Page 3 of
3 Everlasting US
pyramids in Iraqi sands By Tom
Engelhardt
operations and
maintenance support for base local area network,
commercial satellite communication, technical
control facility, and circuit actions, telephone,
land mobile radio and both inside and outside
cable plant installations ... at 13 bases in Iraq,
Afghanistan and six other nations which fall in
the United States Central Command area of
responsibility".
And major base-building
may not be at an end. Keep your eye on Iraqi
Kurdistan. According to Juan Cole, the Kurdish press
continues to report rumors
that US base-building activities are now switching
there. Little is known about this, except that
some in Washington consider Iraqi Kurdistan an
obvious place to "redeploy" US troops in any
future partial withdrawal or draw-down scenarios.
These, then, were the Bush
administration's facts on the Iraqi ground.
Whatever anyone was saying at any moment about
ending the US presence in Iraq some day or turning
"sovereignty" over to the Iraqis, for American
reporters in Baghdad, as well as the media at
home, the "enduring" nature of what was being
built should have been unmistakable - and it
should have counted for something.
After
all, those US bases, like the vast embassy inside
the Green Zone (sardonically dubbed by Baghdadis
"George W's Palace"), were monstrous in size,
state-of-the-art when it came to communications
and facilities, and meant to support large-scale
US communities - whether soldiers, diplomats,
spies, contractors or mercenaries - long-term.
They were imperial in nature, the US military and
diplomatic equivalents of the pyramids. And no
one, on seeing them, should have thought anything
but "permanent".
It didn't matter that
those bases were never officially labeled
"permanent". After all, as the Korea model (now
almost six decades old) indicates, such bases,
rather than colonies, have long been the US way of
empire - and, with rare exceptions, they have
arrived and not left. They remain immobile
gunboats primed for a kind of eternal armed
"diplomacy". As they cluster tellingly in key
regions of the planet, they make up what the
Pentagon likes to call the United States'
"footprint".
As Chalmers Johnson has
pointed out in his book The Sorrows of
Empire, the United States has, mainly since
World War II, set up at least 737 such bases, mega
and micro - and probably closer to 1,000 -
worldwide. Everywhere, just as Tony Snow has said,
the Americans would officially be "invited" in by
the local government and would negotiate a "status
of forces agreement", the modern equivalent of the
colonial era's grant of extraterritoriality, so
that the US troops would be minimally subject to
foreign courts or control. There are still at
least 12 such bases in South Korea, 37 on the
Japanese island of Okinawa alone, and so on,
around the globe.
Since the Gulf War in
1991, such base-creation has been on the rise. The
George H W Bush, Bill Clinton and younger Bush
administrations have laid down a string of bases
from the old Eastern European satellites of the
Soviet Union (Romania, Bulgaria) and the former
Yugoslavia through the greater Middle East
(Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab
Emirates), to the Horn of Africa (Djibouti), into
the Indian Ocean (the "British" island of Diego
Garcia), and right through Central Asia
(Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, where the
US "shares" Pakistani bases).
Bases have
followed the United States' little wars of recent
decades. They were dropped into Saudi Arabia and
the small Persian Gulf emirates around the time of
the first Gulf War; into the former Yugoslavia
after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and the former Soviet Central Asian
republics after the Afghan war of 2001; and into
Iraq, of course, after the invasion of 2003, where
they were to replace the Saudi bases being
mothballed as a response to Osama bin Laden's
claims that Americans were defiling the holiest
spots of Islam.
In effect, when it came to
bases in the years since September 11, 2001, the
emphasis was, on the one hand, encircling Russia
from its former Eastern European satellites to its
former Central Asian republics and, on the other
hand, securing a series of bases across the oil
heartlands of the planet, a swath of territory
known to the administration back in 2002-03 as
"the arc of instability".
Iraq was,
obviously, a part - though a crucial part - of
such imperial dreaming about how to dominate the
planet. And yet the military ziggurats that made
those dreams manifest, and all the billions of
taxpayer dollars and the obvious urge for
"permanence" that went with them, were largely
left out of mainstream reporting on, debate about,
or discussion of the occupation of Iraq.
Iraq as Korea, 2003-07 The Bush
administration remained remarkably tightlipped
about all this building activity and what it might
mean - beyond periodic denials that any such
efforts were "permanent"; and, with rare
exceptions, even when journalists reported from
Camp Victory or other major bases, they never
managed to put them on the reportorial landscape.
Those bases - and the colossus of an "embassy"
that went with them - just weren't considered all
that important.
Perhaps for reporters and
editors, used to an inside-the-Beltway universe in
which the United States simply could not act in an
imperial manner, the bases were givens - like the
American way of life. Evidently, for most
reporters, there was, in a sense, nothing to
notice. As a consequence, there has been endless
discussion about Bush administration
"incompetence" (of which there has been plenty),
but not the quite competent planning that left
such structures impressively on the Iraqi
landscape. If the subject wasn't exactly blacked
out in the United States, it did, at least,
undergo a kind of whiteout.
So much about
Iraq was up for discussion, but the preponderant
evidence on the ground, so utterly solid, carried
no weight. It was evidence of nothing. For
American reporters, as for American secretaries of
defense, the full-scale garrisoning of Planet
Earth is simply not a news story. As a result,
most Americans have had next to no idea that we
were creating multibillion-dollar edifices on
Iraqi soil meant for a near-eternity.
Remarkably enough, when asked late last
year by pollsters from the Program on
International Policy Attitudes whether the US
should have the "permanent" bases in Iraq, a
whopping 68% of Americans said no. But when the
issue of bases and permanency arises at all in the
US press, it's usually in the context of Iraqi
"suspicions" on the subject. (Oh, those paranoid
foreigners!)
Typically, the Los Angeles
Times cited Michael O'Hanlon, an oft-quoted
analyst at the Brookings Institution, saying the
following of Bush's endorsement of the Korea
model: "In trying to convey resolve, [Bush]
conveys the presumption that we're going to be
there for a long time ... It's unhelpful to
handling the politics of our presence in Iraq."
No, Michael, the bases are the United
States' politics in Iraq.
Generally, the
Democrats and their major presidential candidates
line up with O'Hanlon. And yet no significant
Democratic proposal for "withdrawal" from Iraq is
really a full-scale withdrawal proposal. They are
all proposals to withdraw US combat brigades
(perhaps 50,000-60,000 troops) from the country,
while withdrawing most other Americans into those
giant bases that are too awkward to mention.
Suddenly, however, discussion of the
"Korea model" has entered the news and so put
those bases - and the idea of a permanent military
presence in Iraq - in the US viewfinder for what
may be the first time. You only have to look at
Iraq today to know that, like so much else the
United States' imperial dreamers have conjured up,
this fantasy too - of a calming Iraq developing
over the decades into a friendly democracy, while
US troops sit tight in their giant base-towns is
doomed to one kind of failure or another, while
the oil lands of the planet threaten to implode.
The Korea model is just one of the Bush
administration's many grotesque, self-interested
misreadings of history, but it isn't new. It isn't
a fantasy the president and his top officials have
just stumbled on in post-"surge" desperation. It's
the fantasy they rumbled into Baghdad aboard back
in 2003. It's the imperial fantasy that has never
left their minds from that first shock-and-awe
moment until now.
Give them credit for
consistency. On this "model", whatever it may be
called, the Bush administration bet the store and,
on it, it has never wavered. Because of some of
the worst reporting on an important topic in
recent memory, most Americans have lived out these
past years in remarkable ignorance of what was
actually being built in Iraq. Now, perhaps, that
great American disconnect is beginning to end,
which may be more bad news for the Bush
administration.
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. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
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