Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site
Commentary: The single enduring fact of the Iraq War may be the constant building and upgrading of U.S. bases.
December 3, 2007
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The title of the agreement, signed by President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in a "video conference" last week, and carefully labeled as a "non-binding" set of principles for further negotiations, was a mouthful: a "Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America." Whew!
Words matter, of course. They seldom turn up by accident in official documents or statements. Last week, in the first reports on this "declaration," one of those words that matter caught my attention. Actually, it wasn't in the declaration itself, where the key phrase was "long-term relationship" (something in the lives of private individuals that falls just short of a marriage), but in a "fact-sheet" issued by the White House. Here's the relevant line: "Iraq's leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America, and we seek an enduring relationship with a democratic Iraq." Of course, "enduring" there bears the same relationship to permanency as "long-term relationship" does to marriage.
In a number of the early news reports, that word "enduring," part of the "enduring relationship" that the Iraqi leadership supposedly "asked for," was put into (or near) the mouths of "Iraqi leaders" or of the Iraqi prime minister himself. It also achieved a certain prominence in the post-declaration "press gaggle" conducted by the man coordinating this process out of the Oval Office, the President's so-called War Tsar, Gen. Douglas Lute. He said of the document: "It signals a commitment of both their government and the United States to an enduring relationship based on mutual interests."
In trying to imagine any Iraqi leader actually requesting that "enduring" relationship, something kept nagging at me. After all, those mutual vows of longevity were to be taken in a well publicized civil ceremony in a world in which, when it comes to the American presidential embrace, don't-ask/don't-tell is usually the preferred course of action for foreign leaders. Finally, I remembered where I had seen that word "enduring" before in a situation that also involved a "long-term relationship." It had been four-and-a-half years earlier and not coming out of the mouths of Iraqi officials either.
Back in April 2003, just after Baghdad fell to American troops, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt reported on the front page of the New York Times that the Pentagon had launched its invasion the previous month with plans for four "permanent bases" in out of the way parts of Iraq already on the drawing board. Since then, the Pentagon has indeed sunk billions of dollars into building those mega-bases (with a couple of extra ones thrown in) at or near the places mentioned by Shanker and Schmitt.
When questioned by reporters at the time about whether such "permanent bases" were in the works, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. was "unlikely to seek any permanent or ‘long-term' bases in Iraq—and that was that. The Times' piece essentially went down the mainstream-media memory hole. On this subject, the official position of the Bush administration has never changed. Just last week, for instance, General Lute slipped up, in response to a question at his press gaggle. The exchange went like this:
"Q: And permanent bases?"GENERAL LUTE: Likewise. That's another dimension of continuing U.S. support to the government of Iraq, and will certainly be a key item for negotiation next year."
White House spokesperson Dana Perino quickly issued a denial, saying: "We do not seek permanent bases in Iraq."
Back in 2003, Pentagon officials, already seeking to avoid that potentially explosive "permanent" tag, plucked "enduring" out of the military lexicon and began referring to such bases, charmingly enough, as "enduring camps." And the word remains with us—connected to bases and occupations anywhere. For instance, of a planned expansion of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a Col. Jonathan Ives told an AP reporter recently, "We've grown in our commitment to Afghanistan by putting another brigade (of troops) here, and with that we know that we're going to have an enduring presence. So this is going to become a long-term base for us, whether that means five years, 10 years—we don't know."
Still, whatever they were called, the bases went up on an impressive scale, massively fortified, sometimes 15-20 square miles in area, housing up to tens of thousands of troops and private contractors, with multiple bus routes, traffic lights, fast-food restaurants, PXs, and other amenities of home, and reeking of the kind of investment that practically shouts out for, minimally, a relationship of a distinctly "enduring" nature.
The Facts on Land—and Sea
These were part of what should be considered the facts on the ground in Iraq, though, between April 2003 and the present, they were rarely reported on or debated in the mainstream in the U.S. But if you place those mega-bases (not to speak of the more than 100 smaller ones built at one point or another) in the context of early Bush administration plans for the Iraqi military, things quickly begin to make more sense.
Remember, Iraq is essentially the hot seat at the center of the Middle East. It had, in the previous two-plus decades fought an eight-year war with neighboring Iran, invaded neighboring Kuwait, and been invaded itself. And yet, the new Coalition Provisional Authority, run by the President's personal envoy, L. Paul Bremer III, promptly disbanded the Iraqi military. This is now accepted as a goof of the first order when it came to sparking an insurgency. But, in terms of Bush administration planning, it was no mistake at all.
At the time, the Pentagon made it quite clear that its plan for a future Iraqi military was for a force of 40,000 lightly armed troops—meant to do little more than patrol the country's borders. (Saddam Hussein's army had been something like a 600,000-man force.) It was, in other words, to be a Military Lite—and there was essentially to be no Iraqi air force. In other words, in one of the more heavily armed and tension-ridden regions of the planet, Iraq was to become a Middle Eastern Costa Rica—if, that is, you didn't assume that the U.S. Armed Forces, from those four "enduring camps" somewhere outside Iraq's major cities, including a giant air base at Balad, north of Baghdad, and with the back-up help of U.S. Naval forces in the Persian Gulf, were to serve as the real Iraqi military for the foreseeable future.
Again, it's necessary to put these facts on the ground in a larger—in this case, pre-invasion—geopolitical context. From the first Gulf War on, Saudi Arabia, the largest producer of energy on the planet, was being groomed as the American military bastion in the heart of the Middle East. But the Saudis grew uncomfortable—think here, the claims of Osama bin Laden and Co. that U.S. troops were defiling the Kingdom and its holy places—with the Pentagon's elaborate enduring camps on its territory. Something had to give—and it wasn't going to be the American military presence in the Middle East. The answer undoubtedly seemed clear enough to top Bush administration officials. As an anonymous American diplomat told the Sunday Herald of Scotland back in October 2002, "A rehabilitated Iraq is the only sound long-term strategic alternative to Saudi Arabia. It's not just a case of swopping horses in mid-stream, the impending U.S. regime change in Baghdad is a strategic necessity."
