The Facts on Land -- and Sea

These were part of what should be considered the facts on the ground in Iraq, though, between April 2003 and the present, they were rarely reported on or debated in the mainstream in the U.S. But if you place those mega-bases (not to speak of the more than 100 smaller ones built at one point or another) in the context of early Bush administration plans for the Iraqi military, things quickly begin to make more sense.

Remember, Iraq is essentially the hot seat at the center of the Middle East. It had, in the previous two-plus decades fought an eight-year war with neighboring Iran, invaded neighboring Kuwait, and been invaded itself. And yet, the new Coalition Provisional Authority, run by the President's personal envoy, L. Paul Bremer III, promptly disbanded the Iraqi military. This is now accepted as a goof of the first order when it came to sparking an insurgency. But, in terms of Bush administration planning, it was no mistake at all.

At the time, the Pentagon made it quite clear that its plan for a future Iraqi military was for a force of 40,000 lightly armed troops -- meant to do little more than patrol the country's borders. (Saddam Hussein's army had been something like a 600,000-man force.) It was, in other words, to be a Military Lite -- and there was essentially to be no Iraqi air force. In other words, in one of the more heavily armed and tension-ridden regions of the planet, Iraq was to become a Middle Eastern Costa Rica -- if, that is, you didn't assume that the U.S. Armed Forces, from those four "enduring camps" somewhere outside Iraq's major cities, including a giant air base at Balad, north of Baghdad, and with the back-up help of U.S. Naval forces in the Persian Gulf, were to serve as the real Iraqi military for the foreseeable future.

Again, it's necessary to put these facts on the ground in a larger -- in this case, pre-invasion -- geopolitical context. From the first Gulf War on, Saudi Arabia, the largest producer of energy on the planet, was being groomed as the American military bastion in the heart of the Middle East. But the Saudis grew uncomfortable -- think here, the claims of Osama bin Laden and Co. that U.S. troops were defiling the Kingdom and its holy places -- with the Pentagon's elaborate enduring camps on its territory. Something had to give -- and it wasn't going to be the American military presence in the Middle East. The answer undoubtedly seemed clear enough to top Bush administration officials. As an anonymous American diplomat told the Sunday Herald of Scotland back in October 2002, "A rehabilitated Iraq is the only sound long-term strategic alternative to Saudi Arabia. It's not just a case of swopping horses in mid-stream, the impending U.S. regime change in Baghdad is a strategic necessity."

As those officials imagined it -- and as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz predicted -- by the fall of 2003, major American military operations in the region would have been re-organized around Iraq, even as American forces there would be drawn down to perhaps 30,000-40,000 troops stationed eternally at those "enduring camps." In addition, a group of Iraqi secular exiles, friendly to the United States, would be in power in Baghdad, backed by the occupation and ready to open up the Iraqi economy, especially its oil industry to Western (particularly American) multinationals. Americans and their allies and private contractors would, quite literally, have free run of the country, the equivalent of nineteenth century colonial extraterritoriality (something "legally" institutionalized in June 2004, thanks to Order 17, issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, just before it officially turned over "sovereignty" to the Iraqis); and, sooner or later, a Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA would be "negotiated" that would define the rights of American troops garrisoned in that country.

At that point, the U.S. would have successfully repositioned itself militarily in relation to the oil heartlands of the planet. It would also have essentially encircled a second member of the "axis of evil," Iran (once you included the numerous new U.S. bases that had been built and were being expanded in occupied Afghanistan as part of the ongoing war against the Taliban). It would be triumphant and dominant and, with its Israeli ally, militarily beyond challenge in the region. The cowing of, collapse of, or destruction of the Syrian and Iranian regimes would surely follow in short order.

Of course, much of this never came about as planned. It turned out that, once the Sunni insurgency gained traction, the Bush administration had little choice but to reconstitute a sizeable, if still relatively lightly armed, Iraqi military (as a largely Shiite force) and then, more recently, arm Sunni militias as well, possibly opening the way for future clashes of a major nature. It had to accept a Shiite regime locked inside the highly fortified Green Zone of the Iraqi capital that was religious, sectarian, largely powerless, and allied to some degree with Iran. It had to accept chaos, significant and unexpected casualties, continual urban warfare, and an enormous strain and drain on its armed forces (as well as a black hole of distraction from other global issues). None of this had been predicted, or imagined, by Bush's top officials.

On the other hand, the Bush administration has demonstrated significant "endurance" of its own, especially when it came to the linked issues of oil and bases. In a recent report for Harper's Magazine, "The Black Box, Inside Iraq's Oil Machine," Luke Mitchell describes traveling the southern Iraqi oil field of Rumaila with a petroleum engineer working for Foster Wheeler, a Houston engineering firm hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to oversee much of the oilfield reconstruction," and protected by private guards employed by the British security company Erinys. He describes what's left of the Iraqi oil industry after decades of war, sanctions, civil war, sabotage, and black-market theft -- a run-down industrial plant with a rusting delivery system that, at a technical level, is now largely in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the State Department, and private contractors like KBR, the former division of Halliburton. At the most basic level, he reports that many of "Iraq's native oil professionals," who heroically patched up and held together a broken system in the years after the first Gulf War, have (along with so many other Iraqi professionals) fled the country. He writes:

"The Wall Street Journal in 2006 called this flight a 'petroleum exodus' and reported that about a hundred oil workers had been murdered since the war began and that 'of the top hundred of so managers running the Iraqi oil ministry and its branches in 2003, about two-thirds are no longer at their jobs.' Now most of the [oil] engineers in Iraq are from Texas and Oklahoma."

Similarly, in Baghdad, the government of Prime Minister Maliki is not expected to handle the crucial energy problems of its country alone. Here's a relevant (if well-buried) passage from a recent New York Times piece on the subject: "Earlier this month, the White House dispatched several senior aides to Baghdad to work with the Iraqis on specific legislative areas. They include the under secretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, Reuben Jeffery III, who is working on the budget and oil law…" This is what passes for "sovereignty" in present-day Iraq.

In this context, the following line of text about agreed-upon subjects for negotiation in last week's Bush/Maliki "declaration" caused eyebrows to be raised (at least abroad): "Facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments, to contribute to the reconstruction and rebuilding of Iraq." As the British Guardian put the matter: "The promise was immediately seen as a potential bonanza for American oil companies." A BBC report commented, "Correspondents say US investors benefiting from preferential treatment could earn huge profits from Iraq's vast oil reserves, causing widespread resentment among Iraqis." (American coverage regularly ignores or plays down the oil aspect of the Bush administration's Iraq policies, even though that country has the third largest reserves on the planet.)

Bases, Bases Everywhere