How DC, Pentagon Create Global Instability

How Washington Creates Global Instability

It was built for… well, not to put too fine a point on it, victory. I’m talking, of course, about the ill-named Camp Victory, the massive military complex, a set of bases really, constructed around an old hunting lodge and nine of former dictator Saddam Hussein’s opulent palaces near Baghdad International Airport.

Within months of American troops entering Baghdad in April 2003, it was already“the largest overseas American combat base since the Vietnam War.” It would become the grand visiting place for American politicians — back when the U.S. was still being called the global “hyperpower” — arriving in what was almost imagined as our 51st state. It was the headquarters for the American military effort and later “surge” strategy in Iraq. It was also the stomping grounds for at least 46,000 U.S. troops stationed there and who knows how many spooks, contractors, hire-a-guns, Defense Department civilians, and third-world workers. It had its own Cinnabon and Burger King, its massive PXs, and its 27-mile perimeter of “blast walls and concertina wire,” as well as its own hospital and water-bottling plant. It was a “city,” a world, unto itself.

American reporters passed through it regularly, and yet for most Americans who didn’t set foot in it, our massive outpost in the heart of the oil heartlands of the planet (the place we were supposed to garrison for decades, if not generations) might as well not have existed. For all the news about Iraq that, once upon a time, was delivered to Americans, the humongous Camp Victory itself never struck journalists as particularly newsworthy, nor generally did the billions of dollars that went into building the more than 500 U.S. bases, mega to micro, that we now know were constructed in that country at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

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Posted by Jason Rink on Sep 20 2011. Filed under Featured, Foreign Policy, U.S. News, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.