U.S. planners claim they want to move the bases in Germany to forward operating sites (FOSs) and cooperative security locations (CSLs) in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria because they are closer to potential areas of conflict. In December 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed an access agreement with Romania to set up U.S. military bases there.42 However, in its planning, the Pentagon does not seem to take into account just how many buildings, hangars, airfields, and warehouses we occupy in Germany and how expensive it would be to build even slightly comparable facilities in former communist countries such as Romania, one of Europe’s poorest places. Lieutenant Colonel Amy Ehmann, a military spokesperson in Hanau, Germany, pointed out to the press in 2003, “There’s no place to put these people” in Romania and Bulgaria. According to many press reports, the Bush administration had a special interest in Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania not for defense but as a secret CIA prison for the interrogation and torture of terrorism suspects.43 This may come closer to the real uses to which bases in such poor countries of Eastern Europe may be put. One thing is certain: American commanders have no intention of living in a backwater like Constanta, Romania, and plan to hang on to their military headquarters in Stuttgart and Heidelberg, convenient as they are to so many nearby military golf courses and the armed forces ski center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps.
According to the Global Posture Review, the United States intends to retain three facilities in Germany no matter what: Ramstein Air Base, nearby Spangdahlem Air Base, and the huge Grafenwöhr training area and firing ranges near Nuremberg in Bavaria. The United States has grown used to thinking of these as virtually American territory. Ramstein Air Base, in particular, represents the largest community of Americans— over forty thousand—and the most immense military installation outside of the United States. Its military hospital is the biggest such facility overseas. The Ramstein complex is located in a rural and relatively underdeveloped part of southwestern Germany, adjacent to the small town of Kaiserslautern, known to linguistically challenged GIs as “K-town.”44 The Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based research organization, contends that the United States still has 480 nuclear warheads in Europe, 130 of them deployed at Ramstein. Three of Germany’s center-left parties deeply oppose this.45 The air base also houses important espionage facilities, including part of the global Echelon eavesdropping system, and the Twenty-sixth Intelligence Group, a unit of the Air Intelligence Agency affiliated with the National Security Agency.46 In addition to all the usual schools, housing estates, and supermarkets, Ramstein maintains one of the finest eighteen-hole golf courses in Europe.
Today, Ramstein has also become a logistics base for the U.S. fleet of 180 C-17 Globemasters. It took over this function from Frankfurt’s Rhein-Main Air Base, which the United States was forced to give up in October 2005. Rhein-Main was the main staging area for the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, whereas Ramstein was not built until 1953. During 2004, some 624,000 American soldiers and their families passed through Rhein-Main, most of the troops en route to or from Iraq. The air base shared runways with Frankfurt International Airport, Europe’s second busiest. The German government finally bought out the U.S. interest in the property so that it could build a third passenger terminal in preparation for the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger jet, when it goes into service in 2006. Although Rhein-Main was long a symbol of postwar German-American friendship and cooperation, according to the New York Times, “Germans are generally dry-eyed about the decline in American visibility.”47
The question is: How long will Germany accept the current base structure when the United States seems interested in having bases in Europe’s most powerful country only to serve narrow American interests? The same question could be asked of the Spanish government’s toleration of the air force’s Moron air base and our naval station at Rota, on the Atlantic coast halfway between Gibraltar and the border of Portugal. The Turkish government may not continue to feel comfortable about our joint use of the air base at Incirlik, and the South Korean government’s forbearance may in future years wane when it comes to the huge array of American bases in its country since the United States refuses to give it any say in when or how they will be used.
The Global Posture Review is a purely military analysis of where the United States might like to have military bases in light of possible future wars, including those we might start. It contains almost no political understanding of the foundations of the American empire or of the way Bush administration policies have threatened its cornerstone bases, not to speak of the global loathing these have generated.48 The longevity of the U.S. empire depends less on hypertechnical military and strategic calculations than on whether its junior partners trust the good sense of the U.S. government, factors to which the Bush administration seems to be totally blind.
Peter Katzenstein, a political economist at Cornell University, has argued that the jewels in the crown of the American empire are Germany and Japan and the regions they dominate—Europe and Northeast Asia. Japan is the worlds second- or third-largest economy, depending on how one evaluates China, and Germany is the fifth. They bear much the same relationship to the American empire that the so-called white dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—had with the British Empire. “Germany’s and Japan’s unconditional surrender and occupation by the United States,” Katzenstein has written, “created two client states that eventually rose to become core regional powers.... It is not American dictates to the world that are its most important and enduring source of power. It is the American capacity to generate and tolerate diversity in a loose but shared sense of moral order.... Total defeat in war was the precondition for Japan’s and Germany’s belated conversion to the American way of informal liberal rule.”49
After the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the unification of Germany, these mutually profitable relationships seemed destined to have a very long life. But the coming to power and influence in the United States of men and women with only a superficial knowledge of history and international affairs has greatly diminished “the consent and cooperation that remain indispensable to America’s imperium.”50 It is no longer inconceivable that our satellites might one day kick us out— and get away with it, just as the East Europeans did with the Soviet Union in 1989.
The huge arrays of bases in Germany and Japan and their semipermanent quality are the forms of empire preferred by U.S. government planners. It is clear today that the Bush administration intended, upon Saddam Hussein’s certain defeat, to create military bases in Iraq similar to those we built or took over in Germany and Japan after World War II. The covert purpose of our 2003 invasion was empire building—to move the main focus of our military installations in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, gain control over Iraq’s oil resources, and make that country a permanent Pentagon outpost for the control of much of the rest of the “arc of instability.”
In response to the question, “What were the real reasons for our invasion of Iraq?” retired air force lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a former strategist inside the Near East Division of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggested: “One reason has to do with enhancing our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing.... So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter—to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important.”51 In the spring of 2005, Kwiatkowski further noted, Pentagon leaders regarded Iraqi bases as vital for protecting Israel and as potential launching pads for preventive wars in Syria and Iran, part of the administration’s strategic vision of reorganizing the entire region as part of an American sphere of influence. So it seems likely we intend to stay there whether the Iraqis want us or not.52
Our publicly stated policy, as the Overseas Basi
ng Commission puts it, has continued to be: “Decisions on temporary, permanent, or ‘enduring’ U.S. bases in Iraq have yet to be made. . . . U.S. presence in Iraq is a subject for discussions with the Iraqi government once it is formed.”53 On February 17, 2005, for instance, Secretary Rumsfeld testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I can assure you that we have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” The actual policy being implemented on the ground, however, is to build a number of stable, hardened facilities (the military avoids the term “permanent”) that, according to Lieutenant General Walter E. Buchanan III, chief of air operations in the U.S.’s Central Command, “will remain available for U.S. use for at least another decade or two.”54
One can infer from numerous unofficial comments by American military officials in Iraq that, even if a future Iraqi government should attempt to kick us out, the Pentagon nonetheless plans to retain at least four crucially located and heavily fortified bases. In February 2005, Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, who was an adviser on democratization to our chief envoy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, summed up the basing situation this way:” [W] e could declare . .. that we have no permanent designs on Iraq and we will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. This one statement would do an enormous amount to undermine the suspicion that we have permanent imperial intentions in Iraq. We aren’t going to do that. And the reason we’re not going to do that is because we are building permanent military bases in Iraq.”55
These permanent bases are the successors to the formerly permanent bases we hoped to hang on to in Saudi Arabia. However, on August 26, 2003, in a small ceremony at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the United States ended its thirteen-year presence in the kingdom. By then it had relocated its Persian Gulf headquarters to Al-Udeid Air Base in the small neighboring emirate of Qatar and launched a $1.2 billion program to upgrade the sixteen major airfields we already occupied elsewhere in the Middle East. In an interview with the New York Times, Lieutenant General Buchanan claimed that there were only two “enduring” bases for American operations in the Middle East outside Iraq: al-Udeid in Qatar and al-Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates.56 The problem with this statement is that it depends entirely on what the air force means by “enduring.” There are quite substantial bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman that Lieutenant General Buchanan overlooks. In any case, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers and the KBR Corporation of Houston were making major improvements to both of the bases Buchanan cited, largely financed by the host governments.
In Iraq, using funds appropriated for military operations, the U.S. military has hired KBR and other companies to build or rebuild around a dozen semipermanent, reinforced bases. According to Joshua Hammer, the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek, since the original contracts of potentially $7 billion awarded to KBR in 2003, “it has received another $8.5 billion for work associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom. By far the largest sum—at least $4.5 billion—has gone to construction and maintenance of U.S. bases.”57 These funds were contained in an $82 billion supplementary war-spending bill approved by Congress in May 2005.58
According to Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune, we began our occupation of Iraq in the spring of 2003 with some 120 “forward operating bases.”59 Two years later we had returned 14 to the Iraqis and still occupied 106, plus four prisons holding more than eleven thousand prisoners and several logistics centers for servicing truck convoys from Kuwait. Bradley Graham of the Washington Post quoted an unnamed general as saying, “If we’re going to withdraw, we need a base plan.”60 This planning process led to the crash program to build permanent structures made of mortar-resistant concrete at some fourteen of the bigger bases and to concentrate on four airfields away from urban areas that we intend to keep as long as possible.
Any visitor to Iraq, according to Newsweek’s Hammer, could not fail to note “[t]he omnipresence of the giant defense contractor KBR, ... the shipments of concrete and other construction materials, and the transformation of decrepit Iraqi military bases into fortified American enclaves.” In its report of May 2005, the Overseas Basing Commission “observed the immense amount of military construction to support U.S. operations that has taken place and is currently being planned within USCENTCOM.”61 Since the secretary of defense has not explicitly authorized this construction, although he undoubtedly knows about it, there is no straightforward list of these “enduring” bases in Iraq. The Department of Defense maintains a pervasive silence on the subject, and members of Congress of both parties routinely say it is not part of their “agenda.”62 The following compilation of facilities that the United States would like to keep has therefore been pieced together from various fragmentary accounts. By far the most important compilation is by the Global Security Organization of Alexandria, Virginia.63
Three of the bases are in or around Baghdad itself. First is the Green Zone, the four-square-mile enclave in the middle of the city encircled by fifteen-foot concrete walls and rings of concertina wire. Its buildings include Saddam Hussein s former presidential palace, which is headquarters for the current Iraqi government, the U.S. embassy, and offices for numerous military and civilian functionaries.64
The new U.S. embassy is as permanent a base as they come. Located in a 104-acre compound, it will be the biggest embassy in the world—ten times the size of a typical American embassy, six times larger than the U.N., as big as Vatican city, and costing $592 million to build. It will be defended by blast walls and ground-to-air missiles. A workforce of nine hundred mostly Asian workers who live on the site has been imported to do the actual construction. They work around the clock (at a time when most Iraqis are enduring blackouts of up to twenty-two hours a day, the embassy site is floodlit by night). This diplomatic “facility” will have its own apartment buildings (six of them) for a staff of perhaps 5,500 (many of them troops for guard duty), its own electricity, well-water, and waste-treatment facilities, plus the de rigueur “swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court, and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.” The London Times’s Daniel McGrory reports that Baghdad residents are properly cynical watching what they call, in mock-honor of Saddam Hussein’s famously self-glorifying building projects, “George W’s palace,” as it rises on the banks of the Tigris River while their lives crumble around them. It goes without saying that, like the former American embassy in Saigon, the Baghdad embassy will have one or more helipads on the roofs.65
The other two bases in the Baghdad vicinity are Camp Victory North, adjacent to the international airport, and al-Rashid Military Camp, the capital’s former military airport. At Victory North, KBR has built an encampment for 14,000 troops housed in air-conditioned barracks with access to the largest post exchange in Iraq. (Other sources assert that the biggest PX is at Camp Taji north of Baghdad.) Camp Victory North includes Qasr al-Fao, one of Saddam Hussein’s ornate palaces, which sits in the middle of a man-made lake stocked with carp and catfish. The palace is now occupied by senior military commanders. At first, there was some concern about American generals occupying such ostentatious buildings associated with the Saddam era, but the high command decided it was too expensive to build replacement facilities.66 So they continue to occupy at least fifteen former presidential palaces spread around the country. Camp Victory North, it should be noted, is twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, constructed by KBR in 1999 and until the Iraq war the largest overseas base built since the Vietnam War.67
Some seventeen miles north of Baghdad is Taji Air Base, renamed Camp Cooke by the Americans after a First Armored Division sergeant killed in Baghdad in December 2003 and then in September 2004 changed back to Camp Taji.68 Taji was a former Republican Guard “military city.” According to the description of the base by the Global Security Organization, “The quality of life at Camp Taji gets better every day. The Camp now has ... a Subway, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. They also have a newly built dining facility, which
is three times larger [than the old one] and the food selection is unbelievable. There are several gyms and MWR facilities [Morale, Welfare, and Recreation] where soldiers can exercise, watch movies or sporting events, and play games. Soldiers live in air-conditioned and heated trailers, have hot showers, and can eat four meals a day in the new dining facility.”
Thirteen miles north of Camp Taji is the fifteen-square-mile Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, and its associated army facility, Camp Anaconda, so gigantic it requires nine internal bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors to get around inside the earthen berms and concertina wire. During 2004, Anaconda was headquarters of the Third Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division, whose job it was to police some 1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra to Taji. Despite extensive security precautions, the base has frequently come under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of July 2003, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded at the local field hospital. During 2005, the military spent $228.7 million to upgrade ramps, runway lights, and parking facilities for some 138 army helicopters at Balad. Military flights that once flew into Baghdad International Airport now use Balad to allow for the resumption of commercial flights at Baghdad. Its air traffic is second only in the world to London’s Heathrow.69 Balad houses over 250 aircraft.
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic Page 21