All Our Base Are Belong to Us

In February of 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I can assure you that we have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” But Rumsfeld was contradicting un-named “senior Bush administration officials” who had told the New York Times two years earlier that the U.S. plans to establish “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 region.”

And a full year before Rumsfeld’s testimony, the Chicago Tribune reported that the U.S. was planning to build 14 mortar-proof “enduring bases” in Iraq (“enduring” due to the desire to avoid use of the word “permanent”).

As with many developments in Iraq, the top levels of the Bush administration have one story for TV news consumers, while military and lower-level government officials give us the real one, which is then buried on page eight. The real story in this case is that we’re not planning to withdraw from Iraq any time in the foreseeable future, but to “consolidate” the American occupation in four or five permanent fortified bases from which our troops can guard the region, the Iraqi government, and the anticipated oil supply.

These permanent American bases will be the equivalent of a Mideastern regional Fort Apache, as well as replacements for the bases we were forced to give up in Saudi Arabia in 2003, after Osama bin Laden, on 9/11/01, made good on the promise he made in his 1996 “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.”

In his book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” Chalmers Johnson quotes Newsweek reporter Joshua Hammer who has intensively studied the government-let contracts in Iraq, and found that in addition to the seven billions awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) in 2003, “it has received another $8.5 billion for work associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom…(and) the largest sum -- at least $4.5 billion -- has gone to construction and maintenance of U.S. bases.”

Any visitor to Iraq, Hammer continues, couldn’t miss being aware of “the omnipresence of the giant defense contractor KBR…the shipments of concrete and other construction materials, and the transformation of decrepit Iraqi military bases into fortified American enclaves.” The largest of these enclaves are indeed permanent installations, built along the lines of the “little America” that was once the Panama Canal Zone, and fitted with Subway shops, Burger Kings, and Pizza Huts, as well as huge dining facilities where gourmet American cuisine is served daily. There are gyms and MWR (morale, welfare, and recreation) facilities where soldiers can watch movies or TV, exercise, and play games. The biggest base, Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad, even has its own metropolitan bus system, making it possible for military personnel to get around easily inside the leviathan camp.

Current U.S. Bases in Iraq: An Inventory

Three of the most important bases are in or near Baghdad, and the best-known of these is the Green Zone, a four-square-mile enclave on the banks of the Tigris River surrounded by fifteen-foot-high concrete walls. Its main structures are Saddam Hussein’s sprawling presidential palace, now converted to offices and living quarters, and the U.S. Embassy.

However, the new American Embassy, a separate Baghdad base occupying its own 104-acre compound, dwarfs the present one. In the words of Chalmers Johnson, “(I)t will be the biggest embassy in the world -- ten times the size of a typical American embassy, six times larger than the U.N., as big as Vatican City, and costing $592 million to build. It will be defended by blast walls and ground-to-air missiles.”

Just north of the metropolis are Camp Victory North, next to the international airport, and Camp al-Rashid, adjacent to Saddam’s old military airport. Victory North is particularly huge, with encampment facilities for as many as 14,000 troops. It also contains Qasr al-Faro, one of Saddam’s bizarre Islamic rococo palaces, which sits in the middle of an artificial lake and now houses senior U.S. military commanders. Altogether this base is twice as big as Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, built in 1999 and up until now the largest overseas military base built since the Vietnam War.

Seventeen miles north of Baghdad is Taji Air Base, a former Republican Guard installation. According to the website of the Global Security Organization (globalsecurity.org), the quality of life at Taji is very plush. Troops stationed there live in fully air conditioned and heated trailers with hot showers, and eat up to four meals a day at the base’s new dining hall. Thirteen miles north of Taji and 30 miles north of Baghdad is the sprawling Balad Air Base, at 15 square miles the largest U.S. military base in the country. Air traffic at Balad is second in volume only to London’s Heathrow Airport. There is also an army facility associated with Balad, Camp Anaconda, which despite its extensive security infrastructure including a high earthen berm perimeter, is the object of frequent mortar attacks, the most notable occurring on July 4, 2003, during a visit by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Other bases include, in the far north near Mosul, Camp Marez, and al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar Province, close to the Syrian border. The latter is the second-largest air base in Iraq, and currently undergoing a feverish building program under the auspices of KBR, as it appears to be one of the locations the Pentagon has chosen as an “enduring” site. A second Anbar Province base is at al Taqaddum near Ramadi, where Navy Seabees have been working to lengthen runways and provide American-style facilities.

Also in the north of the country is Camp Renegade, the former Iraqi fighter base located strategically adjacent to the city of Kirkuk, with its oil refinery and petrochemical plant. Far to the south, close by the ancient and now desecrated and graffitied Ziggurat of Ur is a huge complex with Tallil Airbase as its hub. Camp Qayyarah, or Q-West, is about 30 miles south of Mosul and occupied by part of the One-Hundred First Airborne Division. Then there is Al Sahra airfield just south of Tikrit, with an adjacent army base, Camp Speicher, which contains the largest single structure built by the U.S. military in Iraq so far, a $6.7 million divisional headquarters that will replace the Saddamist pink palace in Tikrit that is currently serving that purpose.

Considering how many bases there are, how many U.S. personnel are stationed there, semi-permanently it would seem, and the billions of dollars that have been spent building these colossal outposts of a far-flung and vastly-projected imperium, it is difficult to determine which four or five facilities have been earmarked as the permanent and “enduring” U.S. garrison in Iraq, that will serve not just to occupy that country but to anchor America’s Middle Eastern policy. Bradley Graham of the Washington Post has studied the base structure and determined that at a minimum there are four bases the U.S. will try to keep active in Iraq forever, no matter what. These are Tallil Airbase in the south, al-Asad Airbase in Anbar Province, the gigantic air base and associated army camp at Balad, and probably Camp Qayyarah in the Shi’ite south of the country.

For the time being, however, all the bases listed above are going concerns, and like U.S. military bases everywhere, considered by Washington as sovereign American territory despite their residing on the soil of another, sovereign country. It’s with a certain degree of chutzpah, then, that Bush administration officials accuse Iran of “meddling” in Iraqi affairs, and even do so with a straight faces. But they carry it off without fear of contradiction, since for the time being Iraq, or the heavily occupied portions of it, is ours, and all our base are belong to us.