Article on Halliburton Building New Bases in Iraq for US : Houston Indymedia

Digging In
If the U.S. government doesn't plan to occupy Iraq for any longer than
necessary, why is it spending billions of dollars to build "enduring" bases?

Joshua Hammer
March/April 2005 Issue

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters last December that
he expected U.S. troops to remain in Iraq for another four years, he was
merely confirming what any visitor to the country could have surmised. The
omnipresence of the giant defense contractor KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown &
Root), the shipments of concrete and other construction materials, and the
transformation of decrepit Iraqi military bases into fortified American
enclavescomplete with Pizza Huts and DVD storesare just the most obvious
signs that the United States has been digging in for the long haul. It's a
far cry from administration assurances after the invasion that the troops
could start withdrawing from Iraq as early as the fall of 2003. And it is
hardly consistent with a prediction by Richard Perle, the former chairman of
the Defense Policy Board, that the troops would be out of Iraq within
months, or with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi's guess that
the U.S. occupation would last two years. Take, for example, Camp Victory
North, a sprawling base near Baghdad International Airport, which the U.S.
military seized just before the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. Over
the past year, KBR contractors have built a small American city where about
14,000 troops are living, many hunkered down inside sturdy, wooden,
air-conditioned bungalows called SEA (for Southeast Asia) huts, replicas of
those used by troops in Vietnam. There's a Burger King, a gym, the country's
biggest PXand, of course, a separate compound for KBR workers, who handle
both construction and logistical support. Although Camp Victory North
remains a work in progress today, when complete, the complex will be twice
the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovocurrently one of the largest overseas
posts built since the Vietnam War.

Such a heavy footprint seems counterproductive, given the growing antipathy
felt by most Iraqis toward the U.S. military occupation. Yet Camp Victory
North appears to be a harbinger of America's future in Iraq. Over the past
year, the Pentagon has reportedly been building up to 14 "enduring" bases
across the countrylong-term encampments that could house as many as 100,000
troops indefinitely. John Pike, a military analyst who runs the research
group GlobalSecurity.org, has identified a dozen of these bases, including
three large facilities in and around Baghdad: the Green Zone, Camp Victory
North, and Camp al-Rasheed, the site of Iraq’s former military airport. Also
listed are Camp Cook, just north of Baghdad, a former Republican Guard
"military city" that has been converted into a giant U.S. camp; Balad
Airbase, north of Baghdad; Camp Anaconda, a 15-square-mile facility near
Balad that housed 17,000 soldiers as of May 2004 and was being expanded for
an additional 3,000; and Camp Marez, next to Mosul Airport, where, in
December, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the base's dining tent,
killing 13 U.S. troops and four KBR contractors eating lunch alongside the
soldiers.

At these bases, KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary that works in cooperation with
the Army Corps of Engineers, has been extending runways, improving security
perimeters, and installing a variety of structures ranging from rigid-wall
huts to aircraft hangars. Although the Pentagon considers most of the
construction to be "temporary"designed to last up to three yearssimilar
facilities have remained in place for much longer at other "enduring"
American bases, including Kosovo's Camp Bondsteel, which opened in 1999, and
Eagle Base in Tuzla, Bosnia, in place since the mid-1990s.

How long is "enduring"? The administration insists that troops will remain
in Iraq as long as it takes to install a functioning, democratic government,
quell the insurgency, and build an efficient Iraqi fighting force. Given the
elusiveness of those goals, many military experts believe that Rumsfeld's
hope that the troops might be out by 2008 is wildly optimistic. Retired
Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, the top U.S. commander in the Middle
East from 1997 to 2000, recently predicted that American involvement in Iraq
would last at least 10 more years. Retired Army Lt. General Jay Garner, the
former interim administrator of reconstruction efforts in Iraq, told
reporters in February 2004 that a U.S. military presence in Iraq should last
"the next few decades." Even that, some analysts warn, could be an
underestimate. "Half a century ago if anyone tried to convince you that we’d
still have troops in Korea and Japan, you’d think they were crazy," says
Pike, the military analyst. Suspicions also run deep both inside Pentagon
circles and among analysts that the Department of Defense is pouring
billions of dollars into the facilities in pursuit of a different agenda
entirely: to turn Iraq into a permanent base of operations in the Middle
East.

If true, this scheme is fraught with danger. The presence of U.S. troops is
a powerful recruitment tool for the Iraqi insurgencyas well as a source of
bitter anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East. Politically, the
occupation is becoming increasingly untenable: Practically every significant
Iraqi political figurefrom Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani to Iraqi president Ghazi al-Yawar, an influential Sunni
Muslimopposes the occupation and wants the troops out, and any leader who
hopes to maintain credibility will have to make that a priority. "The
presence of bases there is going to be a source of instability and anger for
the Iraqi people, whether they are currently for the insurgency or not,"
says Jessica Matthews, the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, D.C. "It will convince people across the Arab world
that we went there to install an American regime in the Middle East."

The other great danger of "enduring" bases, say critics, is that they tend
to operate according to a well-tested axiom: The deeper you dig in, the
harder it is to dig out. That's hardly reassuring to the 11,400 U.S.
soldiers who’ve had their enlistments extended through the stop-loss clause
in their contracts, and to others who’ve been forced to serve multiple tours
in the combat zone.

One indication of an open-ended U.S. occupation is the amount of money that
has already been spent on bases in Iraq. KBR’s first big building contract
there, in June 2003, was a $200 million project to build and maintain
"temporary housing units" for U.S. troops. Since then, according to military
documents, it has received another $8.5 billion for work associated with
Operation Iraqi Freedom. By far the largest sumat least $4.5 billionhas
gone to construction and maintenance of U.S. bases. By comparison, from 1999
to this spring, the U.S. government paid $1.9 billion to KBR for similar
work in the Balkans.

Does the Department of Defense have a bigger agenda in Iraq? Brig. General
Robert Pollman, chief engineer of base construction in Iraq, caused a
stirand forced his superiors to engage in damage controlwhen he told the
Chicago Tribune last spring that the bases could be a "swap" for bases in
Saudi Arabia. The United States has been closing bases and drawing down its
forces in the kingdom in response to the growing unpopularity of the
American presence there and repeated terror attacks. In mid-2003, roughly
4,500 U.S. troops reportedly redeployed from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, leaving
only about 500 in the kingdom.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served in the
office of the Secretary of Defense until spring 2003, and has since become
an outspoken critic of the war, says that the neoconservative architects of
the Iraq invasion definitely foresaw a permanent, large-scale presence.
Kwiatkowski says that Pentagon planners view the bases as vital both for
protecting Israel and as launchpads for operations in Syria and Iran. The
Pentagon, she says, went into the war assuming that once Saddam was toppled
a so-called Status of Forces Agreement, like those the U.S. government
signed with Japan and South Korea, could be quickly reached with Iraq. The
growth of the insurgency and the vocal opposition to a prolonged U.S.
occupation among Iraqi leaders haven't changed the plan, Kwiatkowski
insists: "We’re pouring concrete. We’re building little fiefdoms with
security, moats, and walls…. Eighty percent of Iraqis will grouse, but they
have no political power," she says. "We'll stay whether they want us to or
not."

Other American officials heartily dispute that assertion. One U.S. official
who served alongside L. Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority
insists that base construction has been an ad hoc effort, reflecting the
changing facts on the ground, not long-term strategy. "At no time did I ever
overhear any meaningful discussion about 'permanent bases,'" he says. "I
remember asking Bremer about it from time to time, and he would say, 'That's
ludicrous.' Maybe there are some military guys brainstorming. But it just
isn't on the agenda." The official concedes that permanent basing in Iraq
"makes sense" from a strictly strategic perspective, given the steady
reduction of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia and the potential volatility of
U.S. relations with other Gulf allies, like Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and
Bahrain, which currently have, all together, an estimated 30,000 U.S. troops
stationed within their borders. But he agrees the consequences of such a
move would be disastrous: Permanent bases "would be under siege, a
temptation for terrorists, a symbol of U.S. occupation. It would totally
undermine our political strategy in Iraq." Adds Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.),
who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, "The next Iraqi
leadership has to show they are truly sovereign and independent. And that’s
hard to do if they lease significant parts of Iraq to the United States.
We've already seen the ability of these insurgents to target our facilities
and attack them. I'd be very reluctant to say this is a good place to base
our troops."

That's not to say that the Pentagon isn't keen to maintain at least some
American presence on the ground. According to one intelligence source in
Baghdad, maintaining a quick reaction force in Iraq would be essential to
prevent, for example, a coup against a friendly Iraqi government. And the
Pentagon sees Iraq as possibly playing a role in its global realignment of
U.S. forcesa shift away from the static, Cold War basing arrangements in
Europe to smaller, more flexible deployments in volatile regions like the
Middle East. One model they point to is Camp Lemonier, which was built in
the Horn of Africa country Djibouti in 2002 and houses about 1,300 troops as
well as facilities for fighter planes.

A high-ranking military officer in the Middle East says that the Pentagon
envisions a small number of bases in Iraq that "in no way approximates what
we have there now." He insists that "we are not planning to occupy the
country. We’re talking about a small, unobtrusive presenceit could simply
be facilities that give you the capability to come in and out." That version
of "Occupation Lite" may eventually come to pass. For the foreseeable
future, however, it is difficult to imagine anything other than an enduring
status quo: a heavy troop presence, big bases spread across the country, and
a steadily rising body count.

Joshua Hammer is the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and has reported
extensively from Iraq. He is the author of A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War
in a Sacred Place and is currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard.