Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Our publicly stated policy, as the Overseas Basing Commission puts it, has continued to be: “Decisions on temporary, permanent, or ‘enduring’ U.S. bases in Iraq have yet to be made. . . . U.S. presence in Iraq is a subject for discussions with the Iraqi government once it is formed.”⁵³ On February 17, 2005, for instance, Secretary 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.” The actual policy being implemented on the ground, however, is to build a number of stable, hardened facilities (the military avoids the term “permanent”) that, according to Lieutenant General Walter E. Buchanan III, chief of air operations in the U.S.’s Central Command, “will remain available for U.S. use for at least another decade or two.”⁵⁴

One can infer from numerous unofficial comments by American military officials in Iraq that, even if a future Iraqi government should attempt to kick us out, the Pentagon nonetheless plans to retain at least four crucially located and heavily fortified bases. In February 2005, Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, who was an adviser on democratization to our chief envoy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, summed up the basing situation this way:” [W] e could declare . .. that we have no permanent designs on Iraq and we will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. This one statement would do an enormous amount to undermine the suspicion that we have permanent imperial intentions in Iraq. We aren’t going to do that. And the reason we’re not going to do that is because we are building permanent military bases in Iraq.”⁵⁵

These permanent bases are the successors to the formerly permanent bases we hoped to hang on to in Saudi Arabia. However, on August 26, 2003, in a small ceremony at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the United States ended its thirteen-year presence in the kingdom. By then it had relocated its Persian Gulf headquarters to Al-Udeid Air Base in the small neighboring emirate of Qatar and launched a $1.2 billion program to upgrade the sixteen major airfields we already occupied elsewhere in the Middle East. In an interview with the New York Times, Lieutenant General Buchanan claimed that there were only two “enduring” bases for American operations in the Middle East outside Iraq: al-Udeid in Qatar and al-Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates.⁵⁶ The problem with this statement is that it depends entirely on what the air force means by “enduring.” There are quite substantial bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman that Lieutenant General Buchanan overlooks. In any case, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers and the KBR Corporation of Houston were making major improvements to both of the bases Buchanan cited, largely financed by the host governments.

In Iraq, using funds appropriated for military operations, the U.S. military has hired KBR and other companies to build or rebuild around a dozen semipermanent, reinforced bases. According to Joshua Hammer, the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek, since the original contracts of potentially $7 billion awarded to KBR in 2003, “it has received another $8.5 billion for work associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom. By far the largest sum—at least $4.5 billion—has gone to construction and maintenance of U.S. bases.”⁵⁷ These funds were contained in an $82 billion supplementary war-spending bill approved by Congress in May 2005.⁵⁸

According to Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune, we began our occupation of Iraq in the spring of 2003 with some 120 “forward operating bases.”⁵⁹ Two years later we had returned 14 to the Iraqis and still occupied 106, plus four prisons holding more than eleven thousand prisoners and several logistics centers for servicing truck convoys from Kuwait. Bradley Graham of the Washington Post quoted an unnamed general as saying, “If we’re going to withdraw, we need a base plan.”⁶⁰ This planning process led to the crash program to build permanent structures made of mortar-resistant concrete at some fourteen of the bigger bases and to concentrate on four airfields away from urban areas that we intend to keep as long as possible.

Any visitor to Iraq, according to Newsweek’s Hammer, could not fail to note “[t]he 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.” In its report of May 2005, the Overseas Basing Commission “observed the immense amount of military construction to support U.S. operations that has taken place and is currently being planned within USCENTCOM.”⁶¹ Since the secretary of defense has not explicitly authorized this construction, although he undoubtedly knows about it, there is no straightforward list of these “enduring” bases in Iraq. The Department of Defense maintains a pervasive silence on the subject, and members of Congress of both parties routinely say it is not part of their “agenda.”⁶² The following compilation of facilities that the United States would like to keep has therefore been pieced together from various fragmentary accounts. By far the most important compilation is by the Global Security Organization of Alexandria, Virginia.⁶³

Three of the bases are in or around Baghdad itself. First is the Green Zone, the four-square-mile enclave in the middle of the city encircled by fifteen-foot concrete walls and rings of concertina wire. Its buildings include Saddam Hussein s former presidential palace, which is headquarters for the current Iraqi government, the U.S. embassy, and offices for numerous military and civilian functionaries.⁶⁴

The new U.S. embassy is as permanent a base as they come. Located in a 104-acre compound, it 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. A workforce of nine hundred mostly Asian workers who live on the site has been imported to do the actual construction. They work around the clock (at a time when most Iraqis are enduring blackouts of up to twenty-two hours a day, the embassy site is floodlit by night). This diplomatic “facility” will have its own apartment buildings (six of them) for a staff of perhaps 5,500 (many of them troops for guard duty), its own electricity, well-water, and waste-treatment facilities, plus the de rigueur “swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court, and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.” The London Times’s Daniel McGrory reports that Baghdad residents are properly cynical watching what they call, in mock-honor of Saddam Hussein’s famously self- glorifying building projects, “George W’s palace,” as it rises on the banks of the Tigris River while their lives crumble around them. It goes without saying that, like the former American embassy in Saigon, the Baghdad embassy will have one or more helipads on the roofs.⁶⁵

The other two bases in the Baghdad vicinity are Camp Victory North, adjacent to the international airport, and al-Rashid Military Camp, the capital’s former military airport. At Victory North, KBR has built an encampment for 14,000 troops housed in air-conditioned barracks with access to the largest post exchange in Iraq. (Other sources assert that the biggest PX is at Camp Taji north of Baghdad.) Camp Victory North includes Qasr al-Fao, one of Saddam Hussein’s ornate palaces, which sits in the middle of a man-made lake stocked with carp and catfish. The palace is now occupied by senior military commanders. At first, there was some concern about American generals occupying such ostentatious buildings associated with the Saddam era, but the high command decided it was too expensive to build replacement facilities.⁶⁶ So they continue to occupy at least fifteen former presidential palaces spread around the country. Camp Victory North, it should be noted, is twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, constructed by KBR in 1999 and until the Iraq war the largest overseas base built since the Vietnam War.⁶⁷

Some seventeen miles north of Baghdad is Taji Air Base, renamed Camp Cooke by the Americans after a First Armored Division sergeant killed in Baghdad in December 2003 and then in September 2004 changed back to Camp Taji.⁶⁸ Taji was a former Republican Guard “military city.” According to the description of the base by the Global Security Organization, “The quality of life at Camp Taji gets better every day. The Camp now has ... a Subway, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. They also have a newly built dining facility, which is three times larger [than the old one] and the food selection is unbelievable. There are several gyms and MWR facilities [Morale, Welfare, and Recreation] where soldiers can exercise, watch movies or sporting events, and play games. Soldiers live in air-