The Sorrows of Empire (39 page)

Since the Khobar Towers bombing, one of the army’s main goals has been to replace Camp Doha, which is too close to the capital, Kuwait City, with a more modern prepositioning facility fully protected from possible terrorist attacks. In July 1999, the government of Kuwait began work on that new base, a $200 million facility named Camp Arifjan, located in the desert south of the capital. During 2002, about 10,000 noncombat army personnel were transferred there from Camp Doha. At Arifjan, virtually all the prepositioned equipment for a full army brigade is stored in large warehouses rather than exposed to the desert environment, as at Camp Doha. The Army Corps of Engineers designed the base, which includes modern barracks with shatterproof Mylar glass on all windows and special maintenance bays for tanks. Most of Camp Arifjan was completed during 2002, with only some roads and utilities still to be built. Camp Doha, continuously in use since the first Gulf War, was always understood to be a temporary facility, but Arifjan is evidence that the Americans intend to stay a long time.

Throughout the late 1990s, the army flew a new brigade from the United States or Europe into Kuwait every four months for training. The airfield it used was Ahmed al Jaber Air Base, located just seventy-five miles south of the Iraq border; although the base belongs to the Kuwait air force, it has an area set aside only for U.S. Air Force operations. Until late 1996, our air force deployed its F-15 and F-16 fighters at Kuwait City’s international airport, but after the terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Dhahran, it moved everything to what the troops inevitably call “the Jab.” According to the Global Security Organization, “Ahmed al Jaber Air Base is one hard target. The Air Force uses every means available, from physical barriers to high-tech sensors and infrared cameras, to keep people deployed to al Jaber safe. And an alert and overwhelming security force
subjects even the most innocuous happenings to stern scrutiny.”
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The air force contracts out almost all services for the several thousand U.S. troops at al Jaber.

Another American military facility in Kuwait, the Ali al Salem Air Base, only thirty-nine miles from the Iraqi border, was until recently a hard-duty post, devoted to radar surveillance of Iraqi air space. One description of Ali al Salem notes that “the weather is about as hot here as any place you’ve ever been in your life.”
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During mid-2000, work began on new buildings and security devices to make Ali al Salem a permanent base. Services here, too, are provided under contract.

Americans like to think that Kuwait is indebted to the United States because we came to its aid in 1991 and therefore welcomes permanent military bases on its soil. This is a mistake. Kuwait has not proved a particularly friendly ally. As an Arab nation, Kuwait opposes American support for Israeli expansionism and its double standard for Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers, both of whom kill defenseless civilians. The Kuwaitis are also no more happy with foreign troops living among them than any other nation might be, particularly foreigners who are disrespectful toward their religion. Nonetheless, Kuwait has accepted American protection and pays for it.

The situation is more complex in the other gulf states. Qatar and Oman are small nations, scared to death of their larger neighbors, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. They have invited the Americans into their countries as a form of protection, much as their ancestors accepted the British. In return, the Americans demand military bases, preferably in highly secure areas away from population centers. The Pentagon knows that it is not particularly welcome in the area and that the gulf governments prefer not to talk about American bases or acknowledge their presence more than absolutely necessary. Oman is probably the most tolerant of the gulf states toward the Americans, the United Arab Emirates the least. Each risks the wrath of its own people for collaborating with the United States.

Bahrain is a good example. It remained a rather quiet place until July 1995, when the navy moved the headquarters of its Fifth Fleet there, together with some 4,200 military personnel. As the Global Security Organization notes, “The current ASU [naval administrative support
unit] bears little resemblance to the small, 10-acre compound it was as recently as 1991. In the past seven years, this ‘sleepy hollow’ has expanded to 62 acres with $36.5 million worth of new construction, including new transient bachelor quarters, a medical and dental clinic, a racquetball court, a chapel, a post office and several multi-purpose sports fields.”
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Many American servicemen regard duty in Bahrain as the best posting in the gulf. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, which is connected to Bahrain by the King Fahd causeway, Americans can drink alcohol in Bahrain. But even though Manama, Bahrain’s capital, is a city made up primarily of foreigners—and not just American foreigners—and the kingdom has a population of only about 660,000, the navy has placed many hotels and bars off-limits to its personnel as a precaution against terrorist attacks.

Bahrain goes out of its way not to appear subservient to the Americans. The Bahrainis are rich and lead comfortable lives, but they nonetheless demonstrate against the United States at the slightest provocation. To keep political matters in balance, during August 2002, King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa of Bahrain crossed the gulf and paid a formal visit to Iran, where he was welcomed by President Mohammad Khatami. His visit was the first to Teheran by a Bahraini head of state since the Iranian revolution of 1979.
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Fifth Fleet or no Fifth Fleet, Bahrain was clearly unimpressed by President George Bush’s statement of January 2002 naming Iran as part of an “axis of evil.”

The navy inherited the British base at Manama, and military ships are therefore a familiar presence. The air force is another matter. In 1987, the Bahrain air force began to build a massive air base on Bahrain Island, about twenty miles from Manama. The Shaikh Isa Air Base was intended for its one and only fighter wing. The base was still unfinished four years later at the time of the first Gulf War, when the marines took it over, and Navy SeaBees completed it. During the mid-1990s, the air force further enlarged the base, and, in 1997, it flew in the 366th Air Expeditionary Wing from Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, with 1,200 personnel and such advanced aircraft as B-1B bombers, F-15 and F-16 fighters, and KC-135 aerial-refueling tankers. To protect the wing’s forty-four aircraft, the Pentagon also transferred in elements of a Patriot antimissile battalion from Fort Bliss, Texas. By 2000, both the marines and the air force
were permanent fixtures at Shaikh Isa Air Base, even though their presence was a subject the government of Bahrain had no desire to talk about.

Just south of Bahrain is the rich country of Qatar, about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The head of state, the emir, is directly accountable to no one. He is constrained only by tribal tradition and Islamic law and works primarily to preserve the feudal and financial interests of his family. This is not easy, however, given the contemporary pressures on Qatar, which has a population of slightly over 800,000, 80 percent of whom are foreign workers, mostly highly literate Arabs, Pakistanis, Indians, and Iranians. Thanks to great oil wealth and stupendous reserves of natural gas, Qataris in the year 2000 enjoyed a per capita income of about $20,300, equal to that of the most developed countries. The high standard of living among a general population that lacks any firm ties to Qatar or its ruling family means there is constant agitation from below to end autocracy and open up the political system to social change.

Qatar was part of the anti-Iraqi coalition during both Gulf Wars. In June 1992, it granted the United States basing and weapons-prepositioning rights in return for an implicit guarantee of aid if Qatar were attacked. Qatar’s fears are not abstract. Although the country is several times larger and much richer than Bahrain, genuine Qataris constitute such a small minority that the country has been ripe for an external takeover, internal revolution, or both. It shares a disputed land border with Saudi Arabia, fought Baghdad during both Gulf Wars, and often feuds with Iran. It hopes that by unobtrusively supporting the United States while publicly criticizing it and denouncing Israel while publicizing its large monetary donations to the Palestinians, it can contain popular indignation. The goal is to keep the dictatorial powers of its small ruling elite intact as long as possible.

After the young emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani deposed his conservative father in a bloodless coup in June 1995, he made one significant gesture toward openness, if not democracy. He agreed to sponsor what would become the single most influential source of news in Muslim countries, the cable-news network al-Jazeera (meaning “the peninsula,” i.e., Qatar), whose studios are located in Doha, Qatar’s capital. In April
1996, Saudi Arabia had thrown the BBC out of the country for reporting on such controversial issues as beheadings and Saudi dissidents. A few months later, the new emir hired most of the BBC’s Arabic Service editors, reporters, and technicians and set them up as the nucleus of al-Jazeera. His intent seems to have been to end censorship in Qatar and thereby relieve some of the pressure for more openness without destabilizing the country. The emir has subsequently given his TV network almost complete journalistic freedom. So far, al-Jazeera has been criticized by virtually every Islamic country from Saudi Arabia to Algeria and, of course, by Israel. In October 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice demanded that the emir censor interviewees who contended that American foreign policy was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001. The following month, the United States bombed al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, as it would bomb the network’s Baghdad studio during the second Iraq war. The emir still backs al-Jazeera to the tune of $100 million a year—corporate advertisers are hard to come by—and the station continues to report world news. The only matters that are off-limits are interviews with Qatari political dissidents and details of U.S. basing policy in the emirate.
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Among the Qatari bases the Pentagon has appropriated is one of the best airfields in the gulf, nineteen miles southwest of Doha in the open desert. During the late 1990s, the government of Qatar actually built al-Udeid Air Base at a cost of $1.4 billion with the thought that it might attract the Americans, who clearly were not going to hold on to their Saudi bases forever, and perhaps bribe them into becoming the country’s protector. It is the only base in Qatar that the authorities allow to be mentioned in the press. Its 14,760-foot runway is one of the longest in the gulf, greatly exceeding the needs of Qatar’s dozen or so fighter aircraft. The airfield has hardened concrete bunkers for as many as 120 warplanes.

The air force enthusiastically took the bait. Al-Udeid is the site for prepositioned air force weapons, fuel, medical supplies, and munitions—the army’s site is elsewhere in Qatar. In March 2002, the air force began to build there a combined air operations center that, although not as advanced as Price Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, could serve as an alternative. Following the assault on Afghanistan, the air force put up its own
money to complete all the facilities at al-Udeid as fast as possible. In March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney visited the site, and in June the U.S. secretary of defense did the same. The main air force unit based there is the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, composed of F-15E and F-16 fighters and KC-10, KC-130, and KC-135 aerial tankers. Al-Udeid played an important role in the Afghan war as the main base for refueling war-planes on their way to and from Afghanistan. The air force estimates that the tankers of the 379th delivered more than 220 million pounds of fuel over Afghanistan, about half of all refueling undertaken during the war.
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Al-Udeid also played a key role in the 2003 assault on Iraq, hosting some 6,500 airmen with a planned eventual population of 10,000. They live in a large desert tent city that the air force calls Camp Andy, after Master Sergeant Evander Andrews, the first U.S. casualty of the Afghanistan operation, who died as a result of a forklift accident. It is hard to know whether the officials who supply these names are being intentionally saccharine or are running out of genuine heroes. A permanent housing complex, rechristened Expeditionary Village, is to open on the 3,000-acre base late in 2003. During the summer of 2002, according to one informed source, the first swimming pool at al-Udeid had already been completed, usually a sign that the air force plans a long stay.
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Dyn-Corp of Reston, Virginia, is responsible for providing this and other amenities and for accepting, storing, maintaining, and protecting the prepositioned war material, the same services it performs at air bases in Oman and Manama, Bahrain.

Two other installations in Qatar are Camp as-Sayliyah, located in the outskirts of Doha, and Camp Snoopy, at Doha International Airport, both army prepositioning sites for tanks and other fighting vehicles, together with their fuel and munitions for a full armored brigade. These are state-of-the-art facilities completed in the summer of 2000. While most other bases in the Persian Gulf region are paid for by the host countries, Congress actually put up a total of $110 million for these. The government of Qatar contributed only the land and utilities.

During the second Iraq war, Camp as-Sayliyah was the forward headquarters of commander in chief General Tommy R. Franks, who, in
December 2002, under cover of a military training exercise, moved about 750 staff officers from MacDill Air Base, Florida, to direct the war in front of banks of computers and video displays located in air-conditioned tents. The base was also the site of the $1.5 million, made-for-TV “Coalition Media Center,” where Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, the six-foot-plus, Hollywood-handsome African American spokesman for Central Command, gave hundreds of journalists his daily edited video presentations.
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Reporting the war from Qatar for
New York
magazine, Michael Wolff described Camp as-Sayliyah as “pure moonscape. Not a tree, not a bush. Hardly a structure. Just a horizon of flat limestone. And then you come upon the U.S. base—really just a ring of wire and then a no-man’s-land behind which there is a base. The lack of cover in every direction must provide a high security level, but, in addition, the base is fortified with all other maximum-paranoia, extra-protection measures. It’s hunkered down. Not just defended, but defensive.” Both the high-tech war and the extreme attention to controlling media coverage were the latest in American-style militarism and imperialism.