Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Theology of American National Security
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/62703/tomgram-andrew-bacevich-the-theology-of-american-national-securityTomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Theology of American National Security
by Tom Engelhardt | June 18, 2015 - 8:42am
In April 2003, with Baghdad occupied by American troops, the top officials of the Bush administration were already dreaming of building bases in Iraq that would be garrisoned more or less in perpetuity. Everyone was too polite to call them permanent bases, so they were sometimes referred to by the Pentagon as enduring camps. Still, planning for permanent access to at least four giant Iraqi bases was underway, as Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported then. These were intended to anchor a Pax Americana in the Middle East.
In the months that followed President Bushs mission accomplished speech, the U.S. military began constructing bases in remarkable profusion. By late 2003, Lieutenant Colonel David Holt, "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was quoted in an engineering magazine speaking proudly of several billion dollars already having been sunk into base construction. ("The numbers, he said, are staggering." By 2005, as the country disintegrated into Sunni and Shiite insurgencies and chaos ensued, there were 105 U.S. bases in the country, ranging from tiny combat outposts to monster facilities like Balad Air Base with its own Pizza Hut, Subway, and Popeye's franchises, "an ersatz Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges, and four mess halls. By the height of the occupation, Washington had reportedly constructed a mind-boggling 505 bases without any kind of public accounting of what was being spent on them. By 2011, when the last U.S. troops slipped out of the country, every one of them (except the 506th base, the giant three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar American Embassy that the Bush administration built in Baghdad) had been abandoned to the Iraqi military, to looters, or to the ravages of time.
~snip~
When the Obama administration launched Iraq War 3.0 last year, sending in 3,000 American advisers, trainers, and other personnel, it garrisoned some of them on familiar bases reoccupied for the occasion. Last week, as it was preparing to dispatch the next round of trainers and other personnel to Iraq, it also announced the opening of a brand-new lily pad (or bare-bones) base for them at Taqaddam in al-Anbar Province, nearer to the front lines of the conflict with the forces of the Islamic State. At the same time, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey began to talk up the possibility of building additional lily pads -- a network of new bases -- for more U.S. personnel elsewhere in Iraq. (Such a lily-pad strategy was, by the way, tried in Afghanistan and essentially failed.) Soon after, the New York Times reported that President Obama was open to such a strategy. In other words, in Washingtons Groundhog Day-style conflict in Iraq, round two of base building was now underway.
And heres one strange thing: no newspaper reporting on any of this mentioned that there had been a previous history of base building in Iraq -- not even the Times, whose reporters first covered the story back in April 2003. That crucial history has, it seems, simply vanished. In this country, its as if it never happened. And yet the minute you consider the proposed lily-pad strategy in the context of those 505 abandoned bases, it seems risible.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)I remember the "lily pad" thing, I think Petraeus came up with it. It's "the Surge" revisited.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/03/17/white-house-consulting-petraeus-on-fight-against-is.html
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2015/03/harper-general-petraeus-embarrassing-returhn.html
MisterP
(23,730 posts)Israel created Hamas to split the PLO, then pretended these fiends were coming out of the blue to prey on a poor innocent democracy
Reagan funded the mujahedeen (well, not all were proto-Taliban: some were just smack dealers) and Osama's friggin' bagman, and hired proxies to "avenge" Beirut, then pretended these fiends were coming out of the blue to prey on a poor innocent democracy
Obama and Clinton brought in the Khaleejis and their al-Qaeda fighters in Libya, then pretended these fiends were coming out of the blue to prey on a poor innocent new democracy
Obama and Clinton massively armed and funded the FSA, then pretended these fiends were coming out of the blue to prey on a poor innocent Shiite dictatorship (and Israel's treating al-Qaeda now)
in Yemen and Ukraine ...