- "You've got to go where the oil is. I don't worry
about it a lot."
- -- Dick Cheney -1998, CEO of Halliburton Amarillo
Texas- Panhandle Producers Association
-
-
- While we're distracted with the Potomac shuffle
the real story of world politics is the struggle for raw materials and
above all for the crude oil. With the new hydrocarbon law instituted in
Iraq (giving control of Iraq's oil reserves to foreign companies) the
need to extract the landlocked huge oil find in the Caspian Sea area
(above Afghanistan); Vice President Cheney was right when he spoke of
this being a 'generational war'. With numerous permanent bases being
built in Iraq it's a given that all this theater of troop withdrawal,
a time limit, etc, is all hokum.
-
- This has never been about purple finger democracy but
the control of world oilwith billions upon billions disappeared, and
more billions (all of this borrowed) you would think that citizens would
relate all of this to the rising costs, programs cut / eliminated on state
and local levels lack of disaster plans decaying infrastructure
etc. Someone has to pay for this costly endeavor (approximately 2.3 billion
per week) and pay the approximate $41 MILLION PER HOUR of interest on
the debt but they don't.
-
- This 'surge' this need for more and more troops
will go on indefinitely to protect and manage these oil fields. What happens
to the Iraqi people, any reconstruction, etc, is superfluous. We can't
build a levee here provide affordable medical care / medicines,
etc, with billions protecting the oil interests of today's robber barons.
Follow the money. -JM
-
-
-
-
- Oil drilling Caspian Sea not reported in U.S. news
the battle of the Titans for OIL (certainly not for McFreedom)
- http:// www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/62_
- folder/62_articles/ 62_mediawatch.html
-
-
-
- The American Press Can't
- By Tom Engelhardt
-
- We're in a new period in the war in Iraq -- one that
brings to mind the Nixonian era of "Vietnamization": A President
presiding over an increasingly unpopular war that won't end; an election
bearing down; the need to placate a restive American public; and an army
under so much strain that it seems to be running off the rails. So it's
not surprising that the media is now reporting on administration plans
for, or "speculation" about, or "signs of," or "hints"
of "major draw-downs" or withdrawals of American troops. The
figure regularly cited these days is less than 100,000 troops in Iraq
by the end of 2006. With about 136,000 American troops there now, that
figure would represent just over one-quarter of all in-country U.S. forces,
which means, of course, that the term "major" certainly rests
in the eye of the beholder.
-
- In addition, these withdrawals are -- we know this thanks
to a Seymour Hersh piece, Up in the Air, in the December 5th New Yorker
-- to be accompanied, as in South Vietnam in the Nixon era, by an unleashing
of the U.S. Air Force. The added air power is meant to compensate for
any lost punch on the ground (and will undoubtedly lead to more "collateral
damage" -- that is, Iraqi deaths).
-
- It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns
or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious proposition that
the Bush administration can "stand up" an effective Iraqi army
and police force (think "Vietnamization" again), capable of
circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so allowing American troops to
pull back to bases outside major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and
points as far west as the United States. Further, all administration or
military withdrawal promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and
obvious loopholes, phrases like "if all goes according to plan and
security improves..." or "it also depends on the ability of
the Iraqis to..."
-
- Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise
and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern civilization (electrical
power, potable water, gas for cars, functional sewage systems, working
traffic lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very establishment
of a government inside the heavily fortified Green Zone has proved immensely
difficult, and since U.S. reconstruction funds (those that haven't already
disappeared down one clogged drain or another) are drying up, such partial
withdrawals may prove more complicated to pull off than imagined. It's
clear, nonetheless, that "withdrawal" is on the propaganda agenda
of an administration heading into mid-term ! elections with an increasingly
skittish Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates worried
about defending the President's mission- unaccomplished war of choice.
Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of, followed by promises
of, followed by announcements of "major" withdrawals, possibly
including news in the fall election season of even more "massive"
withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007, all hedged with
conditional clauses and "only ifs" -- withdrawal promises that,
once the election is over, this administration would undoubtedly feel
under no particular obligation to fulfill.
-
- Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal buzz,
speculation, and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the
question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually
withdrawing from Iraq or not? Sometimes, when trying to cut through a
veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus
on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete
-- though less generally discussed in our media -- than the set of enormous
bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally
multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering
magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked
with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly
of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the
numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base- building has bee!
n massive and ongoing.
-
- In a country in such startling disarray, these bases,
with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on
the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar
system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort, and
geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration
to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.
-
- If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style reconstruction
has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to thievery, knavery, and sheer incompetence,
and is now essentially ending, it has been a raging success in Iraq's
"Little America." For the first time, we have actual descriptions
of a couple of the "super-bases" built in Iraq in the last two
and a half years and, despite being written by reporters under Pentagon
information restrictions, they are sobering. Thomas Ricks of the Washington
Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the
country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle
of the most hostile part of Iraq." In a piece entitled Biggest Base
in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel, Ricks paints a striking portrait:
-
- The base is sizeable enough to have its own "neighborhoods"
including "KBR-land" (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary
that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); "CJSOTF"
("home to a special operations unit," the Combined Joint Special
Operations Task Force, surrounded by "especially high walls,"
and so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never
been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out Army Humvees. There is as
well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks,"
a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like
can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base
speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and
predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see
over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a miniature golf course, which
mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands
of concertina wire and, down at t! he end of the course, what appears
to be a tiny detainee cage."
-
- Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad
live in "air-conditioned containers" which will, in the future
-- and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future --
be wired "to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas
telephone access." He points out as well that, of the troops at
Balad, "only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most
Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi."
-
- Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited another
of the American "super-bases," the still-under-construction
al-Asad Airbase (Football and pizza point to US staying for long haul).
He observes, of "the biggest Marine camp in western Anbar province,"
that "this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of US
suburbia." In addition to the requisite Subway and pizza outlets,
there is a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool,
and a movie theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large --
such bases may cover 15-20 square miles -- that it has two bus routes
and, if not traffic lights, at least red stop signs at all intersections.
-
- There are at least four such "super-bases"
in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal"
from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed
as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever
top administration officials and military commanders say -- and they
always deny that we seek "permanent" bases in Iraq - facts-on-the-
ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream
"permanency."
-
- Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters
adhere to a simple rule: The words "permanent," "bases,"
and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not
even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report.
While a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of press coverage of Iraq
produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the
British press, the only U.S. examples that could be found occurred when
80% of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted
in a poll that the United States might indeed desire to establish bases
and remain permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not"
was added to the mix via any American official denial. (It's strange,
isn't it, that such bases, imposing as they are, generally only exist
in our papers in the negative.) Three examples will do:
-
- The Secretary of Defense: "During a visit with U.S.
troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
said 'at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases' in Iraq.
'It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government.'"
-
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander
for planning and strategy in Iraq: "We already have handed over
significant chunks of territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans
to do so; they are being executed right now. It is not only our plan but
our policy that we do not intend to have any permanent bases in Iraq."
-
- Karen Hughes on the Charlie Rose Show: "CHARLIE
ROSE: they think we are still there for the oil, or they think the United
States wants permanent bases. Does the United States want permanent bases
in Iraq? KAREN HUGHES: We want nothing more than to bring our men and
women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not before they finish
the job. CHARLIE ROSE: And do not want to keep bases there? KAREN HUGHES:
No, we want to bring our people home as soon as possible."
-
- Still, for a period, the Pentagon practiced something
closer to truth in advertising than did our major papers. At least, they
called the big bases in Iraq "enduring camps," a label which
had a certain charm and reeked of permanency. (Later, they were relabeled,
far less romantically, "contingency operating bases.")
-
- One of the enduring mysteries of this war is that reporting
on our bases in Iraq has been almost nonexistent these last years, especially
given an administration so weighted toward military solutions to global
problems; especially given the heft of some of the bases; especially given
the fact that the Pentagon was mothballing our bases in Saudi Arabia and
saw these as long-term substitutes; especially given the fact that the
neocons and other top administration officials were so focused on controlling
the so- called arc of instability (basically, the energy heartlands of
the planet) at whose center was Iraq; and especially given the fact that
Pentagon pre-war planning for such "enduring camps" was, briefly,
a front-page story in a major newspaper.
-
- A little history may be in order here:
-
- On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American
troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote a front-page piece
for the New York Times indicating that the Pentagon was planning to "maintain"
four bases in Iraq for the long haul, though "there will probably
never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops." Rather
than speak of "permanent bases," the military preferred then
to speak coyly of "permanent access" to Iraq. The bases, however,
fit snugly with other Pentagon plans, already on the drawing boards. For
instance, Saddam's 400,000 man military was to be replaced by only a 40,000
man, lightly armed military without significant armor or an air force.
(In an otherwise heavily armed region, this insured that any Iraqi government
would be almost totally reliant on the American military and that the
U.S. Air Force would, by default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to
come.) While much s! pace in our papers has, of late, been devoted to
the administration's lack of postwar planning, next to no interest has
been shown in the planning that did take place.
-
- At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and
Schmitt piece appeared, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted that the
U.S. was "unlikely to seek any permanent or 'long-term' bases in
Iraq" -- and that was that. The Times' piece was essentially sent
down the memory hole. While scads of bases were being built -- including
four huge ones whose geographic placement correlated fairly strikingly
with the four mentioned in the Times article -- reports about U.S. bases
in Iraq, or any Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely disappeared
from the American media. (With rare exceptions, you could only find discussions
of "permanent bases" in these last years at Internet sites like
Tomdispatch or Global Security.org.)
-
- In May 2005, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington
Post reported that we had 106 bases, ranging from mega to micro in Iraq.
Most of these were to be given back to the Iraqi military, now being
"stood up" as a far larger force than originally imagined by
Pentagon planners, leaving the U.S. with, Graham reported, just the number
of bases -- 4 -- that the Times first mentioned over two years earlier,
including Balad Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar Province.
This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of original Pentagon
thinking, but as a "withdrawal plan." (A modest number of these
bases have since been turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit
transferred to Iraqi military units which, according to Poole, promptly
stripped it to the bone.)
-
- The future of a fifth base -- the enormous Camp Victory
at Baghdad International Airport -- remains, as far as we know, "unresolved";
and there is a sixth possible "permanent super-base" being built
in that country, though never presented as such. The Bush administration
is sinking between $600 million and $1 billion in construction funds into
a new U.S. embassy. It is to arise in Baghdad's Green Zone on a plot of
land along the Tigris River that is reportedly two-thirds the area of
the National Mall in Washington, DC. The plans for this "embassy"
are almost mythic in nature. A high-tech complex, it is to have "15ft
blast walls and ground-to-air missiles" for protection as well as
bunkers to guard against air attacks. It will, according to Chris Hughes,
security correspondent for the British Daily Mirror, include "as
many as 300 houses for consular and military officials" and a "large-scale
barracks" for Marines. The "compound" will be a cluster
of at least 21 buildings, assumedly nearly self-sufficient, including
"a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and
a commissary. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all
be independent from Baghdad's city utilities." It is being billed
as "more secure than the Pentagon" (not, perhaps, the most
reassuring tagline in the post-9/11 world). If not quite a city- state,
on completion it will resemble an embassy-state. In essence, inside Baghdad's
Green Zone, we will be building another more heavily fortified little
Green Zone.
-
- Even Tony Blair's Brits, part of our unraveling, ever-shrinking
"coalition of the willing" in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady
of the Scotsman (Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently
in Iraq) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base -- sorry a base "for
years to come" -- near Basra in southern Iraq, thus mimicking American
"withdrawal" strategy on the micro-scale that befits a junior
partner.
-
- As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment
blog, the Pentagon can plan for "endurance" in Iraq forever
and a day, while top Bush officials and neocons, some now in exile, can
continue to dream of a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that
would control the energy heartlands of the planet. None of that will,
however, make such bases any more "permanent" than their enormous
Vietnam-era predecessors at places like Danang and Cam Rahn Bay proved
to be -- not certainly if the Shiites decide they want us gone or Ayatollah
Sistani (as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against such bases.
-
- Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since
the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases -- call them what you will
-- have been at the heart of the Bush administration's "reconstruction"
of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR- lands,
their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain
at the secret heart of Bush administration "reconstruction"
policy. As long as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever
more enduring (and ever more valuable), there can be no genuine "withdrawal"
from Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent
visits of a couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in
a kind of policy silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them
(other than to deny their permanency from time to time). No presidential
speeches deal with them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The
opposition Democrats generally ignore them and the press -- w! ith the
exception of the odd columnist -- won't even put the words "base,"
"permanent," and "Iraq" in the same paragraph.
-
- It may be hard to do, given the skimpy coverage, but
keep your eyes directed at our "super-bases." Until the administration
blinks on them, there will be no withdrawal from Iraq.
-
- Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com
("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder
of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture,
a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last
Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.
-
- Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt
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