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The Independent Review - August 20 2005
Does anyone really believe the Americans
will walk away from their mega-bases in Iraq?
by Robert Higgs
…….why did the Bush team invade Iraq? The most plausible hypothesis has always appeared to be that it did so as part of a larger plan to reshape the strategic contours of southwest Asia, from the Mediterranean to China, from Kazakhstan to the Arabian Sea. By lodging U.S. forces in the heart of this region, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States would be well positioned to launch future attacks on, say, Syria or Iran, should the president and his lieutenants decide to do so. Even without such further attacks, however, the Americans would be able to threaten credibly or to intimidate countries in the region to secure their compliance with U.S. demands.
By effectively controlling the region, the U.S. government would attain several of its cherished ends. First, it would eliminate or greatly diminish the threats posed to Israel by countries such as Syria and Iran. Second, it would control much of the oil and gas extraction and transportation in a region believed to be richly endowed with untapped deposits of those prized fossil fuels. Third, it would butt up against the Russians and the Chinese, excluding them from hegemony or substantial influence in the lands of the Great Game. Fourth (but merely incidental, you should understand), important supporters of the Bush team would make tons of money: Halliburton, Bechtel, Chevron, Unocal, Shell, and the rest of the good old boys, not to mention the arms suppliers and the mercenaries.
In the aftermath of the invasion and two and a half years of occupation, in now-devastated Iraq, it is unfortunate that the Iraqis won’t buckle under to the U.S. forces, but it need not derail the larger plan. The U.S. government will continue, of course, to pretend that it is doing its damnedest to establish a democratic paradise in Iraq, but if the locals kick and scream too much, then the Bush administration will just have to “shed the unreality” of its earlier expectations. And then what? That’s the key question, to which we may conjecture an answer with some confidence.
In all likelihood, the U.S. government will pretend that its properly elected Iraqi puppets have taken over the government, whereupon those Iraqi kingpins will promptly negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement to maintain a U.S. military presence in the country. American officials stoutly deny that the United States intends to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld stated last February, “We have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” Of course, when tomorrow comes, conditions on the ground will somehow justify what the Americans never “intended” as of yesterday. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad recently reiterated, “We are not seeking to maintain permanent bases in Iraq,” but he stressed that the United States would negotiate with an elected Iraqi government with regard to its continued military presence. One need not have mastered rocket science to understand who will hold the upper hand in any such “negotiations.” While the U.S. forces remain in Iraq, no elected Iraqis will constitute a genuine government because they will be powerless to resist the will of those alien forces. The Iraqis may squawk and demand bigger bribes, but everyone knows whose desires will have been fulfilled when the dust settles.
Although eventually some U.S. troops may be withdrawn from Iraq, we have good reason to suspect that many—perhaps 50,000 or 60,000—will remain, because their permanent bases are already under construction. A half-billion dollars for this project was included in the Iraq war supplemental appropriation approved last May. The plan widely discussed in various media outlets calls for U.S. forces, now scattered around the country in more than a hundred bases, to be concentrated in fourteen large, fortified bases on the way to eventual consolidation in four giant, heavily fortified mega-bases.
Once this relocation has been completed, the United States can use the bases to serve important purposes in the implementation of its larger plan for the region. The Iraqis can fight each other day and night, so long as they do not threaten the security of the mega-bases. The hope, of course, is that when the U.S. forces have repositioned themselves in these enclaves, the Iraqi resistance will lose interest in attacking the Americans and turn their energies toward joining a coalition focused on ordinary politics—that is, on looting the country’s oil revenues. If they persist in slaughtering one another, well, the Bush administration realizes that it can do nothing to stop them—short of leaving the country, which it certainly will not do in any event—and so it will rest content to protect U.S. forces inside the big bases, where they will be shielded from the mayhem of the surrounding countryside by wide, lethal, perimeter defenses.
Larry Diamond, a former consultant to the U.S. occupation authority and the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, tells the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t know why we just can’t say, ‘It is not our goal to set up for the indefinite duration military bases in Iraq, from which we can operate in the Middle East for our own geopolitical purposes.’” Well, Dr. Diamond, U.S. officials certainly can say so; indeed, everyone from the president to the secretary of defense to the U.S. ambassador already has said so. The problem is that, in view of the ongoing U.S. construction of permanent bases in Iraq, these American bigwigs evidently do not mean what they say. Imagine that.
The United States began its occupation of Germany and Japan sixty years ago, yet large U.S. military bases remain in those countries today. Does anyone really believe the Americans will walk away from their mega-bases in Iraq just because the Iraqis want the Yankees to go home? Why, that would spoil the big plan, wouldn’t it? The pretext, it now appears, is dispensable, but the plan most likely is not.
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal, The Independent Review.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1553
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