Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski who served in the office of the Secretary of Defense (Douglas Feith) until spring 2003, "says that the neoconservative architects of the Iraq invasion definitely foresaw a permanent, large-scale presence. Kwiatkowski says that Pentagon planners view the bases as vital both for protecting Israel and as launchpads for operations in Syria and Iran." ¹

Iraq was a war for Israel (a neocon obsession - see Iraq: A War for Israel) but it is also a war to project U.S. presence in the region and control oil resources to benefit the U.S. and possibly Israel. These reasons also apply to Iran which is the next major target after Iraq. Map of oil fields, oil pipeline and reported locations of enduring bases

"Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East from 1997 to 2000, recently predicted that American involvement in Iraq would last at least 10 more years. Retired Army Lt. General Jay Garner, the former interim administrator of reconstruction efforts in Iraq, told reporters in February 2004 that a U.S. military presence in Iraq should last 'the next few decades.' Even that, some analysts warn, could be an underestimate."

The military bases being build "could house as many as 100,000 troops indefinitely". If the troops are reduced to 50,000 and hunker down in the 12 to 14 "enduring" bases proposed, it is estimated that "the costs would run between $5 billion to $7 billion a year."

"The presence of bases there is going to be a source of instability and anger for the Iraqi people, whether they are currently for the insurgency or not," says Jessica Matthews, the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. "It will convince people across the Arab world that we went there to install an American regime in the Middle East."

KBR, the base builder, received $200 million in 2003 to build and maintain temporary housing units for the soldiers. As of April 2005, KBR has received $8.5 billion - al least $4.5 billion has gone to build the "enduring" bases.

In November 2005, the Cogressional Research Service reported that the war in Iraq was costing $6 billions and $1 billion in Afghanistan. Costs could be $570 billions by 2010 assuming some troops are drawn down. It underscores how the Iraq price tag has been gradually rising. The Congressional Budget Office reported that it will be difficult to sustain current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan without more rapid rotation of troops into the war zone and using more National Guard brigades. Even those steps will not be adequate long-term solutions.

1: Digging In by Joshua Hammer, Newsweeks' Jerusalem bureau chief who has reported extensively from Iraq.

Related links: Military bases in Iraq
Pentagon spending billions in base upgrades throught Middle East and Southwest Asia

In the SJ article, Capuano talks a bit about "success", how to know it has been achieved. It is disenheartening that he still thinks on these terms but one could answer that It depends on whom you talk to. Many generals, such as Antony Zinni say that there is no success; the war has already been lost. However, if it is the staunch pro-Israel neocons who launched this war, in great part, on Israel's behalf, success has been the destruction of Iraq and its partitioning.

The neocons talked colorfully of bombing Iraq into the "Stone Age" or until it was "dust" and they've almost achieved it. The infrastructure including many hospitals and clinics have been destroyed, health care is mostly unavailable - no medicines, no anesthetics, no clean water - chaos and crime rule the streets, child malnutrition is skyrocketing, sectarianism has ben strengthened. Success measured in terms of "bringing democracy"? By democracy, what the neocons mean is the creation of client (AKA puppet) states. Only someone deluded believes that democracy comes at the end of gun. To begin with, under international law, elections can not be held under occupation (but this does not seem to apply to the US in Iraq and Israel in Palestine); those held nonetheless in January were rigged. The constitution? It is not a product of the Iraqis; it was written for them by Noah Feldman, a professor at Columbia University. The Iraqis did have a constitution that their legal scholars wanted to use with some modifications but the US. vetoed this. Rule of law? The Iraqis are ruled by Bremer's laws that no Iraqi government is allowed to dissolve. The occupation of Iraq has followed the Israeli model for controlling the Palestinian population as is evident, for example, in Fallujah. Checkpoints at which the Iraqis spend endless hours, raids, bombings of civilian population, detention with no recourse to the law or courts, humiliation, torture. (There is much more that one can find out from journalists such as Dahr Jamail, Naomi Klein and Robert Fisk (Independent newspaper- UK).)

As measured by the neocons and the pro-Israel lobby such as AIPAC, success is also achieved by building the "enduring" bases and extending the war beyond the borders of Iraq into Syria and Iran making it, in Michael Ledeen words "a regional war", "a war to remake the world". The U.S. has already crossed the Syrian border and squirmishes have been intensifying. The drive to erect sanctions against Syria and Iran have intensified. Acts of terrorism - bombings - are happening in the southern parts of Iran, on the border with Iraq (check out In the News and its archives).