It's a Pentagon World and Welcome To It: Bases,Bases Everywhere

[sintax]

Tomgram: It’s a Pentagon World and Welcome to It

Bases, Bases Everywhere
Pentagon Planning in Iraq, 2003-2005
By Tom Engelhardt

In other words, the global ambitions of the Pentagon -- and the soaring budgets that go with those ambitions -- are beyond our means (not that that means much to the Bush administration). The report's criticism evidently irritated Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and so the report, already posted at a government website, was promptly taken down after the Defense Department claimed it contained classified information, especially "a reference to ongoing negotiations over U.S. bases in Bulgaria and Romania." (As it happened, the Federation of American Scientists had posted the report at its own site, where it remains available to all, according to Secrecy News.)

<snip>

Spanning the World

Base news has been trickling in from the ‘stans of Central Asia -- formerly SSRs of the old Soviet Union -- as well. After the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, we rushed an official into the country -- no, not the Secretary of State to celebrate the spread of democracy, but our globe-trotting Secretary of Defense, who hustled into that otherwise obscure land just to make sure that Ganci Air Base (named not for some Kyrgyzstani hero, but for Peter Ganci, the New York City fire chief killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks) in the capital of Bishkek was still ours to use (as it is).

<snip>

In Africa this last week, there was news too. The Bush administration was promising to pour ever more "soldiers and money into its anti-terrorism campaign , including in Algeria and chaotic Nigeria, both oil-rich nations where radical Islam has a following." ("Oil-rich" is the key phrase in that sentence, in case you missed it.) "The new campaign," writes Edward Harris of AP, "will target nine north and west African nations and seek to bolster regional cooperation." American officials, calling for a "budgetary increase" for anti-terror military aid to the area, are now evidently comparing the vast "ungoverned" desert expanses of the Sahara "to Afghanistan during Taliban rule, when Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror group thrived." Talk about ambition. Quick, someone report them to the Overseas Basing Commission before anything else happens!

<snip>

To the Southeast, there were yet more basing rumors in a volatile area where, last week, a massive 1,700 kilometer-long pipeline bringing Caspian oil from Baku in the former SSR of Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey via the former SSR of Georgia, was officially opened for business. The pipeline, as Pepe Escobar of Asia Times pointed out, is little short of a "sovereign state"; its route, carefully constructed to cut both Russia and Iran out of the Caspian oil loop, ends "right next door to the massive American airbase at Incirlik" in Turkey. The presidents of all three countries attended the opening ceremonies in Baku, while an Azerbaijan newspaper reported that the "U.S. and Azerbaijani governments on April 12 agreed on the deployment of U.S. military bases… Under the agreement, the U.S. forces will be deployed in Kurdamir, Nasosnaya and Guyullah. Various types of aircraft will be deployed at all the three bases, which have runways modernized for U.S. military needs." The report was promptly denied by the Azerbaijani defense ministry, which under the circumstances probably means little.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3025

[cornermouse]

1. Bases, bases, everywhere without a hint of peace.

Chaos, destruction, and death worldwide. Bush's place in history... Bush's legacy.

[dogday]

2. Take Away Bases From America and Put Them In Iraq

All 14 of them. Don't forget those of us here would like a degree of protection on our home soil....

[teryang]

3. This is the great colonial game - it looks good until someone

...challenges it. Then it collapses. These bases are militarily untenable for the most part. They are there at the sufferance of the regional powers that be.

But Rumsfeldt and company don't care. It keeps the contractors and energy companies in the green at government expense. Can't maintain manpower levels? Who cares when dividends and capital gains are soaring?