http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB16Ak01.html
A permanent basis for staying in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
We're in a new period in the war in Iraq - one that
brings to mind the Nixonian era of "Vietnamization": a
president presiding over an increasingly unpopular war
that won't end; an election bearing down; the need to
placate a restive American public; and an army under
so much strain that it seems to be running off the
rails.
So it's not surprising that the media are now
reporting on administration plans for, or
"speculation" about, or "signs of" or "hints" of
"major drawdowns" or withdrawals of American troops.
The figure regularly cited these days is less than
100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2006. With about
136,000 American troops
there now, that figure would represent just over
one-quarter of all in-country US forces, which means,
of course, that the term "major" certainly rests in
the eye of the beholder.
In addition, these withdrawals are - we know this
thanks to a Seymour Hersh piece, "Up in the air", in
the December 5 New Yorker - to be accompanied, as in
South Vietnam in the Richard Nixon era, by an
unleashing of the US Air Force. The added air power is
meant to compensate for any lost punch on the ground
(and will undoubtedly lead to more "collateral damage"
- that is, Iraqi deaths).
It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns
or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious
proposition that the administration of President
George W Bush can "stand up" an effective Iraqi army
and police force (think "Vietnamization" again),
capable of circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so
allowing American troops to pull back to bases outside
major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and points as
far west as the United States.
Further, all administration or military withdrawal
promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and
obvious loopholes, phrases like "if all goes according
to plan and security improves ..." or "it also depends
on the ability of the Iraqis to ..."
Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise
and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern
civilization (electrical power, potable water, gas for
cars, functional sewage systems, working traffic
lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very
establishment of a government inside the heavily
fortified Green Zone has proved immensely difficult,
and since US reconstruction funds (those that haven't
already disappeared down one clogged drain or another)
are drying up, such partial withdrawals may prove more
complicated to pull off than imagined.
It's clear, nonetheless, that "withdrawal" is on the
propaganda agenda of an administration heading into
mid-term elections with an increasingly skittish
Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates
worried about defending the president's
mission-unaccomplished war of choice.
Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of,
followed by promises of, followed by announcements of
"major" withdrawals, possibly including news in the
fall election season of even more "massive"
withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007,
all hedged with conditional clauses and "only ifs" -
withdrawal promises that, once the election is over,
this administration would undoubtedly feel under no
particular obligation to fulfill.
Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal
buzz, speculation and even a media blitz of withdrawal
announcements, the question is: how can anybody tell
if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing
from Iraq or not?
Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog
of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to
focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq,
nothing could be more concrete - though less generally
discussed in our media - than the set of enormous
bases the Pentagon has long been building in that
country.
Quite literally, multibillions of dollars have gone
into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in
late 2003, Lieutenant-Colonel David Holt, the army
engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq,
was already speaking proudly of several billion
dollars being sunk into base construction ("the
numbers are staggering"). Since then, the
base-building has been massive and ongoing.
In a country in such startling disarray, these bases,
with some of the most expensive and advanced
communications systems on the planet, are like vast
spaceships that have landed from another solar system.
Representing a staggering investment of resources,
effort and geostrategic dreaming, they are the
unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand
over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi
governments.
If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style
reconstruction has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to
thievery, knavery and sheer incompetence, and is now
essentially ending, it has been a raging success in
Iraq's "Little America". For the first time, we have
actual descriptions of a couple of the "super-bases"
built in Iraq in the past two-and-a-half years and,
despite being written by reporters under Pentagon
information restrictions, they are sobering.
Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to
Balad Air Base, the largest US base in the country, 68
kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle
of the most hostile part of Iraq". In a piece titled
"Biggest base in Iraq has small-town feel", Ricks
paints a striking portrait:
The base is sizeable enough to have its own
"neighborhoods" including "KBR-land" (in honor of the
Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the
base-construction work in Iraq); "CJSOTF" ("home to a
special operations unit", the Combined Joint Special
Operations Task Force, surrounded by "especially high
walls", and so secretive that even the base army
public affairs chief has never been inside); and a
junkyard for bombed out army Humvees. There is as well
a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz
Starbucks", a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges
where TVs, iPods and the like can be purchased, four
mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base
speed limit of 10mph [miles per hour], a huge
airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator
drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you
would see over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a
miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with
its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of
concertina wire and, down at the end of the course,
what appears to be a tiny detainee cage".
Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at
Balad live in "air-conditioned containers" which will,
in the future - and yes, for those building these
bases, there still is a future - be wired "to bring
the troops Internet, cable television and overseas
telephone access". He points out as well that, of the
troops at Balad, "only several hundred have jobs that
take them off base. Most Americans posted here never
interact with an Iraqi."
Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited
another of the US "super-bases", the
still-under-construction al-Asad Airbase. He observes
of "the biggest marine camp in western Anbar province"
that "this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a
slice of US suburbia". In addition to the requisite
Subway and pizza outlets, there is a football field, a
Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool and a movie
theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large
- such bases may cover 40-50 square kilometers - that
it has two bus routes and, if not traffic lights, at
least red stop signs at all intersections.
There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq,
none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal"
from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are
being constructed as little American islands of
eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top
administration officials and military commanders say -
and they always deny that the US seeks "permanent"
bases in Iraq - facts on the ground speak with another
voice entirely. These bases practically scream
"permanency".
Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American
reporters adhere to a simple rule: the words
"permanent", "bases" and "Iraq" should never be placed
in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph;
in fact, not even in the same news report.
While a LexisNexis search of the past 90 days of press
coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the
use of those three words in the British press, the
only US examples that could be found occurred when 80%
of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their
difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the US might
indeed desire to establish bases and remain
permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not"
was added to the mix via any US official denial. (It's
strange, isn't it, that such bases, imposing as they
are, generally only exist in US papers in the
negative?) Three examples will do:
The secretary of defense: "During a visit with US
troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary
Donald H Rumsfeld said 'at the moment there are no
plans for permanent bases' in Iraq. 'It is a subject
that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi
government.'"
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmett, the Central Command
deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq:
"We already have handed over significant chunks of
territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans to
do so; they are being executed right now. It is not
only our plan but our policy that we do not intend to
have any permanent bases in Iraq."
US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen
Hughes on the Charlie Rose Show : "Charlie Rose: ...
They think we are still there for the oil, or they
think the United States wants permanent bases. Does
the United States want permanent bases in Iraq? Karen
Hughes: We want nothing more than to bring our men and
women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not
before they finish the job. Charlie Rose: And do not
want to keep bases there? Karen Hughes: No, we want to
bring our people home as soon as possible."
Still, for a period, the Pentagon practiced something
closer to truth in advertising than did major US
papers. At least they called the big bases in Iraq
"enduring camps", a label that had a certain charm and
reeked of permanency. (Later, they were relabeled, far
less romantically, to "contingency operating bases".)
One of the enduring mysteries of this war is that
reporting on US bases in Iraq has been almost
non-existent these past years, especially given an
administration so weighted toward military solutions
to global problems; especially given the heft of some
of the bases; especially given the fact that the
Pentagon was mothballing bases in Saudi Arabia and saw
these as long-term substitutes; especially given the
fact that the neo-conservatives and other top
administration officials were so focused on
controlling the so-called arc of instability
(basically, the energy heartlands of the planet) at
whose center was Iraq; and especially given the fact
that Pentagon prewar planning for such "enduring
camps" was, briefly, a front-page story in a major
newspaper.
A little history
On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American
troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote
a front-page piece for the New York Times indicating
that the Pentagon was planning to "maintain" four
bases in Iraq for the long haul, though "there will
probably never be an announcement of permanent
stationing of troops". Rather than speak of "permanent
bases", the military preferred then to speak coyly of
"permanent access" to Iraq.
The bases, however, fit snugly with other Pentagon
plans, already on the drawing boards. For instance,
Saddam Hussein's 400,000-man military was to be
replaced by only a 40,000-man, lightly armed military
without significant armor or an air force. (In an
otherwise heavily armed region, this ensured that any
Iraqi government would be almost totally reliant on
the US military and that the US Air Force would, by
default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come.)
While much space in our papers has, of late, been
devoted to the administration's lack of postwar
planning, next to no interest has been shown in the
planning that did take place.
At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and
Schmitt piece appeared, Rumsfeld insisted that the US
was "unlikely to seek any permanent or long-term bases
in Iraq" - and that was that. The Times' piece was in
essence sent down the memory hole. While scads of
bases were being built - including four huge ones
whose geographic placement correlated fairly
strikingly with the four mentioned in the Times
article - reports about US bases in Iraq, or any
Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely
disappeared from the US media. (With rare exceptions,
you could only find discussions of "permanent bases"
in these past years at Internet sites such as
Tomdispatch, Asia Times Online or Global
Security.org.)
Last May, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington
Post reported that the US had 106 bases, ranging from
mega to micro in Iraq. Most of these were to be given
back to the Iraqi military, now being "stood up" as a
far larger force than originally imagined by Pentagon
planners, leaving the US with, Graham reported, just
the number of bases - four - that the Times first
mentioned more than two years earlier, including Balad
Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar
province.
This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of
original Pentagon thinking, but as a "withdrawal
plan". (A modest number of these bases have since been
turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit
transferred to Iraqi military units which, according
to Poole, promptly stripped it to the bone.)
The future of a fifth base - the enormous Camp Victory
at Baghdad International Airport - remains, as far as
we know, "unresolved"; and there is a sixth possible
"permanent super-base" being built in that country,
though never presented as such.
The Bush administration is sinking between $600
million and $1 billion in construction funds into a
new US embassy. It is to arise in Baghdad's Green Zone
on a plot of land along the Tigris River that is
reportedly two-thirds the area of the National Mall in
Washington, DC. The plans for this "embassy" are
almost mythic in nature.
A high-tech complex, it is to have "15 foot blast
walls and ground-to-air missiles" for protection as
well as bunkers to guard against air attacks. It will,
according to Chris Hughes, security correspondent for
the British Daily Mirror, include "as many as 300
houses for consular and military officials" and a
"large-scale barracks" for marines.
The "compound" will be a cluster of at least 21
buildings, assumedly nearly self-sufficient, including
"a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food
court and a commissary. Water, electricity and sewage
treatment plants will all be independent from
Baghdad's city utilities." It is being billed as "more
secure than the Pentagon" (not, perhaps, the most
reassuring tagline in the post-September 11 world). If
not quite a city-state, on completion it will resemble
an embassy-state. In essence, inside Baghdad's Green
Zone, we will be building another more heavily
fortified little Green Zone.
Even Prime Minister Tony Blair's Brits, part of our
unraveling, ever-shrinking "coalition of the willing"
in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady of the Scotsman
(Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently
in Iraq) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base -
sorry a base "for years to come" - near Basra in
southern Iraq, thus mimicking US "withdrawal" strategy
on the micro-scale that befits a junior partner.
As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment
blog, the Pentagon can plan for "endurance" in Iraq
forever and a day, while top Bush officials and
neo-cons, some now in exile, can continue to dream of
a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that
would control the energy heartlands of the planet.
None of that will, however, make such bases any more
"permanent" than their enormous Vietnam-era
predecessors at such places as Danang and Cam Rahn Bay
proved to be - not certainly if the Shi'ites decide
they want us gone or Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
(as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against
such bases.
Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since
the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases - call them
what you will - have been at the secret heart of the
Bush administration's "reconstruction" of the country.
To this day, those Little Americas, with their
KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs and
their miniature golf courses, remain a part of this
policy.
As long as KBR keeps building them, making their
facilities ever more enduring (and ever more
valuable), there can be no genuine "withdrawal" from
Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now,
despite the recent visits of a couple of reporters,
those super-bases remain swathed in a kind of policy
silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them
(other than to deny their permanency from time to
time). No presidential speeches deal with them. No
plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition
Democrats generally ignore them and the press - with
the exception of the odd columnist - won't even put
the words "base", "permanent" and "Iraq" in the same
paragraph.
It may be hard to do, given the skimpy coverage, but
keep your eyes directed at our "super-bases". Until
the administration blinks on them, there will be no
withdrawal from Iraq.
(Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt.)
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author
of The End of Victory Culture. His novel, The Last
Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.
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