Say, what ever happened to those "enduring bases"?

[BrainGlutton]

It was moderately big news last year that the Admin was planning to build 14 “enduring bases” (i.e., intended to be maintained even after the occupation is ended) in Iraq, but then interest seemed to die down – I can’t find any article more recent than this, which dates from March/April 2005. Has the plan been scrapped, or are they continuing to build the bases? In either case, why are the media no longer paying attention? I mean, if after all that’s happened in the past year our leaders are still planning to keep Iraq indefinitely as a “coaling station” – a base for the projection of American military power in the region as needed – that’s a pretty big deal, isn’t it? And is anybody making this an issue in the Congressional election? If not, why not?

[Ethilrist]

Well, why would they stop building them? The troops need a safe place to live, after all.

[Squink]

Congress Heads Off Permanent Iraq Bases

Sept. 30, 2006
Congress on Friday moved to block the Bush administration from building permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq or controlling the country’s oil sector, as it approved $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
…
The administration has downplayed prospects for permanent bases in Iraq, but lawmakers have called on President Bush to make a definitive statement that the U.S. has no such plans.

Bush’ll still probably figure out how to fund them through some sort of ‘recess appointment’ type shenanigans.

[elucidator]

Something doesn’t make sense here. I was definitely under the impression that they had *been * building those bases for some time now, like, years. What have they gotten done, outside of transferring large sums of $ into the corporate coffers of fine, upstanding corporations whose patriotic credentials are impeccable. If they haven’t actually started, peachy keen, they can give us the money back (ha! yeah, I know…) If they have started but now are going to stop because the money fountain is stopped up, well, shit, guess thats better than good money chasing bad. But, you know, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking about some serious money!

[Squink]

@elucidator

Something doesn’t make sense here.

I agree. One of the funding measures passed last year also contained a provision that prohibited funding for permanent bases. I suspect that Bush got Gonzales to clarify the legal definition of ‘permanent’ as ‘anything pre-designed to last more than 4 X 10[sup]9[/sup] years.’ That would have the legal effect of making whatever we build over there temporary.

[gonzomax]

How about the enormous embassy that was under schedule and well along.

[Kimstu]

Google “Iraq super-bases”. The most recent info I’ve found is from around early spring 2006, such as this article:

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 multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. 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. […]

Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and “smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq.” In a piece entitled Biggest Base in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel, Ricks paints a striking portrait:

The base is sizeable enough to have its own “neighborhoods” including “KBR-land” (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); “CJSOTF” (“home to a special operations unit,” the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, surrounded by “especially high walls,” and so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out Army Humvees. There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye’s, “an ersatz Starbucks,” a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and “a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of concertina wire and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee cage.”

Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad live in “air-conditioned containers” which will, in the future – and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future – be wired “to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas telephone access.” […]

There are at least four such “super-bases” in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with “withdrawal” from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say – and they always deny that we seek “permanent” bases in Iraq -– facts-on-the-ground speak with another voice entirely. […]

To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain at the secret heart of Bush administration “reconstruction” policy. As long as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever more enduring (and ever more valuable), there can be no genuine “withdrawal” from Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent visits of a couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in a kind of policy silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them (other than to deny their permanency from time to time). No presidential speeches deal with them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them and the press – with the exception of the odd columnist – won’t even put the words “base,” “permanent,” and “Iraq” in the same paragraph.

[gonzomax]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-04-19-us-embassy_x.htm What is more super than this and how can they abandon it .

[if6was9]

I only half mean this as a joke, which is why I dare to post it in GD…

Iraqi Insurgency: All your base are belong to us!