Page 2 of 3 Everlasting US pyramids in
Iraqi sands By Tom Engelhardt
needed to occupy a "liberated" Iraq
effectively. For that statement, the Pentagon
civilian leadership and allied neo-cons laughed
him out of the room and then out of town.
Sagely pointing out that there was no
history of "ethnic strife" in Iraq, deputy defense
secretary Paul Wolfowitz termed Shinseki's
estimate "wildly off the mark". His boss,
secretary of defense
Donald Rumsfeld, concurred.
"Far off the mark," he said and, when the general
retired a few months later, pointedly did not
attend the ceremony.
After all, Rumsfeld
and Wolfowitz were planning to take and occupy
Iraq in a style that would be high-tech and, in
manpower terms, lean and mean. Given an
administration-wide belief that the Iraqis would
greet US troops as liberators or, at least, make
them at home in their country, they expected the
occupation to proceed smoothly - on a "Korea
model" basis, in fact.
Here's what
Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks wrote in
Fiasco, his best-selling book about the
occupation, on the administration's expectations
that February:
[Paul] Wolfowitz told senior army
officers ... he thought that within a few months
of the invasion the US troop level in Iraq would
be 34,000, recalled [Johnny] Riggs, the army
general then at army headquarters. Likewise,
another three-star general, still on active
duty, remembers being told to plan to have the
US occupation force reduced to 30,000 troops by
August 2003. An army briefing a year later also
noted that that number was the goal "by the end
of the summer of 2003".
At present,
about 37,000 US troops are garrisoned in South
Korea. In other words, the original plan, in
manpower terms, was for a Korea-style occupation
of Iraq. But where were those troops to stay? The
Pentagon had been pondering that, too - and here's
where the New York Times has forgotten its own
history.
On April 19, 2003, soon after US
troops entered Baghdad, Times reporters Thom
Shanker and Eric Schmitt had a striking front-page
piece headlined, "Pentagon expects long-term
access to four key bases in Iraq". It began:
The United States is planning a
long-term military relationship with the
emerging government of Iraq, one that would
grant the Pentagon access to military bases and
project American influence into the heart of the
unsettled region, senior Bush administration
officials say. American military officials, in
interviews this week, spoke of maintaining
perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in
the future: one at the international airport
just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near
Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated
airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along
the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and
the last at the Bashur airfield in the Kurdish
north.
The Pentagon, that is, arrived
in Baghdad with at least a four-base strategy for
the long-term occupation of the country already on
the drawing boards. These were to be mega-bases,
in essence fortified US towns on which those
30,000-40,000 troops could hunker down for a
South-Korean-style eternity.
The Pentagon
was officially not looking for "permanent basing",
as it slyly claimed, but "permanent access". And
on this verbal dodge, an administration that has
constantly redefined reality to fit its needs has
ducked its obvious desire for, and plans for,
"permanency" in Iraq. As Tony Snow put the matter
this way only the other day, "US bases in Iraq
would not necessarily be permanent because they
would be there at the invitation of the host
government and the person who has done the
invitation has the right to withdraw the
invitation."
When the reporting of Schmitt
and Shanker came up in a Rumsfeld news conference,
the story was in essence denied ("I have never,
that I can recall, heard the subject of a
permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting
...") and then disappeared from the New York Times
for four years (and most of the rest of the media
for most of that time).
It did not,
however, disappear from Pentagon planning. Quite
the contrary: the Pentagon began doling out the
contracts and the various private builders set to
work. By late 2003, Lieutenant-Colonel David Holt,
the army engineer "tasked with facilities
development" in Iraq, was quoted in a prestigious
engineering magazine speaking proudly of several
billion dollars already being sunk into base
construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Bases
were built in profusion - 106 of them, according
to the Washington Post, by 2005 (including, of
course, many tiny outposts).
For a while,
to avoid the taint of that word "permanent", the
major US bases in Iraq were called "enduring
camps" by the Pentagon. Five or six of them are
simply massive, including Camp Victory, the US
military headquarters adjacent to Baghdad
International Airport on the outskirts of the
capital, Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad (which
has air traffic to rival Chicago's O'Hare), and
al-Asad Air Base in the Western desert near the
Syrian border.
These are big enough to
contain multiple bus routes, huge shops, movie
theaters, brand-name fast-food restaurants and, in
one case, even a miniature golf course. At the
base at Tallil in the south, in 2006, a mess hall
was being built to seat 6,000. And that just skims
the surface of the Bush administration's bases.
In addition, as the insurgency gained
traction and Baghdad fell into disarray as well as
sectarian warfare, administration planners began
the building of a massively fortified, US$600
million, blast-resistant compound of 20-odd
buildings in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone,
the largest "embassy" on the planet, so
independent that it would have no need of Iraq for
electricity, water, food, or much of anything
else. Scheduled to "open" this September, it will
be both a citadel and a home for thousands of
diplomats, spies, guards, private security
contractors and the foreign workers necessary to
meet "community" needs.
The media blind
to the bases From 2003 to the present, the
work building, maintaining and continually
upgrading these bases (and their equivalents in
Afghanistan) has never ended. Though the huge
base-building contracts were given out long ago,
consider just a couple of modest contracts of
recent vintage.
In March 2006, Dataline
Inc of Norfolk, Virginia, was awarded a $5 million
contract for "technical control facility upgrades
and cable installation", mainly at "Camp Fallujah,
Iraq (25%), Camp al-Asad, Iraq (25%), [and] Camp
Taqaddum, Iraq (25%)". Last December, Watkinson
LLC of Houston was awarded a $13 million
"firm-fixed-price contract for design and
construction of a heavy-aircraft parking apron and
open cargo-storage yard" for al-Asad Air Base, "to
be completed by September 17, 2007".
This
March, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems was
awarded a $73 million contract to "provide
recurring requirements such as
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
