Ever thought about how much it would cost to SHIP a Humvee from Iraq to the U.S.?   You can’t afford it, and neither can the U.S. Government.  That’s why the military will be leaving fleets of hundreds of Humvees, jeeps, tanks, people movers and other war and supply vehicles in Iraq.  A treasure trove of war surplus items.   When the U.S. withdraws from its operation, a total of 39 military bases built and groomed by the U.S. military will be left behind.

At one point in the Iraq “remodel” there were 505 bases operating within the country.  OVER FIVE HUNDRED.  Apparently the Bush administration envisioned permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, but as the reconstruction of the Iraq and its government proceeded, the dream became politically impossible.

“How did we come to be wasting that much money?” asked Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the progressive National Security Network. The answer, she said, is that dissenting voices weren’t heeded when Bush administration officials were pushing their hugely overambitious agenda.

“The problem that is often cited in the run-up to the war continued afterward,” she said. “The political and media elite weren’t paying attention.”

Bush Envisioned Permanent Military Bases In Iraq

It wasn’t until late in Bush’s second term that “cooler heads prevailed,” Hurlburt said, and it became apparent that there was no political will in either country for the U.S. to keep permanent bases in Iraq, and therefore no need to spend so much to build them.

But by then, the plans had already been set in motion. As Stars and Stripes reported last year, major construction continued even after November 2008, when then-President George W. Bush and Iraqi officials signed a security agreement calling for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

Most of the $2.4 billion was spent building about a dozen huge outposts that, in addition to containing air strips and massive fortifications also have all the comforts of home. The Al-Asad Airfield in Anbar province, for example, covers 25 square miles — about the size of Boulder, Colo. — and is known as “Camp Cupcake” due to its amenities.

The 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, as Whitney Terrell wrote earlier this year for Slate, is “home to three football-field-sized chow halls, a 25-meter swimming pool, a high dive, a football field, a softball field, two full-service gyms, a squash court, a movie theater, and the U.S. military’s largest airfield in Iraq.”

Despite the media’s elegiacobituariesfor these major bases — like the prematurely named “Camp Victory”, with its palace, its

U.S. Built Olympic-Size Swimming Pool On One Iraqui Base

lake, and its giant, killer carp — the fact is that not one major base has yet been evacuated.

And it’s not clear just what the Iraqis will do with some of those bases, once they get them.

One U.S. officer whose unit turned over a military outpost in a Baghdad neighborhood to the Iraqi Army in 2009 told the Washington Post that Iraqi soldiers looted it within hours of the U.S. departure. “When we returned to the outpost the next morning, most of the beds had already been taken, wood walls and framing had been pulled and several air-conditioning units had been removed from the walls, leaving gaping holes,” the officer told the Post. Weeks later, he added, the power generator the Americans had left behind was barely working.”

 

It won’t be pretty when Iraquis feel like it’s open season to to pillage bases and steal American unguarded war treasures.

 

 

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Inside The KC, Politics, Sonja Eddings Brown, Uncategorized by Sonja Eddings Brown, Sep 26, 2011