The final two paragraphs of the following letter (and particularly the final sentence) are an anti-climax, and I fear indicate more wishful thinking than analysis (though I join in the wishing). But in them she does raise the correct question: Can the insurgency find a way to attack those permanent u.s. bases. I didn't recognize the name Carol Brightman, but on googling it found that she was a co-editor of two of my favorite publications from the '60s: _Viet-Report_ and _Leviathan_.
Carrol
LRB | Vol. 28 No. 9 dated 11 May 2006
Letters
>From Vol. 28 No. 9
Cover date: 11 May 2006
Little Americas
>From Carol Brightman
Patrick Cockburn views up close the shutting down of a country, the destruction of mosques, the slaughter of the faithful, the gruesome murder of civilians (LRB, 6 April). ‘Iraq is splitting into three different parts,’ he writes, referring to the principal communities of Shiite, Sunni and Kurds. This is indeed what the few remaining journalists in Baghdad report, but you can get too close to the carnage. You can forget the strategic dimension of the war, what Condoleezza Rice evokes when she declares that while the Bush administration has committed ‘tactical errors, thousands of them’, it’s right on ‘strategy’.
In Iraq, briefly, the larger US strategy has been to do away with Saddam Hussein’s government, set up a few giant military bases – our ‘Little Americas’ – to protect long-term access to Iraqi oil and secure the submission of two remaining outlaw nations in the Middle East, Iran and Syria. Fostering civil war is how the US has made Iraq hospitable to an ‘enduring’ American occupation; not by fighting an insurgency, a battle it lost two years ago, and certainly not by awaiting the functioning of a hopelessly disunited government.
Setting up these huge fortresses – Balad in the east, al-Qayyarah in the north, al-Asad in the west, Tallil in the south – the Pentagon has fulfilled a tradition that began with Kosovo in 1999, which was to leave behind clusters of new bases after every US military intervention. Now the string starts in the Balkans, extends to most of the Central Asian countries and Afghanistan, and continues through the Persian Gulf states.
The timely question for Iraq is whether these mega-bases – with their vast armouries, their miniature golf courses, their cut-rate Fords, Chevies and Harley-Davidsons to be bought and shipped home, their Baskin Robbins ice cream, Pizza Huts, Popeye’s, Burger Kings – are vulnerable to attack by the insurgency. Not at first glance, for they are remote from villages and their average population of 30,000 US soldiers and contract workers includes no Iraqi forces. But their opponents have included the controversial prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom Washington has been so desperate to unseat; and retired American generals, among them Anthony Zinni, former US Mideast Commander, who calls them a ‘stupid’ provocation to Iran.
As the civil war unravels what’s left of the Iraqi state, the fighting will become uglier (if that is imaginable) than now, as Donald Rumsfeld has reminded us. The Pentagon, in fact, has invested in the training of Iraqi death squads, a story from the autumn of 2004 that most have now forgotten. When US involvement with the worst of the assassination teams finally be-comes apparent, the days of the American occupation in Iraq will be numbered.
Carol Brightman Walpole, Maine