Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
The great land grab
By Tom Engelhardt
It's just a US$5,812,353 contract - chump change for the Pentagon and not even
one of those notorious "no-bid" contracts either. Ninety-eight bids were
solicited by the Army Corps of Engineers and 12 were received before the
contract was awarded this May 28 to Wintara, Inc of Fort Washington, Maryland,
for "replacement facilities for Forward Operating Base Speicher, Iraq".
According to a Department of Defense press release, the work on those
"facilities" to be replaced at the base near Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit,
is expected to be completed by January 31, 2009, a mere 11 days after a new
president enters the Oval Office. It is but one modest reminder that, when the
next administration hits Washington, American bases in Iraq, large and
small, will still be undergoing the sort of repair and upgrading that has been
ongoing for years.
In fact, in the past five-plus years, untold billions of taxpayer dollars have
been spent on the construction and upgrading of those bases. When asked in the
autumn of 2003, only months after Baghdad fell to US troops, Lieutenant Colonel
David Holt, the army engineer then "tasked with facilities development" in
Iraq, proudly indicated that "several billion dollars" had already been
invested in those fast-rising bases. Even then, he was suitably amazed,
commenting that "the numbers are staggering". Imagine what he might have said,
barely two and a half years later, when the US reportedly had 106 bases, mega
to micro, all across the country.
By now, billions have evidently gone into single massive mega-bases like the US
air base at Balad, about 85 kilometers north of Baghdad. It's a "16-square-mile
fortress" (41 square kilometers) housing perhaps 40,000 US troops, contractors,
special-ops types and Defense Department employees. As the Washington Post's
Tom Ricks, who visited Balad in 2006, pointed out - in a rare piece on one of
the US's mega-bases - it's essentially "a small American town smack in the
middle of the most hostile part of Iraq". Then, air traffic at the base was
already being compared to Chicago's O'Hare International or London's Heathrow -
and keep in mind that Balad has been steadily upgraded ever since to support an
"air surge" that, unlike the President George W Bush's 2007 "surge" of 30,000
ground troops, has yet to end.
Building ziggurats
While American reporters seldom think these bases - the most essential US facts
on the ground in Iraq - are important to report on, the military press
regularly writes about them with pride. Such pieces offer a tiny window into
just how busily the Pentagon is working to upgrade and improve what are already
state-of-the-art garrisons. Here's just a taste of what's been going on
recently at Balad, one of the largest bases on foreign soil on the planet, and
but one of perhaps five mega-bases in that country:
Consider, for instance, this description of an air-field upgrade from official
US Air Force news coverage, headlined: Dirt Boyz pave way for aircraft, Airmen:
In
less than four months, Balad Air Base Dirt Boyz have placed and finished more
than 12,460 feet [3,800 meters] of concrete and added approximately 90,000
square feet [8,360 square meters] of pavement to the airfield ... Without the
extra pavement courtesy of the Dirt Boyz, fewer aircraft would be able to be
positioned and maintained at Balad AB. Having fewer aircraft at the base would
directly affect the air force's ability to place surveillance assets in the air
and to drop munitions on targets ... The ongoing flightline projects at Balad
AB consist of concrete pad extensions that will provide occupation surfaces for
multiple aircraft of various types.
Or here's a proud
description of what Detachment 6 of the 732nd Expeditionary Civil Engineer
Squadron did on its recent tour in Balad:
"We constructed more than
25,000 square feet of living, dining and operations buildings from the ground
up," said Staff Sergeant John Wernegreen ... "This project gave the [US] Army's
[3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment] and Iraqi army [soldiers] a place
to carry out their mission of controlling the battlespace around the Eastern
Diyala province."
And here's a caption, accompanying an air
force photo of work at Balad: "Airmen of the 407th Expeditionary Civil Engineer
Squadron pavement and equipment team repair utility cuts here June 11. The team
replaced approximately 30 cubic meters of concrete over newly installed power
line cables." And another: "Expeditionary Civil Engineer Squadron heavy
equipment operator, contours a new sidewalk here, June 10. Sidewalk repair is
being accomplished throughout the base housing area to eliminate tripping
hazards." (The sidewalks on such bases go with bus routes, traffic lights and
speeding tickets - in a country parts of which the US has helped turn into
little more than a giant pothole.)
Or how about this caption for a photo of military men on upgrade duty working
on copper cable as "part of the new tents to trailers project". It's little
wonder that, in another rare piece, National Public Radio's defense
correspondent Guy Raz reported, in October 2007, that Balad was "one giant
construction project, with new roads, sidewalks and structures going up ... all
with an eye toward the next few decades."
Think of this as the greatest American story of these years never told - or
more accurately, since there have been a few reports on a couple of these
mega-bases - never shown. After all, what an epic of construction this has
been, as the Pentagon built a series of fortified American towns, each some 15
to 20 miles around, with many of the amenities of home, including big name
fast-food franchises, PXes, and the like, in a hostile land in the midst of war
and occupation. In terms of troops, the president may only have put his "surge"
strategy into play in January 2007, but his Pentagon has been "surging" on base
construction since April 2003.
Now, imagine as well that hundreds of thousands of Americans have passed
through these mega-bases, including the enormous al-Asad air base (sardonically
nicknamed "Camp Cupcake" for its amenities) in the Western desert of Iraq, and
the ill-named (or never renamed) Camp Victory on the edge of Baghdad. Troops
have surged through these bases, of course. Private contractors galore. Hired
guns. Pentagon officials. Military commanders. Top administration figures.
Visiting congressional delegations. Presidential candidates. And, of course,
the journalists.
It has been, for instance, a commonplace of these years to see a TV
correspondent reporting on the situation in Iraq, or what the American military
had to say about Iraq, from Baghdad's enormous Camp Victory. And yet, if you
think about it, that camera, photographing ABC's fine reporter Martha Raddatz
or other reporters on similar stop-overs, never pans across the base itself.
You don't even get a glimpse, unless you have access to homemade GI videos or
Pentagon-produced propaganda.
Similarly, last year, the president landed at Camp Cupcake for a meeting with
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki with reporters in tow. You could see shots
of him getting off the plane (just as he does everywhere), goofing around with
troops, or shaking hands with the Iraqi prime minister but, as far as I know,
none of the reporters with him stayed on to give us a view of the base itself.
Imagine if just about no one knew that the pyramids had been built. Ditto the
Great Wall of China. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Coliseum. The Eiffel
Tower. The Statue of Liberty. Or any other architectural wonder of the world
you'd care to mention.
After all, these giant bases, rising from the smashed birthplace of Western
civilization, were not only built on (and sometimes out of bits of) the ancient
ruins of that land, but are functionally modern versions of ziggurats, the
terraced pyramids of ancient Mesopotamian times. They are the cherished
monuments of the Bush administration. Even though its spokespeople have
regularly refused to use the word "permanent" in relation to them - in fact, in
relation to any US base on the planet - they have been built to long outlast
the Bush administration itself.
They were, in fact, clearly meant to be key garrisons of a Pax Americana in the
Middle East for generations to come. And, not surprisingly, they reek of
permanency. They are the unavoidable essence - unless, like most Americans, you
don't know they're there - of Bush administration planning in Iraq. Without
them, no discussion of Iraq policy in this country really makes sense.
And that, of course, is what makes their missing-in-action quality on the
American landscape so striking. Yes, a couple of good American reporters have
written pieces about one or two of them, but most Americans, as we know, get
their news from television and - though no one can watch all the news that
flows into American living rooms, it's a reasonable bet that a staggering
percentage of Americans have never had the opportunity to see the remarkable
structures their tax dollars have paid for, and continue to pay for, in
occupied Iraq.
This is the sort of thing you might expect of Bush-style offshore prisons, or
gulags, or concentration camps. And yet Americans have regularly and repeatedly
seen what Guantanamo looks like. They have seen something of what Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq looks like. But not the bases. Perhaps one explanation lies in
this: on rare occasions when Americans are asked by pollsters whether they want
"permanent bases" in Iraq, significant majorities answer in the negative. You
can only assume that, as on many other subjects, the Bush administration
preferred to fly under the radar screen on this one - and the media generally
concurred.
And let's remember one more base, though it's never called that: the massive
imperial embassy, perhaps the biggest on the planet, being built, for nearly
three-quarters of a billion dollars, on a nearly Vatican-sized 43 hectare plot
of land inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. It will be home to 1,000 "diplomats".
It will cost an estimated $1.2 billion a year just to operate. With its own
electricity and water systems, its anti-missile defenses, recreation, "retail
and shopping" areas and "blast-resistant" work spaces, it is essentially a
fortified citadel, a base inside the fortified American heart of the Iraq
capital. Like the mega-bases, it emits an aura of American, not Iraqi,
"sovereignty". It, too, is being built "for the ages".
A land grab, American-style
The issue of the mega-bases in Iraq first surfaced barely days after Baghdad
had fallen. It was on April 20, 2003, to be exact, and on the front-page of the
New York Times in a piece headlined "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Key
Iraq Bases". Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote: "American military officials,
in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that
could be used in the future," including what became Camp Victory. The story,
and the very idea of "permanent" bases, was promptly denied by then-secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld - then essentially disappeared from the news for
years. (To this day, again as far as I know, the New York Times has never
written another significant front-page story on the subject.)
Now, however, the bases are, suddenly and startlingly, in the news (and, of
course, being written about and discussed on TV as if they had long been part
of everyday media analysis). This week, in fact, they hit the front page of the
Washington Post, due to
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
