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Recent
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April
28, 2003
Ann
Harrison
Fighting Back: Medical Marijuana
Patients Sue Ashcroft
Robert
Jensen
Lack of WMD Kills the Case for War
Peter Phillips
Total Information Control
Ron
Jacobs
Get the US Out of Iraq and Its Military Out of Our Minds
Mark Hand
Peace Park: The Pentagon Solution
to a Baseball Stadium Dilemma
Linda
S. Heard
Repeat After Me: Iraq is Weapons Free
Kurt Nimmo
US Military Bases: the Spoils and
Deceptions of War
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/26
April
26 / 27, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
The Other War: Bush, Ashcroft and
the End of Civil Liberties
Saul
Landau
Iraq War: a Policy of Christian and Jewish Fundamentalism
William
A. Cook
Sharon Recruits US as Mercenaries Against Syria
William
S. Lind
Now the Real War Starts
John Chuckman
In Jesus's Name:
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David
MacMichael and Ray McGovern
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Sandels
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Z.
Our Ba'athists
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Gancarski
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Handleman
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Claud Cockburn
Evelyn Waugh's Ear Trumpet
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/26
April
25, 2003
David
Vest
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Steven
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Brasch
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Cockburn
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Hammond
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Springtime in Iraq
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/25
Website
of the Day
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24, 2003
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Whitman
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Avnery
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Our Man in Baghdad
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Do You Regret Being an American?
Harold
A. Gould
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Stew Albert
Big Brother in Bed
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/24
Website
of the Day
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April
23, 2003
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Gancarski
When Young Mothers Die in Combat
Chris
Floyd
Desolation Row: Bush's Barbarians Teach
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Marjorie
Cohn
Tax the War Profiteers
William
Lind
The Fourth Generation of Modern War
Dave Marsh
Nina Simone: Freedom Singer
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Kampmark
Malayasia's America: the War on Iraq
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Rodman
Lawn Poem
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/23
Website
of the Day
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April
22, 2003
Edward
Said
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Hamod
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Nimmo
Shi'a Will to Power
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Leupp
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Estabrook
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Stanton
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Baroud
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Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult
Stew
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/22
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April
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Cassel
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Gary
Leupp
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Berry
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Brechin
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April
19, 2003
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The Rape of History
Saul
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Pablo
Mukherjee
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Barghouti
Sharon's Bloody Beat
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Z.
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Gordon
Haunted by History
Adam
Engel
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Dr.
Susan Block
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Perry
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Allen
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Perry
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April
17, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Patriot Gore: the Fatal Flaws in
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Issam
Nashashibi
Zalmay Khalilzad: the Neocon's Bagman
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Boris
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Virtual Saddam Takes Aim
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Stanley
Heller
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Tim Robbins
A Chill Wind is Blowing Through This Nation
Harold
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Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/17
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April 28,
2003
US Military Bases:
the Spoils and
Deceptions of War
by KURT NIMMO
Donald Rumsfeld says the US does not want its
troops in countries where they are not welcome. "You want
to be someplace that people want us, you really do," he
admitted in an interview. "We don't want to be places that
we're not wanted. We simply don't."
No word if the interviewer laughed or
even scoffed. What Rumsfeld said is so deceptive that it transcends
absurdity. He said the size of the US military force in the Gulf
region would likely shrink now that the Iraqi military no longer
poses a threat to its neighbors. "With the absence of the
Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the need for a US presence in
the region would diminish rather than increase," he said.
The US has troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the
United Arab Emirates.
So, will the US simply yank up its tent
stakes and go home?
Consider the investments. The United
States spent a bundle on a state-of-the-art air command center
at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. It recently shelled
out $1.5 billion for an air base at Al-Udeid in Qatar. In Central
Asia, the US acquired the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan last year.
It concluded US base agreements with Pakistan and two former
Soviet republics, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many of these agreements
are classified -- contained within documents known as "status
of force agreements" -- in order to prevent opposition on
the part of the locals. Secret agreements and local opposition
aside, Russian journalists reported that the United States and
Uzbekistan signed an agreement leasing the Khanabad base for
25 years.
Before the invasion of Iraq Deputy Defense
Secretary and neocon Paul Wolfowitz discussed US bases in an
interview with the New York Times. "Their function may be
more political than actually military," he explained. US
bases "send a message to everybody, including important
countries like Uzbekistan, that we have a capacity to come back
in and will come back in."
Is it possible Rumsfeld is telling a
lie -- hardly a rarity for the duplicitous Bushites -- in order
to mask the Pentagon's true intentions? Last Sunday the New York
Times quoted unidentified Bush administration officials as saying
the United States wants to keep four permanent military bases
in Iraq. More than likely these bases will be situated at the
international airport, the H-1 airfield, Tallil airfield near
Nasiriya, and Bashur airfield. "The impression that's left
around the world is that we plan to occupy the country, we plan
to use their bases over the long period of time, and it's flat
false," Rumsfeld said about the New York Times story.
"Whenever America goes to war, the
spoils of victory invariably include more US military bases overseas,"
writes Ian Traynor of the Guardian. "The Iraqi deployment
plans fall into the century-old pattern of US foreign bases being
built on the back of military victory. They are also the latest
episode in an extraordinary surge in America's projection of
military muscle since September 11... From Camp Bondsteel in
Kosovo, a result of the 1999 Nato campaign, to the Bishkek airbase
in Kyrgyzstan, appropriated for the Afghanistan war, the Americans
are establishing an armed presence in places they have never
been before."
Either Rumsfeld falls asleep during Pentagon
meetings, or he is smoking crack on his lunch break. As head
honcho at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld should know about the upgrades
to the Krzesiny air base at Poznan in western Poland. He should
be aware of the visit of General Gregory Martin, the top US air
force officer in Europe, to Bulgaria and Romania where Martin
checked out real estate for a move into the Balkans. "All
of those places now represent opportunities for us to create
relationships that some day will allow us the access we need,"
Martin told the Stars and Stripes.
"In every meaningful sense, the
reach and spread of the US bases is growing very strongly, alarmingly
from the point of view of the rest of the world," Marcus
Corbin, a security analyst at the Center for Defense Information
think tank in Washington, told the Guardian. "The big thing
to come out of Iraq is that the US will redouble its efforts
to diversify its assets and potential."
It's helpful to read between the lines
when Rumsfeld and the neocons speak. Obviously, a large and undisguised
presence of US troops in the Middle East and Central Asia would
make the locals nervous -- and has the potential to destabilize
governments in the neighborhood. The Bushites are looking for
permanent access, not permanent basing. "Our basic interest
is to have the ability to go into a country and have a relationship
and have understandings about our ability to land or over-fly
and to do things that are of mutual benefit to each of us,"
Rumsfeld said last year aboard an Air Force C-32 bound for Central
Asia. "But we don't have any particular plans for permanent
bases."
If not for permanent bases, and thousands
of obtrusive and resented US troops, how will the Bushites impose
"democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to
every corner of the world," as the neocon national security
strategy characterizes it?
Think Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran.
Think Suharto, the brutal dictator who ruled Indonesia for 32
years. Think General Castillo Armas in Guatemala, General Joseph
Mobutu in Zaire, General Pinochet in Chile, or Jonas Savimbi
in Angola. In fact, think of Saddam Hussein, the obscure Ba'ath
Party hit man who eventually "came to power on a CIA train,"
as Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general, described
it. All of these dictators were catapulted to power by the US
with the covert and often not so covert help of the CIA. No invasions
were necessary, no conspicuous "footprint" was required.
As former CIA agent John Stockwell has
noted, after successful coups in the Third World, the US went
about setting up and training secret police. "We created
and left behind [in Nicaragua] a National Guard with officers
trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests.
This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism...
The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units that are, today,
the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders were on the CIA's
payroll, trained by the CIA in the United States. We had the
public safety program going throughout Central and Latin America
for twenty-six years, in which we taught them to break up subversion
by interrogating people: interrogation, including torture, the
way the CIA taught it."
In post-invasion Iraq, however, the CIA
appears to building a complete "intelligence service"
from the ground up. "You really want whatever emerges on
Iraq to reflect favorably on the CIA," Vincent Cannistraro
told the Newhouse News Service. "That almost certainly means,
in this case, starting over with new people. You're going to
have to start from scratch." Cannistraro is probably best
known as the man in charge of the CIA's collusion with the contras
in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.
More than likely the "new people"
mentioned by Cannistraro will be former Ba'athists who worked
for Saddam Hussein and Mukhabarat, or the Department of General
Intelligence or the General Directorate of Intelligence (Al-Mukhabarat
Al-A'ma). Chances are the US will get a better understanding
of how Mukhabarat operated so effectively -- creating, in essence,
a hermetically sealed dictatorship and, as Pepe Escobar of the
Asia Times writes, "a parallel state in Iraq" -- now
that Farouk Hijazi, the former operations director for Saddam
Hussein's secret police, was allegedly captured near the Syrian
border.
A new CIA-fashioned Mukhabarat, working
undetected deep within the inscrutable domain of spooks and secret
police to circumvent political movements unacceptable to the
US-imposed government of Iraq, may reduce the US military "footprint"
so abhorred by Iraqis and other Arabs, but ultimately, if the
tenacity of the Shi'ites are any indication, it will fail. If
the Bush neocons need an example of what very well may happen
in Iraq sooner before later, they need look no further than Iran
where demonstrations against a pro-US government in 1978 eventually
resulted in the downfall of the shah and Khomeini's declaration
of an Islamic republic. "The radical fundamentalist regime
that rules Iran today," writes Mark Zapezauer, "could
never have found popular support without the CIA's 1953 coup
[against democratically elected prime minister Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh]
and the repression that followed."
Even as the Bushites have demonstrate
their ability to engage in pathological lying (most notably in
regard to WMD and attempting to finger Saddam as a supporter
of al-Qaeda), they cannot deny or easily paper over the current
situation -- Iraqi Shi'ite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's
future, a future many of them want to be dictated by the precepts
of religion.
In Washington, policy hacks and Pentagon
officials are now beginning to realize the Shi'ites are far more
organized and dedicated than previously believed. Last Monday,
according to the Washington Post, "one meeting of generals
and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in
on Iraq's Shi'ites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic
fundamentalism in Iraq." In fact, the Bushites are so clueless
about the influence of Shia Islam in Iraq that Rumsfeld made
himself look foolish by blaming it all on the Iranians. Attempts
to ""transform Iraq in Iran's image will not be permitted,"
Rumsfeld blustered. "We will not allow the Iraqi people's
democratic transition to be hijacked by those who might wish
to install another form of dictatorship."
Moreover, as if to send the message that
he is not only an ignoramus, but a racist as well, Rumsfeld said
the "Shias in the country are Iraqis and the Shias outside
the country from Iran are Persians. My guess is that the Iraqi
people would prefer to be governed by Iraqis and not Persians...
The government of Iran has encouraged people to go into the country
[Iraq] and... they have people in the country attempting to influence
the country." Rumsfeld seems incapable, or unwilling, to
accept the fact Islam refuses to be contained by borders -- borders,
incidentally, established by the British and French -- or is
Islam circumscribed by race.
As the journalist Robert Fisk told Amy
Goodman of Democracy Now, Bush's plans for Iraq are doomed to
failure. "I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon,
which of course will be first referred to as a war by terrorists,
by al Qaeda, by remnants of Saddam's regime... but it will be
waged particularly by Shi'ite Muslims against the Americans and
the British to get us out of Iraq and that will happen... We
now have American troops occupying the wealthiest Arab country
in the world. And the shockwaves of that are going to continue
for decades to come, long after you and I are in our graves,
if that's where we go. And I don't think we have yet realized
-- I don't think that the soldiers involved or the Presidents
involved have yet realized the implications of what has happened.
We have entered a new age of imperialism, the life of which we
have not attempted to judge or assess or understand."
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
We highly recommend regular visits to
Nimmo's website, Another
Day in the Empire
Today's
Features
Ann
Harrison
Fighting Back: Medical Marijuana
Patients Sue Ashcroft
Robert
Jensen
Lack of WMD Kills the Case for War
Peter Phillips
Total Information Control
Ron
Jacobs
Get the US Out of Iraq and Its Military Out of Our Minds
Mark Hand
Peace Park: The Pentagon Solution
to a Baseball Stadium Dilemma
Linda
S. Heard
Repeat After Me: Iraq is Weapons Free
Kurt Nimmo
US Military Bases: the Spoils and
Deceptions of War
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/26
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