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2 OCCUPATION: HAVING TO SAY
GOODBYE ... Iraq: A frat house with
guns By Peter Van Buren
Way out on the edge of Forward Operating
Base Hammer, where I lived for much of my year in
Iraq as a Provincial Reconstruction Team leader
for the United States Department of State, there
were several small hills, lumps of raised dirt on
the otherwise frying-pan-flat desert. These were
"tells", ancient garbage dumps and fallen
buildings.
Thousands of years ago, people
in the region used sun-dried bricks to build homes
and walls. Those bricks had a lifespan of about 20
years before they began to crumble, at which point
locals just built anew atop the old foundation. Do
that for a while, and soon enough your buildings
are sitting on a small hill.
At night, the
tell area was very dark, as we avoided artificial
light in order not to give passing insurgents easy
targets. In that
darkness, you could imagine
the earliest inhabitants of what was now our base
looking at the night sky and be reminded that we
were not the first to move into Iraq from afar. It
was also a promise across time that someday
someone would undoubtedly sit atop our own ruins
and wonder whatever happened to the Americans.
From that ancient debris field, recall the
almost forgotten run-up to the American invasion,
the now-ridiculous threats about Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State
Colin Powell lying away his own and America's
prestige at the United Nations, those
"Mission-Accomplished" days when the marines tore
down Saddam's statue and conquered Baghdad, the
darker times as civil society imploded and Iraq
devolved into civil war, the endless rounds of
purple fingers for stage-managed elections that
meant little, the "surge" and the ugly stalemate
that followed, fading to gray as president George
W Bush negotiated a complete withdrawal of US
forces from Iraq by the end of 2011 and the
seeming end of his dreams of a Pax Americana in
the Greater Middle East.
Now, with less
than seven months left until that withdrawal
moment, Washington debates whether to honor the
agreement, or - if only we can get the Iraqi
government to ask us to stay - to leave a
decent-sized contingent of soldiers occupying some
of the massive bases the Pentagon built hoping for
permanent occupancy.
To the extent that
any attention is paid to Iraq here in Snooki's
America, the debate over whether eight years of
war entitles the US military to some kind of Iraqi
squatter's rights is the story that will
undoubtedly get most of the press in the coming
months.
How this won't end Even
if the troops do finally leave, the question is:
Will that actually bring the US occupation of Iraq
to a close? During the invasion of 2003, a younger
David Petraeus famously asked a reporter: "Tell me
how this ends."
Dave, it may not actually
end. After all, as of October 1, 2011, full
responsibility for the US presence in Iraq will
officially be transferred from the military to the
Department of State. In other words, as Washington
imagines it, the occupation won't really end at
all, even if the landlords are switched.
And the State Department hasn't exactly
been thinking small when it comes to its future
"footprint" on Iraqi soil. The US mission in
Baghdad remains the world's largest embassy, built
on a tract of land about the size of the Vatican
and visible from space. It cost just $736 million
to build - or was it $1 billion, depending on how
you count the post-construction upgrades and
fixes?
In its post-"withdrawal" plans, the
State Department expects to have 17,000 personnel
in Iraq at some 15 sites. If those plans go as
expected, 5,500 of them will be mercenaries, hired
to shoot-to-kill Iraqis as needed, to maintain
security. Of the remaining 11,500, most will be in
support roles of one sort or another, with only a
couple of hundred in traditional diplomatic jobs.
This is not unusual in wartime situations.
The military, for example, typically
fields about seven support soldiers for every
"shooter". In other words, the occupation run by a
heavily militarized State Department will simply
continue in a new, truncated form - unless the US
Congress refuses to pay for it.
It would
better serve America's interests to have an
embassy sized to the message we now need to send
to the Middle East, and it shouldn't be one of
boastful conquest.
A place to call
home After initially setting up shop in a
selection of Saddam's Disneyesque palaces (in one
of the dumbest PR moves of all time), plans were
made to build an embassy worthy of the
over-the-top optimism and bravado that
characterized the invasion itself.
Though
officially photos of the inside of the embassy
compound are not allowed for "security" reasons, a
quick Google search under "US Embassy Baghdad"
turns up plenty, including some of the early
architectural renderings of the future gargantuan
compound. (Historical minifact: back in 2007,
TomDispatch first broke the story that the
architect's version of the embassy's secret
interior was displayed all pink and naked online.)
The blind optimism of that moment was best
embodied in the international school building
stuck in one corner of the embassy compound.
Though a fierce civil-war-cum-insurgency was then
raging in Iraq, the idea was that, soon enough,
diplomatic families would be assigned to Baghdad,
just as they were to Paris or Seoul, and naturally
the kids would need a school. It may seem silly
now, but few doubted it then.
Apartments
were built, each with a full set of the usual
American appliances, including dishwashers, in
expectation that those families would be shopping
for food at a near-future Sadr City Safeway and
that diplo-tots Timmy and Sally would need their
dinners after a long day at school. Wide walkways,
shaded by trees and dotted with stone benches -
ultimately never implemented - were part of the
overall design for success, and in memory now
serve as comic rim-shots for our past hubris.
In la-la land they may have been, but even
the embassy planners couldn't help but leave some
room for the creeping realities of an Iraq in
chaos. The compound would purify its own water,
generate its own power, and process its own
sewage, ensuring that it could outlast any siege
and, at the same time, getting the US off the hook
for repairing such basic services in Baghdad
proper.
High walls went up rimmed with
razor wire, and an ever-more complex set of gates
and security checkpoints kept creeping into the
design. Eventually, the architects just gave up,
built a cafeteria, filled the school building with
work cubicles, and installed inches-thick
bulletproof glass on every window. The embassy's
housing for 4,000 is, at present, packed, while
the electrical generators run at capacity 24/7.
They need to be upgraded and new units added very
soon simply to keep the lights on.
And
now, the embassy staff in Baghdad is about to
double. One plan to accommodate extra personnel
involves hot-bunking - sharing beds on
day-and-night shifts as happens on submarines.
The embassy will also soon need a hospital
on its grounds, if the US Army truly departs and
takes its facilities with it. Iraqi medical care
is considered too substandard and Iraqi hospitals
too dangerous for use by white folks.
You and whose army? A fortress
needs guards, and an occupier needs shock troops.
The State Department's army will be divided into
two parts: those who guard fixed facilities like
the embassy and those who protect diplomats as
they scurry about trying to corral the mad Iraqis
running the country.
For static security,
a company named SOC will guard the embassy
facilities for up to $973 million over five years.
That deflowered old warhorse Blackwater (now Xe),
under yet another dummy corporate name, will also
get a piece of action, and of the money pie.
SOC will undoubtedly follow the current
security company's lead and employ almost
exclusively Ugandans and Peruvians transported to
Iraq for that purpose. For the same reasons
Mexicans cut American lawns and Hondurans clean
American hotel rooms, embassy guards come from
poverty-stricken countries and get paid
accordingly - about $600 a month.
Their US
supervisors, on the other hand, pull down $20,000
of your tax dollars monthly. Many of the Ugandan
and Peruvian guards got their jobs through nasty
intermediaries ("pimps," "slavers"), who take back
most of their meager salaries to repay
"recruitment costs," leaving many guards as little
more than indentured servants.
Long-time
merc group Triple Canopy will provide protection
outside the embassy fortress, reputedly for $1.5
billion over a five-year span. The overall goal is
for State to have its own private army in Iraq:
those 5,500 hired guns, almost two full brigades
worth of them. The Army guards Fort Knox with
fewer soldiers; my Forward Operating Base made due
with less then 400 troops and I slept comfortably.
The past mayhem caused by contracted
security is well known, with massacres in public
squares, drunken murders in the Green Zone, and
the like. Think of the mercs as what the army
might be like without its NCOs and officers: a
frat house with guns.
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