Doonesbury’s Sunday strip for 6-27-04 claimed that the U.S. is building 14 permanent military bases in Iraq.
This jibes with what I’ve heard hinted at as the “real reason” why we invaded, but I wonder what Trudeau’s source for that is.
Anyone?
It is widely known that the invasion of Iraq was being pushed well before September 2001, the events of which merely provided a convenient excuse.
Rebuilding America’s Defences (90 page PDF)
[Moderator Hat ON]
To GQ. Guys, behave yourself there, no GD stuff. ::looks at SentientMeat::
[Moderator Hat OFF]
As I have read it, they aren’t “permanent” - they are “mid term” bases designed to last 10-15 years.
However, nothing says that they won’t be used after that designed period, or that they will be abandoned long before it.
But it is safe to say that the Corps of Engineers is buys building bases for both US and Iraqi military forces.
(I won’t be able to reply to this since I don’t do the whole GQ thing, but I suspect it might bounce back to GD anyway 
Old hat for news junkies who can’t miss a fix.
IIRC, they’re called something like ‘enduring camps’ and ‘enduring bases’
cribbed from here
**Meet the 389th Engineers, Davenport component**
March 14, 2004
He understood Camp Victory to be the largest combat base project since Vietnam. It required filling nearly five miles of deep irrigation ditches with more than 185,000 tons of rubble, the clearing of acres of wheat fields, and the laying of gravel and building roads.
It’s to be one of eight long-term bases American troops plan to use on Baghdad’s outskirts in a move out of the city center to coincide with the return of sovereignty to the nation on June 30.
[and]
By late January 2004 engineers from the 1st Armored Division were midway through an $800 million project to build half a dozen camps for the incoming 1st Cavalry Division. Army planners expected to finish by 15 March 2004. The new outposts, dubbed Enduring Camps, will improve living quarters for soldiers and allow the military to return key infrastructure sites within the Iraqi capital to the emerging government, military leaders said. “The plan is for the camps to last five to 10 years,” said Col. Lou Marich, commander of the 1st AD engineers. “They will last longer if we take care of them.”
I think that is should also be included:
Q: In the process that you are engaged in now of looking not just at Iraq, but at the region, can you give us your thought process — frame for us how you want the American footprint to look like, a year or two from now, in the region. There was also a New York Times story saying that the administration was supposedly looking at, long term, four air bases in Iraq.
Is that, in fact, a reflection of your thinking for the future of that country?
Rumsfeld: Well, it depends — it says “senior Bush administration officials say.” To my knowledge, I don’t know what senior is, but I can tell you he wasn’t asked (indicating General Myers), I wasn’t asked, Torie wasn’t asked, Wolfowitz wasn’t asked, Pace wasn’t asked, and there has been zero discussion among senior Bush administration officials, the way I define senior, on that subject. We literally have not even considered that.
Now, what is going on? There are four bases that the U.S. is using in that country to help bring in humanitarian assistance, to help provide for stability operations. And are they doing that? Sure. But does that have anything to do with the long-term footprint? Not a whit.
April 24, 2003
Q: I would like to take you to a subject that you addressed earlier this week, which was the question of whether there’s planning on the way in the Pentagon to establish a long-term military relationship with the government that does emerge in Iraq that might allow access for U.S. forces in the future?
Rumsfeld: Well, you know. Is there any planning going on in the Pentagon? **Is somebody thinking about something like that? I don’t doubt it for a minute. ** But we are looking at our footprint all over the globe as I have indicated. We are looking at it in Asia we are looking at it in Europe, which General Jones has announced. We are looking at it in the Middle East, in fact, we’ve just changed our footprint to some extent because we announced the end of operation of southern watch and northern. It was the end of a period and that changes that. Those forces leave. My guess is that in the case of Iraq you couldn’t even begin to think about that until there was an interim government, that a final government that would be in a position to make those kind of arrangements.
Second, and I don’t anticipate that will be the case. **Second, certainly and not at the senior level there’s no one planning anything like that. ** And third, my guess is with the absence of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. The need for U.S. presence in the region would diminish rather than increase. And forth, there’s an awful lot of countries in the region where a lot of money has been spent, in neighboring countries where we have excellent facilities, excellent cooperation and it’s not as though we need additional places out there.
(emphasis added)
While this isn’t exactly a confirmation, it’s not exactly a denial either.
On the other hand, we have Bryton Johnson and others of the Combined Joint Task Force-7 (CJTF-7) Forward Engineer Support Team-Augmentation (FEST-A) multi-district Tiger Team “engaged in master planning for the permanent bases in Iraq.”
from Jan 04 Engineer Update published monthly for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
**Engineer support teams build logistical hub in Iraq**
By Grant Sattler
Coalition Provisional Authority
Johnson is a project manager in the environmental branch at Europe District. He deployed to Turkey in April for a month for the planned push into Iraq from the north, returned to Germany, and then deployed to Iraq in July with a multi-district Tiger Team engaged in master planning for the permanent bases in Iraq, working at Al Taji north of Baghdad.
Johnson said his major projects on LSA Anaconda are building a Class 8 warehouse for medical supplies, building a theater postal distribution facility, and building an 800,000-square-foot concrete parking apron for both the Air Force and Army. The warehouse is mechanically complicated because of refrigeration for blood supplies and security for narcotics.
oops.
I don’t geuss that it needed to be included in a GQ thread.
My bad.
I was in my own little world of a dozen browser windows.
Well, it does offer a rebuttal to the idea that there will be ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq.
Slight hijack: I remember living in barracks in the mid 70s that had been built in WWII as ‘temporary quarters’. The shelf life was supposed to be about 5-10 years.
My dad used to work in tempoary buildings that dated all the way back to WWII. This was in the 80s to maybe even the early 90s. For all I know, they are still there.
Aww, Gaudere, I put it in GD in the first place so respondents would feel free to inject GD stuff!
:smack:
To be fair to Trudeau, I believe he meant permanent in the sense of “buildings, not tents” rather than “projected to exist forever”, which jibes with the 10-15 year span mentioned here earlier.
As per SimonX,
I grew up on a farm. I looked at that cite for whether provision was made for irrigation replacement, or mention of compensation to the owners of the wheat fields, and didn’t find any.
Has anyone seen reference to that kind of information?