On October 31, 2003, in a piece called The Time of Withdrawal I wrote: “I think one thing is predictable in a world where predicting anything accurately is a low-percentage bet: Sooner or later, the time of withdrawal will be upon us. Some of us would like it to be sooner, not later… But, given ongoing events in Iraq, the idea of withdrawal is already on an inexorable course into the mainstream world.”

I seldom return to my past writings, but looking back at this essay, in the context of the first presidential debate and ongoing events in Iraq, set me thinking about how subjects that are, in some often hard-to-label fashion, tabooed in the mainstream media nonetheless percolate upwards into our American life — just as the idea of withdrawal from Iraq has recently begun to do.

Two of John Kerry’s lines on Iraq from the debate leaped out at me for quite different reasons. There was the most depressingly expectable moment, his emphatic comment, “Now that we’re there, we have to succeed. We can’t leave a failed Iraq.” (To which the answer would have to be, “Every moment we delay announcing a plan to withdraw from Iraq means an ever more deeply failed Iraq.”) As Kerry returned to the campaign trail the morning after his encounter with the President, he took up just this issue even more emphatically, responding to Bush criticisms by saying (New York Times, 10/2): “Well, Mr. President, nobody’s talking about leaving, nobody’s talking about wilting and wavering. We’re talking about winning and getting the job done right.”

It’s here that the President got in his strongest riposte more than once: “My opponent says help is on the way, but what kind of message does it say to our troops in harm’s way, ‘wrong war, wrong place, wrong time’? Not a message a commander in chief gives, or this is a ‘great diversion.’” There is indeed an inherent illogic embedded in Kerry’s position and the President picked up on it. If the war was a massive botch, a plan-less mess, then shouldn’t he indeed be planning to end it, not “win” it? Shouldn’t some form of withdrawal be his obvious goal? Shouldn’t he want to avoid letting more American soldiers die for a mistake?

But in this debate there are, as yet, not two sides, not quite two positions. At best, Kerry’s is only a half position over from the President’s. Still, that half-position is interesting, even potentially promising; and, for me at least, it provided the single most unexpected moment of the night. Kerry said of Iraq:

“As I understand it, we’re building some 14 military bases there now, and some people say they’ve got a rather permanent concept to them. When you guard the oil ministry, but you don’t guard the nuclear facilities, the message to a lot of people is maybe, ‘Wow, maybe they’re interested in our oil.’ Now, the problem is that they didn’t think these things through properly. And these are the things you have to think through… I will make a flat statement: The United States of America has no long-term designs on staying in Iraq. And our goal in my administration would be to get all of the troops out of there with a minimal amount you need for training and logistics as we do in some other countries in the world after a war to be able to sustain the peace.”

Now, it would be a promising beginning to any withdrawal strategy to state up front that the United States has designs neither on Iraqi oil, nor on permanent bases in the country, despite the $2-3 billion or more that has already gone into building our elaborate base structure there. At best, then, there’s a potential withdrawal strategy lurking somewhere under Kerry’s “winning” strategy, but more on that later. Let me first turn to those “14 military bases” with that “rather permanent concept to them.” Their sudden appearance in the first presidential debate was nothing short of a strange miracle, given that our media has essentially not mentioned them, no less covered them for almost the last year and a half.

The “Enduring Camps” that couldn’t be seen

As those of you who read Tomdispatch regularly know, I’ve long hammered away at our permanent bases, also known in Pentagonese as “enduring camps” — something close to an oxymoron. If you didn’t factor those “camps” into the equation that was Iraq, the Bush administration’s policies there made no sense from the start. (And almost no American could have done so, since almost no one knew about them.) If you did, they made a mockery of the neocons stated desire to create an independent, “democratic” Iraq rather than an occupied, acquiescent client state at the heart of the Middle East.

On April 19, 2003, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times wrote Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq, a front-page piece about plans to build four permanent bases in Iraq. The story was denied by the Pentagon. No major paper in the United States had even mentioned them again by October 2003 when, in “The Time of Withdrawal,” I wrote:

“When thinking of withdrawal, it’s important to remember that it was never a concept in the Bush administration’s vocabulary. Despite all those years of Vietnam ‘lessons’ and Colin Powell’s ‘doctrine’ which said that no military action should be undertaken without an ‘exit strategy’ in place, Bush’s boys had no exit strategy in mind because they never imagined leaving. Of course, they expected to quickly draw down American forces in the face of a jubilant and grateful population. But there was no greater signal of our long-term intentions than our dismantling of the Iraqi military, and their planned re-creation as a lightly armed border-patrolling force of perhaps 40,000 with no air force. Put that together with the four permanent bases we began building almost immediately and you know that we were expecting to be Iraq‘s on-site military protector into the distant future.”

Except for the number of permanent bases, that paragraph remains accurate to this second. Almost a year after the Times piece came out, in March of 2004, the Chicago Tribune published a piece on those permanent bases, mentioning the number fourteen for, as far as I know, the first and only time in a news article. No other mainstream publication or significant American media outlet of any sort had a piece on the subject again until just last week when David R. Francis of the Christian Science Monitor wrote US bases in Iraq: sticky politics, hard math (9/30). It said in part:

“If a new Iraq government should agree to let American forces stay on, how many bases will the US request? One, as the United States Army currently maintains in Honduras? Six, the number of installations it lists in the Netherlands. Or maybe 12? The Pentagon isn’t saying.

“But a dozen is the number of so-called ‘enduring bases’ located by John Pike, director of GlobalSecurities.org. His military affairs website gives their names. They include, for example, Camp Victory at the Baghdad airfield and Camp

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