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Gandalf Grey
Guest
The Great American Disconnect: Iraq Has Always Been "South Korea" for the
Bush Administration
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jun 8 2007 - 10:13am
- from TomDispatch [1]
Finally, the great American disconnect may be ending. Only four years after
the invasion of Iraq, the crucial facts-on-the-ground might finally be
coming into sight in this country -- not the carnage or the mayhem; not the
suicide car bombs or the chlorine truck bombs; not the massive flight of
middle-class professionals, the assassination campaign against academics, or
the collapse of the best health-care service in the region; not the spiking
American and Iraqi casualties, the lack of electricity, the growth of Shia
militias, the crumbling of the "coalition of the willing," or the uprooting
of 15% or more of Iraq's population; not even the sharp increase in
fundamentalism and extremism, the rise of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the
swelling of sectarian killings, or the inability of the Iraqi government to
get oil out of the ground or an oil law, designed in Washington and meant to
turn the clock back decades in the Middle East, passed inside Baghdad's
fortified Green Zone -- no, none of that. What's finally coming into view is
just what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the top officials of their
administration, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and their neocon
followers had in mind when they invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003.
But let me approach this issue another way. For the last week, news jockeys
have been plunged into a debate about the "Korea model," which, according to
the New York Times and other media outlets, the President is suddenly
considering as the model for Iraq. ("Mr. Bush [2] has told recent visitors
to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American
presence in South Korea.") You know, a limited number of major American
bases tucked away out of urban areas; a limited number of American troops
(say, 30,000-40,000 [3]), largely confined to those bases but ready to
strike at any moment; a friendly government in Baghdad; and (as in South
Korea where our troops have been for six decades) maybe another half
century-plus of quiet garrisoning. In other words, this is the time
equivalent of a geographic "over the horizon redeployment" of American
troops. In this case, "over the horizon" would mean through 2057 and beyond.
This, we are now told, is a new stage in administration thinking. White
House spokesman Tony Snow [4] seconded the "Korea model" ("You have the
United States there in what has been described as an over-the-horizon
support role. -- as we have in South Korea, where for many years there have
been American forces stationed there as a way of maintaining stability and
assurance on the part of the South Korean people against a North Korean
neighbor that is a menace."); Defense Secretary Robert Gates threw his
weight [5] behind it as a way of reassuring Iraqis that the U.S. "will not
withdraw from Iraq as it did from Vietnam, 'lock, stock and barrel,'" as did
"surge plan" second-in-command in Baghdad, Lt. General Ray Odierno [6]. ("Q
Do you agree that we will likely have a South Korean-style force there for
years to come? GEN. ODIERNO: Well, I think that's a strategic decision, and
I think that's between us and -- the government of the United States and the
government of Iraq. I think it's a great idea.")
David Sanger of the New York Times [7] recently summed up this "new"
thinking in the following fashion:
"Administration officials and top military leaders declined to talk on the
record about their long-term plans in Iraq. But when speaking on a
not-for-attribution basis, they describe a fairly detailed concept. It calls
for maintaining three or four major bases in the country, all well outside
of the crowded urban areas where casualties have soared. They would include
the base at Al Asad in Anbar Province, Balad Air Base about 50 miles north
of Baghdad, and Tallil Air Base in the south."
Critics -- left, right, and center -- promptly attacked the relevance of the
South Korean analogy for all the obvious historical reasons. Time [8]
headlined its piece: "Why Iraq Isn't Korea"; Fred Kaplan of Slate [9] waded
in this way, "In other words, in no meaningful way are these two wars, or
these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set
of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from
foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might
follow 'a Korean model' -- if the word model means anything -- is absurd."
At his Informed Comment website, Juan Cole [10] wrote, "So what confuses me
is the terms of the comparison. Who is playing the role of the Communists
and of North Korea?" Inter Press's Jim Lobe [11] quoted retired
Lieutenant-General Donald Kerrick, a former US deputy national security
adviser who served two tours of duty in South Korea this way: "[The analogy]
is either a gross oversimplification to try to reassure people [the Bush
administration] has a long-term plan, or it's just silly."
None of these critiques are anything but on target. Nonetheless, the "Korea
model" should not be dismissed simply for gross historical inaccuracy.
There's a far more important reason to attend to it, confirmed by four years
of facts-on-the-ground in Iraq -- and by a little history that, it seems, no
one, not even the New York Times which helped record it, remembers.
How Enduring Are Those "Enduring Camps"?
At the moment, the Korea model is being presented as breaking news, as the
next step in the Bush administration's desperately evolving thinking as its
"surge plan" surges into disaster. However, the most basic fact of our
present "Korea" moment is that this is the oldest news of all. As the Bush
administration launched its invasion in March 2003, it imagined itself
entering a "South Korean" Iraq (though that analogy was never used). While
Americans, including administration officials, would argue endlessly over
whether we were in Tokyo or Berlin, 1945, Algeria of the 1950s, Vietnam of
the 1960s and 70s, civil-war torn Beirut of the 1980s, or numerous other
historically distant places, when it came to the facts on the ground, the
administration's actual planning remained obdurately in "South Korea."
The problem was that, thanks largely to terrible media coverage, the
American people knew little or nothing about those developing
facts-on-the-ground and that disconnect has made all the difference for
years.
Let's review a little basic history here:
You remember, of course, the flap over Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's
February 2003 claim before a Congressional committee that "several hundred
thousand troops" would be needed to effectively occupy a "liberated" Iraq.
For that statement, the Pentagon civilian leadership and allied neocons
laughed him out of the room and then out of town. Sagely pointing out that
there was no history of "ethnic strife" in Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz [12] termed Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the mark." His
boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, concurred. "Far off the mark,"
he said and, when the general retired a few months later, pointedly did not
attend the ceremony. After all, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were planning to take
and occupy Iraq in a style that would be high-tech and, in manpower terms,
lean and mean. Given an administration-wide belief that the Iraqis would
greet American troops as liberators or, at least, make them at home in their
country, they expected the occupation to proceed smoothly -- on a "Korea
model" basis, in fact.
Here's what Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks wrote in Fiasco, his
bestselling book about the occupation, on the administration's expectations
that February: "[Paul] Wolfowitz told senior Army officers. he thought that
within a few months of the invasion the U.S. troop level in Iraq would be
thirty-four thousand, recalled [Johnny] Riggs, the Army general then at Army
headquarters. Likewise, another three-star general, still on active duty,
remembers being told to plan to have the U.S. occupation force reduced to
thirty thousand troops by August 2003. An Army briefing a year later also
noted that that number was the goal 'by the end of the summer of 2003.'"
At present, approximately 37,000 American troops [13] are garrisoned in
South Korea. In other words, the original plan, in manpower terms, was for a
Korea-style occupation of Iraq. But where were those troops to stay? The
Pentagon had been pondering that, too -- and here's where the New York Times
has forgotten its own history. On April 19, 2003, soon after American troops
entered Baghdad, Times' reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt had a
striking front-page [14] piece headlined, "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access
to Four Key Bases in Iraq." It began:
"The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the
emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to
military bases and project American influence into the heart of the
unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say. American
military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps
four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the
international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya
in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western
desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the
Bashur air field in the Kurdish north."
The Pentagon, that is, arrived in Baghdad with at least a four-base strategy
for the long-term occupation of the country already on the drawing boards.
These were to be mega-bases, essentially fortified American towns on which
those 30,000-40,000 troops could hunker down for a South-Korean-style
eternity. The Pentagon was officially not looking for "permanent basing," as
it slyly claimed, but "permanent access." (And on this verbal dodge, an
administration that has constantly redefined reality to fit its needs has
ducked its obvious desire for, and plans for, "permanency" in Iraq. As Tony
Snow [15] put the matter this way only the other day, "U.S. bases in Iraq
would not necessarily be permanent because they would be there at the
invitation of the host government and 'the person who has done the
invitation has the right to withdraw the invitation.'")
When the reporting of Schmitt and Shanker came up in a Rumsfeld news
conference, the story was essentially denied [16] ("I have never, that I can
recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any
meeting.") and then disappeared from the New York Times for four years (and
most of the rest of the media for most of that time). It did not, however,
disappear from Pentagon planning. Quite the contrary, the Pentagon began
doling out the contracts and the various private builders set to work. By
late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities
development" in Iraq, was quoted in a prestigious engineering magazine
speaking proudly of several billion dollars [17] already being sunk into
base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Bases were built in
profusion -- 106 of them, according to the Washington Post [18], by 2005
(including, of course, many tiny outposts).
For a while, to avoid the taint of that word "permanent," the major American
bases in Iraq were called "enduring camps" [19] by the Pentagon. Five or six
of them are simply massive, including Camp Victory, our military
headquarters adjacent to Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of
the capital, Balad Air Base [20], north of Baghdad (which has air traffic to
rival Chicago's O'Hare), and al-Asad Air Base [21] in the Western desert
near the Syrian border. These are big enough to contain multiple bus routes,
huge PXes, movie theaters, brand-name fast-food restaurants, and, in one
case, even a miniature golf course. At our base at Tallil in the south, in
2006, a mess hall [22] was being built to seat 6,000, and that just skims
the surface of the Bush administration's bases. [23]
In addition, as the insurgency gained traction and Baghdad fell into
disarray as well as sectarian warfare, administration planners began the
building of a massively fortified, $600 million, blast-resistant compound of
20-odd buildings in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone, the largest "embassy"
[24] on the planet, so independent that it would have no need of Iraq for
electricity, water, food, or much of anything else. Scheduled to "open" this
September, it will be both a citadel and a home for thousands of diplomats,
spies, guards, private security contractors, and the foreign workers
necessary to meet "community" needs.
The Media Blind to the Bases
From 2003 to the present, the work building, maintaining, and continually
upgrading these bases (and their equivalents in Afghanistan) has never
ended. Though the huge base-building contracts were given out long ago,
consider just a couple of modest contracts of recent vintage. In March 2006,
Dataline, Inc, of Norfolk, Virginia was awarded [25] a $5 million contract
for "technical control facility upgrades and cable installation," mainly at
"Camp Fallujah, Iraq (25 percent), Camp Al Asad, Iraq (25 percent), [and]
Camp Taqaddum, Iraq (25 percent)." In December 2006, Watkinson L.L.C. of
Houston was
awarded [26] a $13 million "firm-fixed-price contract for design and
construction of a heavy aircraft parking apron and open cargo storage yard"
for al-Asad Airbase, "to be completed by Sept. 17, 2007." In March 2007,
Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems was awarded [27] a $73 million contract
to "provide recurring requirements such as operations and maintenance
support for base local area network, commercial satellite communication,
technical control facility, and circuit actions, telephone, land mobile
radio and both inside and outside cable plant installations.... at 13 bases
in Iraq, Afghanistan and six other nations which fall in the United States
Central Command Area of Responsibility."
And major base building may not be at an end. Keep your eye on Iraqi
Kurdistan. According to Juan Cole [28], the Kurdish press continues to
report rumors that American base-building activities are now switching
there. Little is known about this, except that some in Washington consider
[29] Iraqi Kurdistan an obvious place to "redeploy" American troops in any
future partial withdrawal or draw-down scenarios.
These, then, were the Bush administration's facts-on-the-Iraqi-ground.
Whatever anyone was saying at any moment about ending the American presence
in Iraq someday or turning "sovereignty" over to the Iraqis, for American
reporters in Baghdad, as well as the media at home, the "enduring" nature of
what was being built should have been unmistakable -- and it should have
counted for something. After all, those American bases, like the vast
embassy inside the Green Zone (sardonically dubbed by Baghdadis, "George W's
Palace"), were monstrous in size, state-of-the-art when it came to
communications and facilities, and meant to support large-scale American
communities -- whether soldiers, diplomats, spies, contractors, or
mercenaries -- long term. They were imperial in nature, the U.S. military
and diplomatic equivalents of the pyramids. And no one, on seeing them,
should have thought anything but "permanent."
It didn't matter that those bases were never officially labeled "permanent."
After all, as the Korea model (now almost six decades old) indicates, such
bases, rather than colonies, have long been the American way of empire --
and, with rare exceptions, they have arrived and not left. They remain
immobile gunboats primed for a kind of eternal armed "diplomacy." As they
cluster tellingly in key regions of the planet, they make up what the
Pentagon likes to call our "footprint."
As Chalmers Johnson has pointed out in his book The Sorrows of Empire [30],
the United States has, mainly since World War II, set up at least 737 such
bases [31], mega and micro -- and probably closer to 1,000 -- worldwide.
Everywhere, just as Tony Snow has said, the Americans would officially be
"invited" in by the local government and would negotiate a "status of forces
agreement," [32] the modern equivalent of the colonial era's grant of
extraterritoriality, so that the American troops would be minimally subject
to foreign courts or control. There are still at least 12 such bases in
Korea, 37 on the Japanese island of Okinawa alone, and so on, around the
globe.
Since the Gulf War in 1990, such base-creation has been on the rise. The
Bush, Clinton, and younger Bush administrations have laid down a string of
bases from the old Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union (Romania,
Bulgaria [33]) and the former Yugoslavia [34] through the Greater Middle
East (Kuwait [35], Qatar [36], Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates
[37]), to the Horn of Africa (Djibouti [38]), into the Indian Ocean (the
"British" island of Diego Garcia [39]), and right through Central Asia
(Afghanistan [40], Kyrgyzstan [41], and Pakistan, where we "share" Pakistani
bases).
Bases have followed our little wars of recent decades. They were dropped
into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates around the time of our first
Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of
1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the former Central Asian SSRs after
the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq, of course, after the invasion of 2003
where they were to replace the Saudi bases being mothballed as a response to
Osama bin Laden's claims that Americans were defiling the holiest spots of
Islam.
In effect, when it came to bases in the post-9/11 years, the emphasis was,
on the one hand, encircling Russia from its former Eastern European
satellites to its former Central Asian SSRs and, on the other hand, securing
a series of bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, a swath of
territory known to the administration back in 2002-2003 as "the arc of
instability." [42] Iraq was, obviously, but part -- though a crucial part --
of such imperial dreaming about how to dominate the planet. And yet the
military ziggurats that made those dreams manifest, and all the billions of
taxpayer dollars and the obvious urge for "permanence" that went with them,
were largely left out of mainstream reporting on, debate about, or
discussion of the occupation of Iraq.
Iraq as Korea, 2003-2007
The administration remained remarkably tightlipped about all this building
activity and what it might mean -- beyond periodic denials that any such
efforts were "permanent"; and, with rare exceptions, even when journalists
reported from Camp Victory or other major bases, they never managed to put
them on the reportorial landscape. Those bases -- and the colossus of an
"embassy" that went with them -- just weren't considered all that important.
Perhaps for reporters and editors, used to an inside-the-Beltway universe in
which the United States simply could not act in an imperial manner, the
bases were givens -- like the American way of life. Evidently, for most
reporters, there was, in a sense, nothing to notice. As a consequence, there
has been endless discussion about Bush administration "incompetence" (of
which there has been plenty), but not the quite competent planning that left
such structures impressively on the Iraqi landscape. If the subject wasn't
exactly blacked-out in the United States, it did, at least, undergo a kind
of whiteout.
So much about Iraq was up for discussion, but the preponderant evidence on
the ground, so utterly solid, carried no weight. It was evidence of nothing.
For American reporters, as for American Secretaries of Defense, the
full-scale garrisoning of Planet Earth is simply not a news story. As a
result, most Americans have had next to no idea that we were creating
multibillion dollar edifices on Iraqi soil meant for a near eternity.
Remarkably enough, when asked [43] late last year by pollsters from the
Program on International Policy Attitudes whether we should have the
"permanent" bases in Iraq, a whopping 68% of Americans said no. But when the
issue of bases and permanency arises at all in our press, it's usually in
the context of Iraqi "suspicions" on the subject. (Oh, those paranoid
foreigners!) Typically, the Los Angeles Times cited Michael O'Hanlon [44],
an oft-quoted analyst at the Brookings Institution, saying the following of
the President's endorsement of the Korea model: "In trying to convey
resolve, [Bush] conveys the presumption that we're going to be there for a
long time.... It's unhelpful to handling the politics of our presence in
Iraq." No, Michael, the bases are our politics in Iraq.
Generally, the Democrats and their major presidential candidates line up
with O'Hanlon. And yet no significant Democratic proposal for "withdrawal"
from Iraq is really a full-scale withdrawal proposal. They are all proposals
to withdraw American combat brigades (perhaps 50,000-60,000 troops) from the
country, while withdrawing most other Americans into those giant bases that
are too awkward to mention.
Suddenly, however, discussion of the "Korea model" has entered the news and
so put those bases -- and the idea of a permanent military presence in
Iraq -- in the American viewfinder for what may be the first time. You only
have to look at Iraq today to know that, like so much else our imperial
dreamers have conjured up, this fantasy too -- of a calming Iraq developing
over the decades into a friendly democracy, while American troops sit tight
in their giant base-towns -- is doomed to one kind of failure or another,
while the oil lands of the planet threaten to implode.
The Korea model is just one of the administration's many grotesque,
self-interested misreadings of history, but it isn't new. It isn't a fantasy
the President and his top officials have just stumbled upon in post-surge
desperation. It's the fantasy they rumbled into Baghdad aboard back in 2003.
It's the imperial fantasy that has never left their minds from that first
shock-and-awe moment until now.
Give them credit for consistency. On this "model," whatever it may be
called, the Bush administration bet the store and, on it, they have never
wavered. Because of some of the worst reporting on an important topic in
recent memory, most Americans have lived out these last years in remarkable
ignorance of what was actually being built in Iraq. Now, perhaps, that great
American disconnect is beginning to end, which may be more bad news for the
Bush administration.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular
antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire
Project [45] and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished:
Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters [46] (Nation
Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
Bush Administration
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jun 8 2007 - 10:13am
- from TomDispatch [1]
Finally, the great American disconnect may be ending. Only four years after
the invasion of Iraq, the crucial facts-on-the-ground might finally be
coming into sight in this country -- not the carnage or the mayhem; not the
suicide car bombs or the chlorine truck bombs; not the massive flight of
middle-class professionals, the assassination campaign against academics, or
the collapse of the best health-care service in the region; not the spiking
American and Iraqi casualties, the lack of electricity, the growth of Shia
militias, the crumbling of the "coalition of the willing," or the uprooting
of 15% or more of Iraq's population; not even the sharp increase in
fundamentalism and extremism, the rise of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the
swelling of sectarian killings, or the inability of the Iraqi government to
get oil out of the ground or an oil law, designed in Washington and meant to
turn the clock back decades in the Middle East, passed inside Baghdad's
fortified Green Zone -- no, none of that. What's finally coming into view is
just what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the top officials of their
administration, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and their neocon
followers had in mind when they invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003.
But let me approach this issue another way. For the last week, news jockeys
have been plunged into a debate about the "Korea model," which, according to
the New York Times and other media outlets, the President is suddenly
considering as the model for Iraq. ("Mr. Bush [2] has told recent visitors
to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American
presence in South Korea.") You know, a limited number of major American
bases tucked away out of urban areas; a limited number of American troops
(say, 30,000-40,000 [3]), largely confined to those bases but ready to
strike at any moment; a friendly government in Baghdad; and (as in South
Korea where our troops have been for six decades) maybe another half
century-plus of quiet garrisoning. In other words, this is the time
equivalent of a geographic "over the horizon redeployment" of American
troops. In this case, "over the horizon" would mean through 2057 and beyond.
This, we are now told, is a new stage in administration thinking. White
House spokesman Tony Snow [4] seconded the "Korea model" ("You have the
United States there in what has been described as an over-the-horizon
support role. -- as we have in South Korea, where for many years there have
been American forces stationed there as a way of maintaining stability and
assurance on the part of the South Korean people against a North Korean
neighbor that is a menace."); Defense Secretary Robert Gates threw his
weight [5] behind it as a way of reassuring Iraqis that the U.S. "will not
withdraw from Iraq as it did from Vietnam, 'lock, stock and barrel,'" as did
"surge plan" second-in-command in Baghdad, Lt. General Ray Odierno [6]. ("Q
Do you agree that we will likely have a South Korean-style force there for
years to come? GEN. ODIERNO: Well, I think that's a strategic decision, and
I think that's between us and -- the government of the United States and the
government of Iraq. I think it's a great idea.")
David Sanger of the New York Times [7] recently summed up this "new"
thinking in the following fashion:
"Administration officials and top military leaders declined to talk on the
record about their long-term plans in Iraq. But when speaking on a
not-for-attribution basis, they describe a fairly detailed concept. It calls
for maintaining three or four major bases in the country, all well outside
of the crowded urban areas where casualties have soared. They would include
the base at Al Asad in Anbar Province, Balad Air Base about 50 miles north
of Baghdad, and Tallil Air Base in the south."
Critics -- left, right, and center -- promptly attacked the relevance of the
South Korean analogy for all the obvious historical reasons. Time [8]
headlined its piece: "Why Iraq Isn't Korea"; Fred Kaplan of Slate [9] waded
in this way, "In other words, in no meaningful way are these two wars, or
these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set
of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from
foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might
follow 'a Korean model' -- if the word model means anything -- is absurd."
At his Informed Comment website, Juan Cole [10] wrote, "So what confuses me
is the terms of the comparison. Who is playing the role of the Communists
and of North Korea?" Inter Press's Jim Lobe [11] quoted retired
Lieutenant-General Donald Kerrick, a former US deputy national security
adviser who served two tours of duty in South Korea this way: "[The analogy]
is either a gross oversimplification to try to reassure people [the Bush
administration] has a long-term plan, or it's just silly."
None of these critiques are anything but on target. Nonetheless, the "Korea
model" should not be dismissed simply for gross historical inaccuracy.
There's a far more important reason to attend to it, confirmed by four years
of facts-on-the-ground in Iraq -- and by a little history that, it seems, no
one, not even the New York Times which helped record it, remembers.
How Enduring Are Those "Enduring Camps"?
At the moment, the Korea model is being presented as breaking news, as the
next step in the Bush administration's desperately evolving thinking as its
"surge plan" surges into disaster. However, the most basic fact of our
present "Korea" moment is that this is the oldest news of all. As the Bush
administration launched its invasion in March 2003, it imagined itself
entering a "South Korean" Iraq (though that analogy was never used). While
Americans, including administration officials, would argue endlessly over
whether we were in Tokyo or Berlin, 1945, Algeria of the 1950s, Vietnam of
the 1960s and 70s, civil-war torn Beirut of the 1980s, or numerous other
historically distant places, when it came to the facts on the ground, the
administration's actual planning remained obdurately in "South Korea."
The problem was that, thanks largely to terrible media coverage, the
American people knew little or nothing about those developing
facts-on-the-ground and that disconnect has made all the difference for
years.
Let's review a little basic history here:
You remember, of course, the flap over Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's
February 2003 claim before a Congressional committee that "several hundred
thousand troops" would be needed to effectively occupy a "liberated" Iraq.
For that statement, the Pentagon civilian leadership and allied neocons
laughed him out of the room and then out of town. Sagely pointing out that
there was no history of "ethnic strife" in Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz [12] termed Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the mark." His
boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, concurred. "Far off the mark,"
he said and, when the general retired a few months later, pointedly did not
attend the ceremony. After all, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were planning to take
and occupy Iraq in a style that would be high-tech and, in manpower terms,
lean and mean. Given an administration-wide belief that the Iraqis would
greet American troops as liberators or, at least, make them at home in their
country, they expected the occupation to proceed smoothly -- on a "Korea
model" basis, in fact.
Here's what Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks wrote in Fiasco, his
bestselling book about the occupation, on the administration's expectations
that February: "[Paul] Wolfowitz told senior Army officers. he thought that
within a few months of the invasion the U.S. troop level in Iraq would be
thirty-four thousand, recalled [Johnny] Riggs, the Army general then at Army
headquarters. Likewise, another three-star general, still on active duty,
remembers being told to plan to have the U.S. occupation force reduced to
thirty thousand troops by August 2003. An Army briefing a year later also
noted that that number was the goal 'by the end of the summer of 2003.'"
At present, approximately 37,000 American troops [13] are garrisoned in
South Korea. In other words, the original plan, in manpower terms, was for a
Korea-style occupation of Iraq. But where were those troops to stay? The
Pentagon had been pondering that, too -- and here's where the New York Times
has forgotten its own history. On April 19, 2003, soon after American troops
entered Baghdad, Times' reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt had a
striking front-page [14] piece headlined, "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access
to Four Key Bases in Iraq." It began:
"The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the
emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to
military bases and project American influence into the heart of the
unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say. American
military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps
four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the
international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya
in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western
desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the
Bashur air field in the Kurdish north."
The Pentagon, that is, arrived in Baghdad with at least a four-base strategy
for the long-term occupation of the country already on the drawing boards.
These were to be mega-bases, essentially fortified American towns on which
those 30,000-40,000 troops could hunker down for a South-Korean-style
eternity. The Pentagon was officially not looking for "permanent basing," as
it slyly claimed, but "permanent access." (And on this verbal dodge, an
administration that has constantly redefined reality to fit its needs has
ducked its obvious desire for, and plans for, "permanency" in Iraq. As Tony
Snow [15] put the matter this way only the other day, "U.S. bases in Iraq
would not necessarily be permanent because they would be there at the
invitation of the host government and 'the person who has done the
invitation has the right to withdraw the invitation.'")
When the reporting of Schmitt and Shanker came up in a Rumsfeld news
conference, the story was essentially denied [16] ("I have never, that I can
recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any
meeting.") and then disappeared from the New York Times for four years (and
most of the rest of the media for most of that time). It did not, however,
disappear from Pentagon planning. Quite the contrary, the Pentagon began
doling out the contracts and the various private builders set to work. By
late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities
development" in Iraq, was quoted in a prestigious engineering magazine
speaking proudly of several billion dollars [17] already being sunk into
base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Bases were built in
profusion -- 106 of them, according to the Washington Post [18], by 2005
(including, of course, many tiny outposts).
For a while, to avoid the taint of that word "permanent," the major American
bases in Iraq were called "enduring camps" [19] by the Pentagon. Five or six
of them are simply massive, including Camp Victory, our military
headquarters adjacent to Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of
the capital, Balad Air Base [20], north of Baghdad (which has air traffic to
rival Chicago's O'Hare), and al-Asad Air Base [21] in the Western desert
near the Syrian border. These are big enough to contain multiple bus routes,
huge PXes, movie theaters, brand-name fast-food restaurants, and, in one
case, even a miniature golf course. At our base at Tallil in the south, in
2006, a mess hall [22] was being built to seat 6,000, and that just skims
the surface of the Bush administration's bases. [23]
In addition, as the insurgency gained traction and Baghdad fell into
disarray as well as sectarian warfare, administration planners began the
building of a massively fortified, $600 million, blast-resistant compound of
20-odd buildings in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone, the largest "embassy"
[24] on the planet, so independent that it would have no need of Iraq for
electricity, water, food, or much of anything else. Scheduled to "open" this
September, it will be both a citadel and a home for thousands of diplomats,
spies, guards, private security contractors, and the foreign workers
necessary to meet "community" needs.
The Media Blind to the Bases
From 2003 to the present, the work building, maintaining, and continually
upgrading these bases (and their equivalents in Afghanistan) has never
ended. Though the huge base-building contracts were given out long ago,
consider just a couple of modest contracts of recent vintage. In March 2006,
Dataline, Inc, of Norfolk, Virginia was awarded [25] a $5 million contract
for "technical control facility upgrades and cable installation," mainly at
"Camp Fallujah, Iraq (25 percent), Camp Al Asad, Iraq (25 percent), [and]
Camp Taqaddum, Iraq (25 percent)." In December 2006, Watkinson L.L.C. of
Houston was
awarded [26] a $13 million "firm-fixed-price contract for design and
construction of a heavy aircraft parking apron and open cargo storage yard"
for al-Asad Airbase, "to be completed by Sept. 17, 2007." In March 2007,
Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems was awarded [27] a $73 million contract
to "provide recurring requirements such as operations and maintenance
support for base local area network, commercial satellite communication,
technical control facility, and circuit actions, telephone, land mobile
radio and both inside and outside cable plant installations.... at 13 bases
in Iraq, Afghanistan and six other nations which fall in the United States
Central Command Area of Responsibility."
And major base building may not be at an end. Keep your eye on Iraqi
Kurdistan. According to Juan Cole [28], the Kurdish press continues to
report rumors that American base-building activities are now switching
there. Little is known about this, except that some in Washington consider
[29] Iraqi Kurdistan an obvious place to "redeploy" American troops in any
future partial withdrawal or draw-down scenarios.
These, then, were the Bush administration's facts-on-the-Iraqi-ground.
Whatever anyone was saying at any moment about ending the American presence
in Iraq someday or turning "sovereignty" over to the Iraqis, for American
reporters in Baghdad, as well as the media at home, the "enduring" nature of
what was being built should have been unmistakable -- and it should have
counted for something. After all, those American bases, like the vast
embassy inside the Green Zone (sardonically dubbed by Baghdadis, "George W's
Palace"), were monstrous in size, state-of-the-art when it came to
communications and facilities, and meant to support large-scale American
communities -- whether soldiers, diplomats, spies, contractors, or
mercenaries -- long term. They were imperial in nature, the U.S. military
and diplomatic equivalents of the pyramids. And no one, on seeing them,
should have thought anything but "permanent."
It didn't matter that those bases were never officially labeled "permanent."
After all, as the Korea model (now almost six decades old) indicates, such
bases, rather than colonies, have long been the American way of empire --
and, with rare exceptions, they have arrived and not left. They remain
immobile gunboats primed for a kind of eternal armed "diplomacy." As they
cluster tellingly in key regions of the planet, they make up what the
Pentagon likes to call our "footprint."
As Chalmers Johnson has pointed out in his book The Sorrows of Empire [30],
the United States has, mainly since World War II, set up at least 737 such
bases [31], mega and micro -- and probably closer to 1,000 -- worldwide.
Everywhere, just as Tony Snow has said, the Americans would officially be
"invited" in by the local government and would negotiate a "status of forces
agreement," [32] the modern equivalent of the colonial era's grant of
extraterritoriality, so that the American troops would be minimally subject
to foreign courts or control. There are still at least 12 such bases in
Korea, 37 on the Japanese island of Okinawa alone, and so on, around the
globe.
Since the Gulf War in 1990, such base-creation has been on the rise. The
Bush, Clinton, and younger Bush administrations have laid down a string of
bases from the old Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union (Romania,
Bulgaria [33]) and the former Yugoslavia [34] through the Greater Middle
East (Kuwait [35], Qatar [36], Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates
[37]), to the Horn of Africa (Djibouti [38]), into the Indian Ocean (the
"British" island of Diego Garcia [39]), and right through Central Asia
(Afghanistan [40], Kyrgyzstan [41], and Pakistan, where we "share" Pakistani
bases).
Bases have followed our little wars of recent decades. They were dropped
into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates around the time of our first
Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of
1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the former Central Asian SSRs after
the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq, of course, after the invasion of 2003
where they were to replace the Saudi bases being mothballed as a response to
Osama bin Laden's claims that Americans were defiling the holiest spots of
Islam.
In effect, when it came to bases in the post-9/11 years, the emphasis was,
on the one hand, encircling Russia from its former Eastern European
satellites to its former Central Asian SSRs and, on the other hand, securing
a series of bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, a swath of
territory known to the administration back in 2002-2003 as "the arc of
instability." [42] Iraq was, obviously, but part -- though a crucial part --
of such imperial dreaming about how to dominate the planet. And yet the
military ziggurats that made those dreams manifest, and all the billions of
taxpayer dollars and the obvious urge for "permanence" that went with them,
were largely left out of mainstream reporting on, debate about, or
discussion of the occupation of Iraq.
Iraq as Korea, 2003-2007
The administration remained remarkably tightlipped about all this building
activity and what it might mean -- beyond periodic denials that any such
efforts were "permanent"; and, with rare exceptions, even when journalists
reported from Camp Victory or other major bases, they never managed to put
them on the reportorial landscape. Those bases -- and the colossus of an
"embassy" that went with them -- just weren't considered all that important.
Perhaps for reporters and editors, used to an inside-the-Beltway universe in
which the United States simply could not act in an imperial manner, the
bases were givens -- like the American way of life. Evidently, for most
reporters, there was, in a sense, nothing to notice. As a consequence, there
has been endless discussion about Bush administration "incompetence" (of
which there has been plenty), but not the quite competent planning that left
such structures impressively on the Iraqi landscape. If the subject wasn't
exactly blacked-out in the United States, it did, at least, undergo a kind
of whiteout.
So much about Iraq was up for discussion, but the preponderant evidence on
the ground, so utterly solid, carried no weight. It was evidence of nothing.
For American reporters, as for American Secretaries of Defense, the
full-scale garrisoning of Planet Earth is simply not a news story. As a
result, most Americans have had next to no idea that we were creating
multibillion dollar edifices on Iraqi soil meant for a near eternity.
Remarkably enough, when asked [43] late last year by pollsters from the
Program on International Policy Attitudes whether we should have the
"permanent" bases in Iraq, a whopping 68% of Americans said no. But when the
issue of bases and permanency arises at all in our press, it's usually in
the context of Iraqi "suspicions" on the subject. (Oh, those paranoid
foreigners!) Typically, the Los Angeles Times cited Michael O'Hanlon [44],
an oft-quoted analyst at the Brookings Institution, saying the following of
the President's endorsement of the Korea model: "In trying to convey
resolve, [Bush] conveys the presumption that we're going to be there for a
long time.... It's unhelpful to handling the politics of our presence in
Iraq." No, Michael, the bases are our politics in Iraq.
Generally, the Democrats and their major presidential candidates line up
with O'Hanlon. And yet no significant Democratic proposal for "withdrawal"
from Iraq is really a full-scale withdrawal proposal. They are all proposals
to withdraw American combat brigades (perhaps 50,000-60,000 troops) from the
country, while withdrawing most other Americans into those giant bases that
are too awkward to mention.
Suddenly, however, discussion of the "Korea model" has entered the news and
so put those bases -- and the idea of a permanent military presence in
Iraq -- in the American viewfinder for what may be the first time. You only
have to look at Iraq today to know that, like so much else our imperial
dreamers have conjured up, this fantasy too -- of a calming Iraq developing
over the decades into a friendly democracy, while American troops sit tight
in their giant base-towns -- is doomed to one kind of failure or another,
while the oil lands of the planet threaten to implode.
The Korea model is just one of the administration's many grotesque,
self-interested misreadings of history, but it isn't new. It isn't a fantasy
the President and his top officials have just stumbled upon in post-surge
desperation. It's the fantasy they rumbled into Baghdad aboard back in 2003.
It's the imperial fantasy that has never left their minds from that first
shock-and-awe moment until now.
Give them credit for consistency. On this "model," whatever it may be
called, the Bush administration bet the store and, on it, they have never
wavered. Because of some of the worst reporting on an important topic in
recent memory, most Americans have lived out these last years in remarkable
ignorance of what was actually being built in Iraq. Now, perhaps, that great
American disconnect is beginning to end, which may be more bad news for the
Bush administration.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular
antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire
Project [45] and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished:
Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters [46] (Nation
Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson