By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
June 14, 2007


In Iraq and beyond, America's empire of permanent bases grows at an alarming pace.

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 percent 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 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),
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 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 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:

("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 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 headlined
its piece: "Why Iraq Isn't Korea"; Fred Kaplan of Slate 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 ("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 already being sunk into base
construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Bases were built in profusion --
106 of them, according to the Washington Post, 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" 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, north of Baghdad (which has air traffic to rival Chicago's
O'Hare), and al-Asad Air Base 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 was
being built to seat 6,000, and that just skims the surface of the Bush
administration's bases.

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" 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 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 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 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, 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 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 US 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, the United States has, mainly since World War
II, set up at least 737 such bases, 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," 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) and the former Yugoslavia through the Greater Middle East (Kuwait,
Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates), to the Horn of Africa
(Djibouti), into the Indian Ocean (the "British" island of Diego Garcia), and
right through Central Asia (Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, 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." 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 late last year by pollsters from the Program on International Policy
Attitudes whether we should have the "permanent" bases in Iraq, a whopping 68
percent 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, 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.
About the Author: Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of
the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.