Iraq
As A Pentagon Construction Site
By
Tom Engelhardt
03 December,
2007
TomDispatch.com
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."
As those
officials imagined it -- and as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
predicted -- by the fall of 2003, major American military operations
in the region would have been re-organized around Iraq, even as American
forces there would be drawn down to perhaps 30,000-40,000 troops stationed
eternally at those "enduring camps." In addition, a group
of Iraqi secular exiles, friendly to the United States, would be in
power in Baghdad, backed by the occupation and ready to open up the
Iraqi economy, especially its oil
industry to Western (particularly American) multinationals.
Americans and their allies and private contractors would, quite literally,
have free run of the country, the equivalent of nineteenth century colonial
extraterritoriality (something "legally" institutionalized
in June 2004, thanks to Order
17, issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, just
before it officially turned over "sovereignty" to the Iraqis);
and, sooner or later, a Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA would be
"negotiated" that would define the rights of American troops
garrisoned in that country.
At that point,
the U.S. would have successfully repositioned itself militarily in relation
to the oil heartlands of the planet. It would also have essentially
encircled a second member of the "axis of evil," Iran (once
you included the numerous new U.S. bases that had been built
and were being expanded in occupied Afghanistan as part of the ongoing
war against the Taliban). It would be triumphant and dominant and, with
its Israeli ally, militarily beyond challenge in the region. The cowing
of, collapse of, or destruction of the Syrian and Iranian regimes would
surely follow in short order.
Of course,
much of this never came about as planned. It turned out that, once the
Sunni insurgency gained traction, the Bush administration had little
choice but to reconstitute a sizeable, if still relatively lightly armed,
Iraqi military (as a largely Shiite force) and then, more recently,
arm Sunni militias as well, possibly opening the way for future clashes
of a major nature. It had to accept a Shiite regime locked inside the
highly fortified Green Zone of the Iraqi capital that was religious,
sectarian, largely powerless, and allied to some degree with
Iran. It had to accept chaos, significant and unexpected
casualties, continual urban warfare, and an enormous strain and drain
on its armed forces (as well as a black hole of distraction from other
global issues). None of this had been predicted, or imagined, by Bush's
top officials.
On the other
hand, the Bush administration has demonstrated significant "endurance"
of its own, especially when it came to the linked issues of oil and
bases. In a recent report for Harper's Magazine, "The Black Box,
Inside Iraq's Oil Machine," Luke Mitchell describes traveling the
southern Iraqi oil field of Rumaila with a petroleum engineer working
for Foster Wheeler, a Houston engineering firm hired by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers "to oversee much of the oilfield reconstruction,"
and protected by private guards employed by the British security company
Erinys. He describes what's left of the Iraqi oil industry after decades
of war, sanctions, civil war, sabotage, and black-market theft -- a
run-down industrial plant with a rusting delivery system that, at a
technical level, is now largely in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers,
the Department of Energy, the State Department, and private contractors
like KBR, the former division of Halliburton. At the most basic level,
he reports that many of "Iraq's native oil professionals,"
who heroically patched up and held together a broken system in the years
after the first Gulf War, have (along with so many other Iraqi professionals)
fled the country. He writes:
"The Wall Street Journal in 2006 called this flight a 'petroleum
exodus' and reported that about a hundred oil workers had been murdered
since the war began and that 'of the top hundred of so managers running
the Iraqi oil ministry and its branches in 2003, about two-thirds are
no longer at their jobs.' Now most of the [oil] engineers in Iraq are
from Texas and Oklahoma."
Similarly,
in Baghdad, the government of Prime Minister Maliki is not expected
to handle the crucial energy problems of its country alone. Here's a
relevant (if well-buried) passage from a recent
New York Times piece on the subject: "Earlier this month, the White
House dispatched several senior aides to Baghdad to work with the Iraqis
on specific legislative areas. They include the under secretary of state
for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, Reuben Jeffery III, who
is working on the budget and oil law…" This is what passes
for "sovereignty" in present-day Iraq.
In this context,
the following line of text about agreed-upon subjects for negotiation
in last week's Bush/Maliki "declaration" caused eyebrows to
be raised (at least abroad): "Facilitating and encouraging the
flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments,
to contribute to the reconstruction and rebuilding of Iraq." As
the British Guardian put
the matter: "The promise was immediately seen as a
potential bonanza for American oil companies." A BBC
report commented, "Correspondents say US investors
benefiting from preferential treatment could earn huge profits from
Iraq's vast oil reserves, causing widespread resentment among Iraqis."
(American coverage regularly ignores or plays down the oil aspect of
the Bush administration's Iraq policies, even though that country has
the third largest reserves on the planet.)
Bases,
Bases Everywhere
Among the
most tenacious and enduring Bush administration facts on the ground
are those giant bases, still largely ignored -- with
honorable exceptions
-- by the mainstream media. Thom Shanker and Cara Buckley of the New
York Times, to give but one example, managed to write that paper's major
piece about the joint "declaration" without mentioning
the word "base," no less "permanent," and only Gen.
Lute's slip made the permanence of bases a minor note in other mainstream
reports. And yet it's not just that the building of bases did go on
-- and on a remarkable scale -- but that it continues today.
Whatever
the descriptive labels, the Pentagon, throughout this whole period,
has continued to create, base by base, the sort of "facts"
that any negotiations, no matter who engages in them, will need to take
into account. And the ramping up of the already gigantic "mega-bases"
in Iraq proceeds apace. Recent reports indicate that the Pentagon will
call on Congress to pony up another billion dollars soon
enough for further upgrades and "improvements."
We also know
that frantic construction has been under way on three new bases of varying
sizes. The most obvious of these -- though it's seldom thought of this
way -- is the gigantic new U.S. Embassy, possibly the largest in the
world, being
built on an almost Vatican-sized plot of land inside Baghdad's
Green Zone. It is meant to be a citadel, a hardened universe of its
own, in, but not of, the Iraqi capital. In recent months, it has also
turned into a construction
nightmare, soaking up another $144 million in American
taxpayer monies, bringing its price tag to three-quarters of a billion
dollars and still climbing. It is to house 1,000 or so "diplomats,"
with perhaps a few thousand extra security guards and hired hands of
every sort.
When, in
the future, you read in the papers about administration plans to withdraw
American forces to bases "outside of Iraqi urban areas," note
that there will continue to be a major base in the heart of the Iraqi
capital for who knows how long to come. As the Washington
Post's Glenn Kessler put it, the 21-building compound "is
viewed by some officials as a key element of building a sustainable,
long-term diplomatic presence in Baghdad." Presence, yes, but diplomatic?
In the meantime,
a relatively small base, "Combat
Outpost Shocker," provocatively placed within a few
kilometers of the Iranian border, has been rushed to completion this
fall on a mere $5 million construction contract. And only in the last
weeks, reports have emerged on the latest U.S. base under construction,
uniquely being built on a key oil-exporting platform in the waters off
the southern Iraqi port of Basra and meant for the U.S. Navy and allies.
Such a base gives meaning to this passage in the Bush/Maliki declaration:
"Providing security assurances and commitments to the Republic
of Iraq to deter foreign aggression against Iraq that violates its sovereignty
and integrity of its territories, waters, or airspace."
As the British
Telegraph described this multi-million dollar project:
"The US-led coalition is building a permanent security base on
Iraq's oil pumping platforms in the Gulf to act as the ‘nerve
centre' of efforts to protect the country's most vital strategic asset."
Chip Cummins of the Wall Street Journal summed up the project this way
in a piece headlined, "U.S. Digs In to Guard Iraq Oil Exports --
Long-Term Presence Planned at Persian Gulf Terminals Viewed as Vulnerable":
"[T]he new construction suggests that one footprint of U.S. military
power in Iraq isn't shrinking anytime soon: American officials are girding
for an open-ended commitment to protect the country's oil industry."
Though you'd
never know it from mainstream reporting, the single enduring fact of
the Iraq War may be this constant building and upgrading of U.S. bases.
Since the Times revealed those base-building plans back in the spring
of 2003, Iraq has essentially been a vast construction site for the
Pentagon. The American media did, in the end, come to focus on the civilian
"reconstruction" of Iraq which, from the rebuilding of electricity-production
facilities to the construction of a
new police academy has proved a
catastrophic mixture of crony capitalism, graft,
corruption, theft, inefficiency, and sabotage. But there has been next
to no focus on the construction success story of the Iraq War and occupation:
those bases.
In this way,
whatever the disasters of its misbegotten war, the Bush administration
has, in a sense, itself "endured" in Iraq. Now, with only
a year left, its officials clearly hope to write that endurance and
those "enduring camps" into the genetic code of both countries
-- an "enduring relationship" meant to outlast January 2009
and to outflank any future administration. In fact, by some official
projections, the bases are meant to be occupied for up to 50 to 60 years
without ever becoming "permanent."
You can,
of course, claim that the Iraqis "asked for" this new, "enduring
relationship," as the declaration so politely suggests. It is certainly
true that, as part of the bargain, the Bush administration is offering
to defend its "boys" to the hilt against almost any conceivable
eventuality, including the sort of internal coup that it has, these
last years, been rumored to have considered launching itself.
In an attempt
to make an end-run around Congress, administration officials continue
to present what is to be negotiated as merely a typical SOFA-style agreement.
"There are about a hundred countries around the world with which
we have [such] bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements,"
Gen. Lute said reassuringly, indicating that this matter would be handled
by the executive branch without significant input from Congress. The
guarantees the Bush administration seems ready to offer the Maliki government,
however, clearly rise to
treaty level and, if we had even a faintly assertive Congress,
would surely require the advice and consent of the Senate. Iraqi officials
have already made clear that such an agreement will have to pass through
their parliament in a country where the idea of "enduring"
U.S. bases in an "enduring" relationship is bound to be exceedingly
unpopular.
Still, a
formula for the future is obviously being put in place and, after more
than four years of frenzied construction, the housing for it, so to
speak, is more than ready. As the
Washington Post described the plan, "Iraqi officials
said that under the proposed formula, Iraq would get full responsibility
for internal security and U.S. troops would relocate to bases outside
the cities. Iraqi officials foresee a long-term presence of about 50,000
U.S. troops…"
No matter
what comes out of the mouths of Iraqi officials, though, what's "enduring"
in all this is deeply Pentagonish and has emerged from the Bush administration's
earliest dreams about reshaping the Middle East and achieving global
domination of an unprecedented sort. It's a case, as the old Joni Mitchell
song put it, of going "round and round and round in the circle
game."
[Note: Spencer
Ackerman has been offering especially good coverage of developments
surrounding the recent Bush/Maliki declaration at TPM
Muckraker. I'd also like to offer one of my periodic statements
of thanks to Iraq-oriented sites that give me daily aid and succor in
gathering crucial material and analysis, especially Juan Cole's invaluable
Informed Comment,
Antiwar.com,
and Paul Woodward's The
War in Context.]
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com,
is the co-founder of the American
Empire Project. His book, The
End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press),
has recently been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that
deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Copyright
2007 Tom Engelhardt
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