Phantom military bases materializing in Iraq [View All]

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=b9f41c4ade25f4d6
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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, multibillions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lieutenant-Colonel 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 been 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 past 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 US base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq". In a piece titled "Biggest base in Iraq has small-town feel", Ricks paints a striking portrait:



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So Rumsfeld is full of it when he says we are getting out!!! No we have taken over...