base in Qatar that the authorities allow to be mentioned in the press. Its 14,760-foot runway is one of the longest in the gulf, greatly exceeding the needs of Qatar’s dozen or so fighter aircraft. The airfield has hardened concrete bunkers for as many as 120 warplanes.
The air force enthusiastically took the bait. Al-Udeid is the site for prepositioned air force weapons, fuel, medical supplies, and munitions—the army’s site is elsewhere in Qatar. In March 2002, the air force began to build there a combined air operations center that, although not as advanced as Price Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, could serve as an alternative. Following the assault on Afghanistan, the air force put up its own money to complete all the facilities at al-Udeid as fast as possible. In March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney visited the site, and in June the U.S. secretary of defense did the same. The main air force unit based there is the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, composed of F-15E and F-16 fighters and KC-10, KC-130, and KC-135 aerial tankers. Al-Udeid played an important role in the Afghan war as the main base for refueling war-planes on their way to and from Afghanistan. The air force estimates that the tankers of the 379th delivered more than 220 million pounds of fuel over Afghanistan, about half of all refueling undertaken during the war.39
Al-Udeid also played a key role in the 2003 assault on Iraq, hosting some 6,500 airmen with a planned eventual population of 10,000. They live in a large desert tent city that the air force calls Camp Andy, after Master Sergeant Evander Andrews, the first U.S. casualty of the Afghanistan operation, who died as a result of a forklift accident. It is hard to know whether the officials who supply these names are being intentionally saccharine or are running out of genuine heroes. A permanent housing complex, rechristened Expeditionary Village, is to open on the 3,000-acre base late in 2003. During the summer of 2002, according to one informed source, the first swimming pool at al- Udeid had already been completed, usually a sign that the air force plans a long stay.40 Dyn-Corp of Reston, Virginia, is responsible for providing this and other amenities and for accepting, storing, maintaining, and protecting the prepositioned war material, the same services it performs at air bases in Oman and Manama, Bahrain.
Two other installations in Qatar are Camp as-Sayliyah, located in the outskirts of Doha, and Camp Snoopy, at Doha International Airport, both army prepositioning sites for tanks and other fighting vehicles, together with their fuel and munitions for a full armored brigade. These are state-of-the-art facilities completed in the summer of 2000. While most other bases in the Persian Gulf region are paid for by the host countries, Congress actually put up a total of $110 million for these. The government of Qatar contributed only the land and utilities.
During the second Iraq war, Camp as-Sayliyah was the forward headquarters of commander in chief General Tommy R. Franks, who, in December 2002, under cover of a military training exercise, moved about 750 staff officers from MacDill Air Base, Florida, to direct the war in front of banks of computers and video displays located in air-conditioned tents. The base was also the site of the $1.5 million, made-for-TV “Coalition Media Center,” where Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, the six-foot-plus, Hollywood-handsome African American spokesman for Central Command, gave hundreds of journalists his daily edited video presentations.41 Reporting the war from Qatar for
As-Sayliyah is said to be the army’s largest locale of prepositioned war material in the world. Camp Snoopy is a logistics facility at Qatar’s main commercial airport, responsible for shipping food and other supplies to bases throughout the gulf. Whereas a high inner wall and .50-caliber machine guns defend as-Sayliyah’s 36.3 acres and twenty-seven warehouses, Snoopy is defended only by guard towers. In May 2003, following the defeat of Iraq, General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Snoopy was no longer needed and would be eliminated. The number of troops there had already dropped from 1,800 during the war to around 800.
The gulf state least attracted to the United States’s imperial presence is undoubtedly the United Arab Emirates. Lying east of Qatar, it is unusual in that it has a good seaport on the Persian Gulf and also one near the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman. Yet for all its advantages, the UAE in 1994 concluded a defense cooperation agreement with us, giving the air force access to al-Dhafra Air Base, about an hour outside the capital of Abu Dhabi. The United States has used this facility for launching manned U-2 and pilotless Global Hawk reconnaissance aircraft against Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and it bases there the 763rd Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron’s KC-10 tanker aircraft.
When the air force first deployed to the UAE, its personnel lived in downtown Abu Dhabi, one of the more sophisticated cities in the region, in an apartment building called the Sahara Residency. But after the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon moved all its personnel from Abu Dhabi to al-Dhafra Air Base. American meals at the airfield, including box lunches for the air crews, are supplied under contract by the local Holiday Inn. In May 2003, the Army Corps of Engineers invited bids from contractors on a headquarters building, dormitories, dining, gym, and medical facilities, and roads and parking at al-Dhafra, again an indication that the Pentagon planned to stay a long time.42
The UAE is also familiar to crews of major navy vessels since Jebel Ali, the seaport for the city of Dubai, is the navy’s most frequented port outside the United States. Carrier battle groups on patrol in the Persian Gulf call there regularly for fuel, supplies, and shore leave. Perhaps the most important commercial center on the Persian Gulf, Jebel Ali has the largest man-made harbor in the world, with sixty-seven berths and extensive dry docks. It is connected by a good road straight across the UAE to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman. Most military cargoes from Japan and Diego Garcia are unloaded at Fujairah and trucked to Jebel Ali or flown to Bahrain. This route allows for the resupply of forces in the Persian Gulf even if the Strait of Hormuz should be closed. Neither of these UAE ports has a permanent U.S. naval presence but officers are based in both to assist military ships in transit.
The last and least typical of the Persian Gulf states, to the east of the UAE, is Oman. With a per capita income of $7,700 and a population of 2.5 million, a half million of whom are nonnationals, it is the poorest of the smaller gulf states. It has no arable land and only about 5 percent of its territory serves as pasture. Oil sales make up 80 percent of its export earnings and 40 percent of its gross domestic product. Oman’s oil was discovered in commercial quantities only in 1962, later than in any of the other gulf states, and the cost of extracting it is well above that of its neighbors. It is not a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which pleases the United States. One of the reasons Oman accepts the presence of American military bases is because they generate substantial income and help diversify the economy. Moreover, the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, entrenched in Oman for decades, recommended the U.S. military to the sultan.
The Oman of today is a remnant of an old Arabian empire that once extended as far south as Zanzibar on the African coast. Located directly across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, it has long, undefined borders with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The first American ambassador arrived in Oman’s capital, the old city of Muscat, only in 1972. In 1980, as a consequence of the fall of the shah in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Oman negotiated a security agreement with the United States. In 1990, this military cooperation agreement was expanded and renewed. Until recently, Oman purchased most of its air force’s aircraft from British manufacturers, and in September 2001, following through on arrangements unrelated to that month’s terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, carried out a large-scale joint exercise in the desert with 22,000 British troops. In October 2001, it signed a contract with the Department of Defense to buy twelve advanced F-16C/D fighters for $1,120 million. The Omani public does not like the government’s military subservience to the United States, but the sultan shrewdly
