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.
