whether to prosecute. In any case the sending state could ask for a consideration of a waiver. If the host country did not prosecute, then the sending state could do so. Concurrent jurisdiction horrified members of the American Congress. In fact, when ratifying the NATO treaty in 1954 the Senate stipulated that it would not be a template for other agreements. Rather, senators insisted, the NATO SOFA was unique because it was a multi-lateral reciprocal treaty, which allowed for its more expansive reading of host country jurisdiction.96 Despite U.S. insistence that the NATO SOFA was not a model, it became an obvious point of comparison for other countries negotiating deals with the United States.97 The Libyans (and others) argued that they required equal treatment, that there could be no “second class” allies. Further complicating matters in 1953, the British begrudgingly granted Libya concurrent jurisdiction in their base deal.98 British actions should be seen, however, less as a sign of enlightened diplomacy than as a nod to realism. In internal memos it is clear that the British continued to hope for primary jurisdiction—or at least whatever privileges the Americans enjoyed.99 But they also understood the precariousness of their own position in Northern Africa. It was a sense of vulnerability made even more acute when the French, who also sought long term strategic rights in the South, were kicked out of Libya.100 As the lone remaining European imperial power in Libya, the British got the message. In any case, the British deal put Villard and the Americans in the rather awkward position of taking a position in Libya that appeared more colonial than that taken by the British Empire. The irony did not go unnoticed. Libyan negotiators demanded that U.S. plans were “prejudicial to Libyan independence and national dignity.”101 “It is the duty” of the Libyan government, wrote al-Zaman, a weekly paper, “to have American soldiers tried in Libya courts in the event that they commit … any offense outside their barracks.”102 For the Libyans, the British Agreement and the NATO SOFA became tools in their own negotiations with U.S. authorities. Both seemed to provide international validation of what the Libyans had been asking for all along: equal treatment and respect for sovereignty. For the Americans this was a problem of their own making. Because of the sprawling nature of their empire of bases U.S. officials, whether in the Netherlands, the Philippines, or Libya, could never simply impose their desired practices and experiences on another government. The very process of negotiating so many deals at the same time meant that topics such as criminal jurisdiction would become part of transnational conversations over the nature and intent of U.S. power. In most cases, then, the United States had to accede both to local demands and to the expectations that grew out of concurrent discussions. NATO was merely the most visible. As the case of Libya shows, the NATO SOFA did not lead to a base deal—that would have happened regardless—but combined with local pressures and arguments, SOFA negotiations elsewhere certainly shaped the contours of what was possible in Tripoli. In June 1954, the Libyans broke off negotiations and insisted that the questions be taken up with the American president. In July the new prime minister, Mustafa Bin Halim, travelled to Washington, DC. The ploy seemed to work as a base deal was signed later that month.103 The final deal guaranteed $40 million in direct payments to be made over 20 years (well over the $1 million offered in 1952), additional economic assistance, aid to the Libyan military, and jurisdiction similar to the British deal. Article XX stipulated cases in which the United States would have jurisdiction (namely crimes committed in agreed areas or those involving only U.S. citizens), and gave Libya primary jurisdiction over all others.104 If the agreement seemed a victory for more expansive and inclusive view of Libyan independence, it was a façade. Through a secret exchange of notes with the Americans, the Libyans agreed to cede all jurisdiction but in the most horrible of cases, and even then they would show great sympathy to U.S. waiver requests.105 The publicized base deal was thus a nod to popular opinion, not a real effort to grapple with the inherent contradictions of the U.S. military project. For Libyan officials, however, it provided the temporary cover they needed to sign a base deal and access the funds and security the Americans could provide. There were other options. The Americans could have recognized the toxicity of extraterritoriality and amended their own views on jurisdiction. But the limited view of sovereignty was consistent with U.S. postwar aims: to stabilize the world through a network of bases—islands of extraterritoriality where their forces would live, work, and play. In Libya, and elsewhere, they were supposed to create what Villard called a “Little America on the shores of the Mediterranean.” Within that vision there was to be little room for interaction with local populations. Integration was not intended, and so accommodation with local practices and laws was not expected. That vision obviously did not hold. U.S. forces had to interact with local people, a reality that was already abundantly clear around the world. By mid-decade the ad hoc system of base agreements was fraying. In 1956, for example, U.S. forces were nearly kicked out of Iceland. The same year the Filipinos demanded a renegotiation of their own base deal along NATO lines. A year later riots broke out in Taiwan after a U.S. sergeant was acquitted of murdering a local.106 The problems of criminal jurisdiction and daily contact were everywhere apparent. Newspapers at home and abroad ran stories about the conduct of U.S. troops overseas; defense officials crafted “how to negotiate base rights” manuals; legal journals increasingly took note of the problems and contradictions of stationing troops around the world in a time of peace.107 World leaders, too, were concerned. Carlos Romulo of the Philippines warned that resentment is “spreading wherever the U.S. has military bases.” Jurisdiction is “part and parcel of our national sovereignty,” he explained, “specially to the peoples newly liberated, national sovereignty is sacrosanct.”108 Recognizing these difficulties, in 1956 President Eisenhower called for a review of all overseas bases.109 Frank C. Nash, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, delivered his 93-page “United States Overseas Military Bases: Report to the President,” the following year. Nash argued that criminal jurisdiction is “a relatively new problem … [that] potentially contains the seeds of serious danger.”110 The way Americans acted locally had repercussions for the country’s global position. To that end Nash recommended direct payment for bases (the very quid pro quo arrangements that the U.S. had earlier eschewed), and that the Department of Defense relax its insistence on exclusive jurisdiction. It is a “hypersensitive field,” Nash admitted, that involves questions of “national dignity and sovereign prerogatives.” Nash also recommended that U.S. bases try to integrate more with local military programs so as to seem less unilateral. But in many cases the damage had been done. The U.S.-Libya agreement was built on a secret that could neither be invoked nor publicized. Its administration led to ill will on both sides. In late 1955, for example, the Libyans took an airman into custody for hitting and killing a local while driving drunk on the road between the base and Tripoli.111 Despite the secret deal, local authorities refused to hear the base commander’s request for a waiver of jurisdiction.112 The Americans could do nothing but issue angry memoranda and complain to Libyan politicians. By 1958, the Libyans informed their American counterparts that the secret memorandum was no longer in effect because it had never passed Parliament.113 The exasperated Americans argued that the whole point of secrecy was that it was not supposed to pass Parliament. But really the game was up. Clearly a limited sense of sovereignty—one that could be traded away in secret deals—was not a firm foundation for lasting relations. It was a vision that, in fact, threatened to undermine the very government on which the American project depended. As the Nash report lamented, the local Libyan population was not particularly pro-Western, though the government generally was.114 Nash would likely have agreed with the American Bar Association (ABA), which initiated its own annual reviews of status of force agreements in 1959. The ABA acknowledged that if the United States had taken more time and effort to think though some of the issues of deploying troops overseas, many of the problems could have been avoided.115 The concerns about jurisdiction in Libya and elsewhere foreshadowed the difficulties that lay ahead for U.S. interests in the Middle East and Mediterranean. In March 1962, for example, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs noted the “increasing concern … about criminal jurisdiction over American military personnel in Iran.” He went on to admit that the favored U.S. position of primary jurisdiction would be anathema to many Iranians.116 He was right. In 1964, after two years of difficult negotiations, a new SOFA narrowly passed parliament granting U.S. forces extraterritoriality in exchange for a $200 million military aid package. The SOFA granted U.S. service people and their dependents almost complete immunity from Iranian laws. The deal was greeted on the streets of Tehran with protest and derision. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared it a “document of enslavement.” The scholar T. Cuyler Young later excoriated the treaty a “catastrophic mistake for American interests in Iran.” One from which the Americans did not recover.117 In Turkey, too, by the 1960s efforts to shield U.S. personnel from local laws and courts added to strained relations. Beginning in the early 1950s the United States operated bases in Turkey under NATO auspices. As in Libya, secret agreements meant that the locally administered SOFA was far more lenient on U.S. military personnel than the publicized NATO-SOFA. When the nature of these agreements came out in the 1960s it fueled already smoldering anti-Americanism in Turkey, sentiments that led to years of protest and agitation against the U.S. military presence. In 1966 the Turkish government demanded a renegotiation of the agreements that governed the 20,000-plus U.S. troops stationed there. Three years later when a new deal was signed, the prime minister declared “the control of the Turkish Government over the joint defense installations and activities from them will be full and absolute.”118 The Libyans, like others around the world, demanded a renegotiation of their base agreement at the end of the 1950s. The Americans were going to have to pay more and cede more authority to their host country. For example, a local board was set up to review Air Force plans and procedures, aid monies were increased, and Libyan military personnel were brought into Wheelus.119 Though the Nash report had cautioned that some bases and regions would have to be abandoned if the “price was too high,” that ceiling was not reached in Libya. By 1958, Wheelus was considered the Air Force’s “Gateway to the Middle East.” A plane took off every 45 seconds.120 Thousands of troops, contractors, and support personnel considered Tripolitania home. More than that, air wings deployed in Europe came through Wheelus on training missions where they dropped bombs and missiles on one of the many gunnery ranges the U.S. established in the desert. The Americans were not going to leave until they were kicked out. Which happened in 1969 when the monarch was overthrown. “How can a soldier remain passive and salute a king who has filled the country with foreign forces?” demanded Muammar Qadhafi, leader of the Revolutionary Command Council. “How can you accept being stopped on the street by an American?” He went on: “That happened to me personally. When I wanted to enter Wheelus base, I was turned away.”121 As the Nash report presciently declared in 1956, foreign bases had “become not only a major facet of the U.S. international military posture, but also a prime factor in U.S. foreign relations.”122 * " The author thanks David Ekbladh, Brian Bergstein, the anonymous reviewers for Diplomatic History and the journal's editorial team for valuable feedback on various versions of this article. For research support, the author is grateful to the Northeastern College of Social Studies and Humanities for a Faculty Development Grant. " 1. Jack R. Volin, “History of Wheelus Field, Tripoli, Libya, June 15, 1947 to November 30, 1947,” on Compact Disc, Air Force IRISREF #A0083, United States Air Force, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL (hereafter AFHRA). " 2. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: The Anatomy of a Dilemma (New York, 1990), 9-11. There were over 2,000 bases and 30,000 “installations” in 1945. " 3. “Deactivation orders,” June 1, 1947, and “Report on Mellaha Air Base, 1923-1945,”Air Force CD, IRISREF #A0083, AFHRA. " 4. “Base interviews,” February 1948 interviews, Air Force CD, IRISREF #A0083, AFHRA. " 5. “Wheelus Field, May 1948,” Air Force CD, IRISREF #A0083, AFHRA. " 6. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing, 9-11. " 7. C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (New York, 2000); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York, 2004); Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire (Durham, NC, 2010). " 8. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, October 28, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-53, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, Record Group 84: Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State (hereafter RG 84), National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA). " 9. Telegram from Tripoli to Secretary of State, October 28, 1951, RG 84, NARA. " 10. Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis, MN, 2007); Kent E. Calder, Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Höhn and Moon, Over There; Joseph Gerson and Bruce Richards, eds., The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases (Boston, MA, 1991). For postwar occupation zones, Maria Moon, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations (New Haven, CT, 2014); Thomas W. Maulucci and Delef Junkler, eds., GIs in Germany: Social, Economic, Cultural and Political History of the American Military Presence (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Jennifer Miller, “Fractured Alliance: Anti-Base Protests and Postwar U.S.–Japanese Relations,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 5 (November 2014): 953-86. On gender, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA, 2014); Jin-Kyung Lee, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis, MN, 2010); Katharine H. S Moon, Sex Among Allies (New York, 1997). For anthropologists, start with the work of Catherine Lutz, ed., The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (New York, 2009); and Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston, MA, 2002). For geographers, Rachel Woodward, Military Geographies (New York, 2004); Rachel Woodward, “From Military Geography to Militarisms Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 6 (December 2005): 718-40. Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War (Minneapolis, MN, 2010); Matthew Farish and Patrick Vitale, “Locating the American Military-Industrial Complex,” Antipode 43, no. 2 (March 2011): 777-82. For environmental historians see, Peter Coates et al. “Defending Nation, Defending Nature? Militarized Landscapes and Military Environmentalism in Britain, France, and the United States,” Environmental History 16, no. 3 (2011): 456-91; JR McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Washington, DC, 2010). " 11. Much like Paul Kramer suggests that the “imperial” become a unit of analysis in the historian’s toolbox, the U.S. military can also serve an important function in internationalizing the study of U.S. history. Kramer largely ignores the military, Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1348-91, accessed August 2014, doi: 10.1086/ahr.116.5.1348. " 12. Quoted in “U.S. Will Reopen Airfield at Strategic Point in Libya,” New York Times, January 15, 1948, 1. Manchester Guardian and London Daily, see U.S. Legation Tripoli to Department of State, “Press Rumors,” January 13, 1948, (Despatch 87), file 811.24565C/1-1348, Central Decimal Files 1945-1949, Record Group 59: Records of the Department of State (hereafter RG 59), NARA. " 13. “Basic Facts on Libya,” December 23, 1949, in Subject File Council and Commissioner in Libya 1947-1952, United Nations Commissioner in Libya (1949-1952), file number: S-0660-0001-013, United Nations Archives and Records Management, New York, NY (hereafter UNA); “Wheelus Reopens” New York Times, March 18, 1948. For naming, Robert L. Swetzer, Wheelus Field: The Story of the US Air Force Base in Libya, The early days 1944-1952 (U.S. Air Force in Europe, 1965), 13; “History Wheelus Field, January 1948,” Air Force CD, IRISREF #A0083, AFHRA. " 14. “U.S. Will Reopen Airfield,” New York Times, March 15, 1948, 1. " 15. “History of Tripoli Air Base,” March 1948, Air Force CD, IRISREF #A0083, AFHRA. " 16. Memorandum from NEA Director to Secretary of State, March 22, 1948, file 811.24565C/3-2248, Central Decimal Files 1945-1949, RG 59, NARA. " 17. Department of State, Memorandum of Conversation, “Mellaha Airfield, Tripoli,” March 18, 1948, file 811.245650/3-1848, Central Decimal Files 1945-1949, RG 59, NARA. " 18. “Meeting Memo,” September 17, 1948, AIR 8/1556; Memorandum, “American Fighter Base in North Africa,” March 17, 1949, FO 371/73817, both in The British National Archives, Kew Gardens (hereafter TNA). " 19. Text of Resolutions Regarding the Disposal of the Former Italian Colony of Libya Adopted at the 4th (November 21, 1949) Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, 289 (IV), http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/4/ares4.htm, accessed January 2015. For background, Adriaan Pelt, Libyan Independence and the United Nations: A Case of Planned Decolonization (New Haven, CT, 1970). " 20. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, May 25, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-1953, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 21. Benjamin Rivlin, The United Nations and the Italian Colonies (New York, 1950), 1. " 22. Rivlin, United Nations and Libya, 2; Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, November 8, 1951, file 711.56373/11-851, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 23. Quoted in Ronald Bruce St. John, Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 37. " 24. “West is now Strengthening its Mediterranean Flank,” New York Times, March 11, 1951, 145. " 25. Study Prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 19, 1949, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1949, vol. 1, National Security Affairs, (Washington, DC), 302-11, available online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1949v01, last accessed on February 24, 2015. " 26. Richard Erickson, “Status of Force Agreements, A Sharing of Sovereign Prerogative” Air Force Law Review 37 (1994): 137-53. " 27. Murray L. Schwartz, “International Law and the NATO Status of Forces Agreement,” Columbia Law Review 53 (December 1953): 1091-1113; Frederick T. Moore, “Criminal Jurisdiction in Overseas Areas,” Journal of Politics 21, no. 1 (May 1959): 276-302; G. I. A. D. Draper, “The Exercise of Criminal Jurisdiction under the NATO Status of Forces Agreement, 1951,” Transactions of the Grotius Society 44 (1958): 9-28; “Report of the Committee on SOFAs,” Proceedings of the ABA (August 24, 1959): 120-27; Memorandum and attachments, “Base Agreement,” November 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-1953, folder: Wheelus 1950, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 28. Ad-Difaa, “Saleh Buweisir, Attacks Bilateral Agreement,” August 21, 1952 (Despatch 25), file 711.56373/8-2152, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 29. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, October 29, 1951, file 711.56373/10-3051, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 30. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, October 28, 1951, RG 84, NARA. " 31. Villard, Libya, 33-34. On Cold War importance of Libya, Dirk Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge, MA, 2012), chapters 2-3; Pelt, Libyan Independence and the United Nations; Rivlin, The United Nations and the Italian Colonies. " 32. Under the charter, administering authorities are prohibited from stationing their own, or other country’s troops in a trusteeship unless under explicit UN auspices; United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, October 24, 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, Chapter XII, Articles 82-86. See also UN, Repertory of Practice of UN Organs, Extracts Relating to Article 82, (1945-1954), Volume 4, http://legal.un.org/repertory/, last accessed February 2015; Memorandum, April 1948, AIR 8/1556, TNA; Telegram from Ministry of Defense to Washington, September 1951, AIR 20/8203, TNA; Telegram from State to Embassy London, January 30, 1948, FO 371/6940, TNA. " 33. Vandewalle, History of Modern Libya, 39-40; Pelt, Libyan Independence, 80-82; Telegram from Tripoli to Foreign Office, “Libyan Unity,” August 3, 1949, FO 371/73892, TNA; and “Minutes of meeting held in Room 25 the Foreign Office,” July 6, 1949, FO 371/73892, TNA. " 34. For example, Memorandum, “The British Basket and U.S. eggs in Libya,” August 1951, Classified General Records in Tripoli 1950-1957, entry 2865, box 4, RG 84, NARA. " 35. Gerry J. Simpson, “The Diffusion of Sovereignty: Self-Determination in the Post-Colonial Age,” Stanford International Law Journal 32 (1966): 266. " 36. UN Charter, Article 4, para. 1; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009); Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the UN,” Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (September 2008): 251-74; Alfred J. Hotz, “The United Nations Since 1945: An Appraisal,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 336 (1961): 127-36. " 37. Simpson, “The Diffusion of Sovereignty”; Douglas Howland and Luise White, Introduction to The State of Sovereignties: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington, IN, 2009), 1-19; Robert Araujo, “Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Self-Determination: The Meaning of International Law,” Fordham International Law Journal 24, no. 5 (June 2001): 1477-1542; Bereket Habte Selassie, “Self-Determination in Principle and Practice: The Ethiopian-Eritrean Experience,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 29, no. 1 (1997): 91-142; M. K. Nawaz, “The Meaning and Range of the Principle of Self-Determination,” Duke Law Journal 82-101 (1965). " 38. Howlad and White, The State of Sovereignty; Jan Klabbers, “The Right to be Taken Seriously: Self-determination in International Law,” Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2006): 186-206; Nawaz, “The Meaning and Range”; Patricia Carley, “Self-Determination, Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, and the Right to Secession,” see especially the Summary and historical background, U.S. Institute for Peace, accessed March 2015, http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/pwks7.pdf. " 39. Convention on Rights and Duties of States (inter-American), December 26, 1933, art. 1, accessed April 2015, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/intam03.asp; Howland and White, The State of Sovereignties, 2-5; Nathaniel Berman, “Sovereignty in Abeyance: Self-Determination in International Law,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 7, no. 1 (1988-89): 51-106. " 40. Howland and White, State of Sovereignties, 4. " 41. General Assembly resolution 175 (II) of November 21, 1947; “Preparatory Study concerning a Draft Declaration on the Rights and Duties of States; Memo Submitted by the Secretary-General,” UN, International Law Committee, 1948, A/CN.4/2, accessed February 2015, http://legal.un.org/ilc/documentation/english/a_cn4_2.pdf; Hans Kelsen, “The Draft Declaration on Rights and Duties of States,” The American Journal of International Law 44 (1950): 259-76; Louis B. Sohn, “The Development of International Law,” American Bar Association Journal 35 (August 1949): 688-89; Norman S. Marsh, “Review of Preparatory Study Concerning a Draft Declaration on the Rights and Duties of States,” The International Law Quarterly 4 (January 1951): 140-41. " 42. Kelson, “The Draft Declaration.” " 43. Pelt, Libyan Independence; Vandewalle, History of Modern Libya, 46-48. " 44. Telegram from Tripoli to London, October 8, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-1953, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 45. Telegram from Tripoli to Secretary of State, July 20, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-1953, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 46. Quoted in Telegram from Lynch to Secretary of State, November 30, 1951, file 711.56373/11-3051, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA; see also, Telegram from Secretary of State (Acheson) to Tripoli, May 15, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-1953, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 47. Benjamin Higgins et al., Report of the Mission to Libya (New York, 1952), 10-11; for similar sentiments, Carter Goodrich, Report of the United Nations Preparatory Mission of Technical Assistance to Libya (New York, August 1950); John Lindberg, A General Economic Appraisal of Libya (New York, 1950); O. J. Wheatley, “Agriculture in Libya,” April 1951, FO 1021/43, TNA; “A Point IV Health Program For Libya,” November 15, 1951, in Subject File Council and Commissioner in Libya, 1934-1956, UN S-0655-0011-13, UNA; Lewis, “Libya: An Experiment”: 103-109; and Lewis and Robert Gordon, “Libya Two Years after independence,” Middle East Journal 8 (Winter 1954): 41-53. " 48. For “auctioning off,” see Shulatul Hurria quoted in Tripoli to Department of State, “Transmission of Article in Tripoli,” October 8, 1951 (Despatch 50), 711.56373/9-2451; On seeking UN and/or Arab League aid see, Tripoli to Department of State, “Advance Publicity of Air Base Agreement,” July 18, 1952 (Despatch 9), file 711.56373/7-1852; both in Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 49. Pelt, Libyan Independence, 598. Documents from the time write his name as “Beshir Bey Sadawi.” " 50. From al Libi, quoted and translated in, “Advance Publicity of Air Base Agreement,” July 18, 1952 (Despatch 9), RG 59, NARA. " 51. Air pouch from Cairo to Department of State, May 23, 1951, file 711.56373/5-1851, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA; Telegram from Department of State to Tripoli, June 19, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-53, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 52. Al Manar, quoted “Advance Publicity of Air Base Agreement,” July 18, 1952 (Despatch 9), RG 59, NARA. " 53. Speech reprinted in Tarablus at Gharb, FO 371/97310, TNA. " 54. Memorandum from Afifi to the Minister, “Territory occupied by military forces,” December 13, 1952, Classified General Records in Tripoli, entry 2865, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 55. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Middle East District Report, 1954,” Military Construction Files, American Overseas Bases, OPS XII-30, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters, Historical Research Office, Alexandria, VA (hereafter ACEHQ). " 56. Robert P. Grathwol and Donita M. Moorhus, Bricks, Sand, and Marble: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction in the Mediterranean and Middle East, 1947-1991 (Alexandria, VA, 2010), 34. " 57. “Mediterranean Division report, 1956,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, General Files, box 2, ACEHQ. " 58. Ibid. " 59. “Historical Summary Middle East District,” Period 25 June 1950–8 September 1951, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, General Files, box 2, ACEHQ. " 60. Letter from Easley to Villard, “Schedule of Rates used by Commission in Evaluating Improvements,” April 9, 1952, Classified General Records in Tripoli, entry 2865, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 61. Memorandum from Dayton S. Mak to Department of State, May 6, 1952; Memorandum for the Record, “Land Acquisition,” May 12, 1952, both in Classified General Records in Tripoli, entry 2865, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 62. “Advance Publicity of Air Base Agreement,” July 18, 1952 (Despatch 9) RG 59, NARA; and October 29, 1951 article from Shuilat al-Huriat, in Subject File Council and Commissioner in Libya, 1934-1956, UN S-0655-0014-folder 3, UNA. " 63. Letter from Tripoli Legation to British Military Administration, April 5, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-53, folder: Wheelus 1951, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 64. Memorandum from the African Department, April 23, 1949, FO 371/73817, TNA. " 65. Joseph Wechsberg, “Twilight in Souk El Giuma,” New Yorker, April 5, 1952, 116, 111. " 66. Letter from Troxler to Villard, May 27, 1953, 711.56373/6-1653, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA. " 67 “Advance Publicity on the Air Base Agreement,” July 18, 1952; For Derna, Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, March 10, 1952, 711.56373/3-1852; Tripoli Legation to Department of State, “Economic Benefits Deriving to Libya from Wheelus Field,” August 29, 1952 (Despatch 33), 711.56373/8-2952; on Idris, Telegram from Tripoli to Secretary of State, March 10, 1952, 711.56373/3-1052, all in Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 68. Villard, Libya, 6. " 69. “Economic Benefits Deriving to Libya from Wheelus Field,” August 29, 1952, RG 59, NARA; Telegram from Acheson to Villard, September 24, 1952, file 711.56373/9-852, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA; Letter from Tripoli to Secretary of State, January 21, 1951, file 711.56373/1-2751, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. On visitors, Swetzer, Wheelus Field, 21-23. " 70. Letter and attachments from Villard to Prime Minister Muntasser, July 17, 1952, including Troxler and Anthis, “U.S. Military contributions to the Libyan Economy,” July 12, 1952, file 711.56373/8-29852, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 71. Letter from Lynch to Department of State, March 6, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-53, folder: Base agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 72. Memorandum from Rice to Lynch, July 20, 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret Files, 1951-1953, folder: Wheelus 1951, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 73. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, October 22, 1951 and October 19, 1951, both in Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-1953, folder: Base Agreement, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 74. Policy Paper Approved by the Foreign Assistance Correlation Committee, Military Rights Question, May 20, 1949, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1, National Security Affairs, (Washington, DC), 312-13, available online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1949v01, last accessed on 24 February 2015. “Nash Report implementation,” April 25, 1959, Bureau of African Affairs, 1951-1963, Office of Inter-African Affairs, Records of the Political-Military Advisor, box 2, RG 59, NARA. " 75. Letter from Secretary of State (Dulles) to Tripoli, “Possible Economic Aid to Libya,” March 16, 1954, Classified General records in Tripoli, 1950-59, entry 2865, folder: Relief aid, box 7, RG 84, NARA. " 76. Telegram from Tripoli to State, plus handwritten attachments May 29, 1954, Classified General records in Tripoli, 1950-59, entry 2865, folder: Relief aid, box 7, RG 84, NARA. " 77. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, June 12, 1954, file 711.56373/6-1954, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA. " 78. Memorandum,“Misrepresentation of Point 4 program in Libya,” May 21,1952; “Monthly Operations Report TGA Libya,” October 17, 1952, both in General Records in Tripoli, entry 2864, box 2, RG 84, NARA; Telegram from Benghazi to Tripoli, January 29, 1953, Classified General Records in Tripoli, entry 2865, box 4, RG 84, NARA; “Press Report,” March 14, 1951, in Subject File Council and Commissioner in Libya, 1934-1956, UN S-0655-0014-01, UNA. " 79. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Mediterranean Division Report, 1954,” Military Construction Files, box XII-36, mid to late 50s, ACEHQ. " 80. “Authorization FY -1952 Air Force Construction Programs, Wheelus,” March 26, 1953, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Dod papers, box 3, ACEHQ; Foreign Service Despatch, September 17, 1954, file 711.56373/9-2054, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA; Telegram from Department of State to Tripoli, April 10, 1954, Secret General Correspondence, 1952-54, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 81. David Engerman, ed., Staging Growth, Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Boston, MA, 2003); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ, 2011). " 82. “Status Report on Implementation of Nash Report,” April 1959, General Records, Records of the Political-Military Advisor, Bureau of African Affairs, 1951-1963, RG 59, NARA. " 83. “Note Verbale,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, United Kingdom of Libya, July 24, 1952, Classified General Records in Tripoli 1950-1954, entry 2865, box 1, RG 84, NARA. " 84. Foreign Service Despatch, “Transmission of Minutes of Base meeting of March 18,” March 25, 1954, file 711.56737/3-2554, Tripoli, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 85. Foreign Service Despatch, “Transmission of Base Agreement Meeting,” March 23, 1954, file 711.56373/3-2554, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA; on traffic incidents see “Status Report on Implementation of Nash Report,” April 1959, General Records, Bureau of African Affairs, 1951-1963, Records of the Political-Military Advisor, RG 59, NARA; for the girl, Confidential Memorandum, December 6, 1952, FO 371/97289, TNA; for the car incident, FO 371/97333, TNA; U.S. case of manslaughter referred to in “Prosecution of British Persons in Libya”, January 1955, FO 371/113938, TNA. " 86. Villard, Libya, 9, 141. " 87. Telegram from Villard to State, June 12, 1954, FRUS, 1952-1954, vol. IX, part 1, Africa and South Asia, (Washington, DC), 588, available online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS195254v11p1, last accessed on February 24, 2015. " 88. On uniforms, Joint WEEKA No. 28 for State, Army, Navy, Air Depts from SANA, December 5, 1952, Tripoli Legation, Secret General Correspondence, box 1, RG 84, NARA; Language law, Memorandum from Benghazi to Tripoli, March 4, 1953, General Records in Tripoli, 1948-1964, entry 2864, box 1, RG 84, NARA; on permits, see Letter to Tripoli, May 14, 1955, General Records in Tripoli, 1948-1964, entry 2864, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 89. Tripoli to Department of State, “Libyan Public Opinion Concerning Recent Developments in U.S.-Libyan Base Negotiations,” June 18, 1954, file 711.56373/6-1954, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 90. “Libyan Public Opinion,” June 18, 1952, RG 59, NARA. " 91. Joint State-Defense Message, March 19, 1954, file 711.56737/3-1954, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA. " 92. Memorandum from Afifi to Villard “Public Opinion,” December 29, 1952; and, Memorandum from Villard, January 24, 1952, both in Classified General Records, Tripoli, entry 2865, box 1, RG 84, NARA; Tripoli to Department of State, September 4, 1952 (Despatch 27), Classified General Records, Tripoli, entry 2865, box 4, RG 84, NARA. " 93. Telegram Villard to Department of State, February 6, 1953, file 711.56373/2-653, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA. " 94. For Greece, “Transmission of Minutes of Base Agreement Meeting,” March 25, 1954, file 711.56373/3-2554, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA; for Saudi Arabia, “Memo and attachments,” November 1951, Tripoli Legation, Top Secret File, 1951-53, folder: Wheelus 1951, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 95. Article VII of the NATO SOFA establishes concurrent criminal jurisdiction, in which the “primary” right is exercised by the receiving state when both countries’ laws are involved. The exceptions are when a member of the sending state commits an act while performing official duties, or when the crime is against the sending state or persons from the sending state. Agreement Between the Parties of the North Atlantic Treaty Regarding the Status of Their Force, June 19, 1951. See also Joseph Rouse, “The Exercise of Criminal Jurisdiction Under the NATO Stats of Forces Agreement,” The American Journal of International Law 51 (January 1957): 29-62. " 96. “Report of the Committee on SOFAs”; Moore, “Criminal Jurisdiction in Overseas Areas”; and, Telegram from Department of State to Tripoli, April 15, 1954, file 711.56373/3-1954, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA. " 97. By 1957 agreements with Japan, Bermuda, and the Bahamas were revised to fit this formula. Though bases in Germany, Korea, Greenland, Ethiopia, and the Ryukyu Islands gave U.S. exclusive jurisdiction. The German deal was under revision. " 98. Telegram from Benghazi to Department of State, March 19, 1954, file 711.56373/3-1954, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA. " 99. See especially files in FO 371/113938, TNA. " 100. Telegram from Tripoli to Department of State, December 30, 1954, Top Secret General Correspondence, folder: The Fezzan, box 1, RG 84, NARA. French evacuated their forces from the Fezzan in 1956, Ronald Bruce St. John, Libya: From Colony to Revolution (New York, 2011), Chapter 5. " 101. Telegram from Benghazi to Department of State, March 26, 1954, file 711.56373/3-2454, Central Decimal Files 1950-54, RG 59, NARA. " 102. Telegram from Villard to Secretary of State, June 12, 1954, file 711.56373/6-1254, Central Decimal Files 1950-1954, RG 59, NARA; see also, “Our British Allies and Our American Friends,” Al Libi, March 31, 1952, translated in Memorandum to Department of State, May 21, 1952, General Records in Tripoli, 1948-1954, entry 2864, box 2, RG 84, NARA. " 103. Telegram from State to Legation in Libya, July 20, 1954, FRUS, 1952-1954, vol. IX, part 1, Africa and South Asia, (Washington, DC), 590, available online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS195254v11p1, last accessed on February 24, 2015. " 104. Agreement of Understanding Between the United States of America and Libya: Use of Facilities in Agreed Areas, Sept. 9, 1954, reprinted in U.S. Treaties and other International Documents, vol. 5, part 3 (Washington, DC, 1954), 2449-95. " 105. Telegram, July 20, 1954, FRUS, vol. IX, part 1, 590; Letter from Walter Graham to Bromley, August 4, 1955, and “Memorandum of Understanding between U.S. and Libya,” both in, FO 371/113938, TNA; Memorandum, “Secret, Base Agreement,” attached to November 22, 1955 letter, General Records of the Department of State, Bureau of Africa Affairs, Records Relating to Libya, 1966-1973, box 2, RG 59, NARA (a number of items from the 1950s are apparently misfiled in “1966-1973”). " 106. Examples from Moore, “Criminal Jurisdiction in Overseas Areas,” 276, 281. " 107. For example, “Forces Overseas Stir ‘inevitable tensions,’” New York Times, June 9, 1957; “Foreign Relations of U.S. forces Stationed Abroad,” New York Times, June 9, 1957; C. L. Sulzberger, “Foreign Affairs: A Primer for U.S. Base Negotiators,” New York Times, July 5, 1958. " 108. Moore, “Criminal Jurisdiction in Overseas Areas,” 276. " 109. Editorial Note, FRUS, 1955-1957, vol. XIX, National Security Policy, (Washington, DC), doc. 172, 334, available online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS195557v19, last accessed on April 3, 2015. " 110. “Implementation of Nash Report,” RG 59, NARA. " 111. Nash Report, “Libya Country Study,” RG 59, NARA. " 112. Memorandum from Air Force to NEA, “Punishment in US for drunk driving,” March 25, 1955, Records Relating to Libya, 1966-1978, RG 59, NARA. " 113. Memo of Conversation, “Criminal Jurisdiction,” April 12, 1958, Records Relating to Libya, 1966-1978, RG 59, NARA. " 114. Nash Report, “Libya Country Study,” RG 59, NARA. " 115. “Report of the Committee on SOFAs.” " 116. Letter From the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (Talbot) to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Bundy), FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XVII, Near East, doc. 210, 519, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v17/d210, last accessed August 11, 2015. " 117. Andrew L. Johns, “The Johnson Administration, the Shah of Iran, and the Changing Pattern of U.S.-Iranian Relations, 1965-1967,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 2 (2007). Young quoted in James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, CT, 1989), 158-59. " 118. Ayse Gul Altmay and Amy Holmes, “Opposition to the U.S. Military Presence in Turkey in the Context of the Iraq War,” in Bases of Empire, 270-297; George Harris, Troubled Alliance: Turkish-American Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945-1971 (Washington DC, 1972), 87-89, 97-98, 161; Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the U.S. Military Overseas (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 95-117; Amy Austin Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge, 2014), 44-94. " 119. Memorandum “Training the Libyan Army,” April 14, 1958, Records Relating to Libya, 1966-1978, RG 59, NARA. " 120. Swetzer, Wheelus Field, 6; “U.S. AIR BASE IN LIBYA HAS 700 BUILDINGS,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 11, 1956, g6. " 121. Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya, 80. " 122. “Nash Report implementation,” RG 59, NARA. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. 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TI - “A Slice of their Sovereignty”: Negotiating the U.S. Empire of Bases, Wheelus Field, Libya, 1950-1954
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhv058
DA - 2017-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-slice-of-their-sovereignty-negotiating-the-u-s-empire-of-bases-M2VTR8407C
SP - 50
VL - 41
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -