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PERMANENT U.S. "SUPER-BASES" IN IRAQ
("a slice of U.S. suburbia")
Lee Bill Attempts to Block Permanent Iraq Bases
On Thursday, during debate on the emergency spending bill for
the War in Iraq, the House approved an amendment introduced by
Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) that will prohibit the use
of funds to enter in to basing agreements that would lead to a
permanent military presence in Iraq.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031806D.shtml
As of September 2001, the Department of Defense acknowledged
**at least 725 American military bases existed outside the United
States. Actually there are many more since some bases exist under
leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds.
And
more have been created since the announcement was made.
Our country deploys well over HALF a MILLION soldiers, spies, tech-
nicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other
nations
and just under a dozen carrier task forces in all the oceans and
seas
of the world.
-- Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy,
and the End of the Republic (2004)
***
PERMANENT U.S. BASES IN IRAQ -- "a slice of U.S. suburbia"
(noteworthy are the White House denial, media silence, KBR/
Halliburton base contractor {KBR has also been building military
prisons/torture chambers since Vietnam}, and why Bush has NO
intention of withdrawing all American troops from Iraq--db)
(highlights from Tom Englehardt, "Can You Say 'Permanent Bases'"?
The Nation, March 27, 2006, 28)
In an online engineering magazine in late 2003, Lieut Col. David
Holt, the Army officer described as "tasked with facilities
develop-
ment" in Iraq, was already speaking of several BILLION dollars
being
sunk into base construction, which has been continuing ever since.
A staggering investment of resources, **they are unlikely places
for the Bush Administration to hand over willingly even to the friend-
liest Iraqi government.
If Bush-style reconstruction, having failed dismally, is now essen-
tially ending in Iraq (except for new prisons--db), it has been
a raging
success in Iraq's "Little America." For the first time,
we have descrip-
tions of a couple of our "super-bases" there, and they
are sobering.
The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks paid a visit to Balad Air Base,
42 miles north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle of the most
hostile
part of Iraq." The largest base in the country, Ricks tells
us, has an
American "small-town feel" and is sizable enough to have
"neighbor-
hoods," including "KBR-land" (in honor of the Halliburton
subsidiary that
has done most base construction work) and the walled-in "CISOTF"
(the
Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, so secretive that
even
the based Army public affairs chief hasn't been inside).
**There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an
ersatz
Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where
TVs,
iPods and the like, convoyed in, can be purchased, four mess halls,
a hospital, a speed limit of 10 miles per hour, a huge airstrip,
250
aircraft, air-traffic pileups of a sort familiar over Chicago's
O'Hare
airport and a "minature golf course, which mimics a battlefield
with
its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of conertina
wire
and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee
cage."
Ricks reports that of the 20,000 troops living in "air-conditioned
containers" (soon to be wired for Internet, cable television
and over-
seas telephone access), "only several hundred have jobs that
take
them off base."
Recently, British reporter Oliver Poole visited the still-under
con-
struction al-Alsad Air Base in a stretch of desert in Anbar Province
that "increasingly resembles a slice of U.S. suburbia."
In addition to
the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, this super-base even has
a
Hertz rent-a-car office. In fact, al-Asad is so large -- **such
bases
may cover 15 to 20 square miles -- that it has two bus routes.
**There are at least 4 such "super-bases" in Iraq, little
American
islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea.
The future of a fifth base -- the enormous Camp Victory at Bagh-
dad International Airport -- remains, as far as we know, unresolved;
but at least one more super-base is being built. **The Administration
is sinking at least $592 MILLION into a new U.S. Embassy to rise
in
Baghdad's Green Zone on land reported two-thirds the size of the
National Mall.
A high-tech complex with "15 ft blast walls and ground-to-air
missiles" for protection, it will, according to Chris Hughes
of the
British Daily Mirror, include as many as "300 houses for consular
and military officials" and a "large-scale barracks"
for marines.
According to David Phinney of CorpWatch.org, the complex's
"water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be
indepen-
dent from Baghdad's utilities" (which provide only 3-4 hours
of
electricity a day--db). It's billed as "more secure than the
Pentagon"
(not, perhaps, the most reassuring tag line in the post-9/11 world).
**If not quite a city-state, it will resemble an embassy-state.
Nothing, however, makes such bases more "permanent"
than their
Vietnam-era predecessors at places like Danang and Cam Ranh Bay,
if the Shiites, like the Sunnis, decide they want us gone.
To this day, those Little Americas remain at the secret heart
of "reconstruction" policy in Iraq. As long as KBR keeps
building
them, there can be no genuine withdrawal.
Despite recent press visits, our super-bases remain swathed in
policy silence. The Bush Administration does not discuss them (other
than to deny their permanence). No plans for them are debated in
Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them.
Dan Butts
March 19, 2006
*****
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