"Who needs Germany when we have Iraq?"

The Christian Science Monitor today published an excellent look at American efforts to maintain a long-range military presence in Iraq. Among other virtues, the article makes clear - if not as explicit as it might - that these bases are intended to provide the permanent infrastructure for projecting American military power into the center of the Middle East, roles served by bases in Okinawa and South Korea for East Asia and by bases Germany for Europe. These bases, then, will help the U.S. keep the peace in Iraq and elsewhere across western Asia. Hell, a "military expert" at the good ol' American Enterprise Institute even claims, in a moment of pure Wolfowitzian fantasy, that, "withdrawal of US forces would be seen by Iraqi insurgents as a victory, prompting them to redouble their efforts to kill Americans." One would think that this alleged goal would be hard to achieve, since after a withdrawal, there wouldn't be as many Americans in Iraq to be killed.

But whatever: neocon corollaries to the flypaper strategy aside, the idea behind these bases is deeply flawed. Iraq is not Germany or Japan in 1947, or even South Korea in 1955. A better model is the giant network of American bases in Saudi Arabia, which we all know worked very well to maintain a postively Edenic peace and quiet throughout the Middle East. Those bases, by sharing the soil of Islam's two holiest places, drew the emnity of bin Laden and his ilk. After some scuffling and debate, the U.S. last year actually accepted bin Laden's demand that we leave Saudi Arabia and relocated many of the bases to Qatar or Kuwait.

The new Iraqi bases are like those current Qatari and Kuwaiti bases and like the old Saudi bases in that American troops aren't going to guarantee free elections or sample the local goat: those troops are going to help ensure that the oil flows, or at least that Iraq has pliant leaders who will keep the oil flowing. This point goes frighteningly, fantastically missing in the Monitor article, except for one passing mention to cwazy "Iraqi suspcions."

What isn't absent from the article is a sense of the Cold-War type costs of these bases: "If the US decides to reduce its forces there from the 138,000 now to, say, 50,000, and station them in bases, the costs would run between $5 billion to $7 billion a year." Seven billion a year. What could that money do at home, or even as humanitarian aid in Iraq? We'll never know.

(Much of the article is based on a report by Global Security.org, a think-tank based in Virginia which does yeomanlike duty ferreting out facts about what out government - and especially our military - is doing, like grafting a permanent military presence onto Iraq.)