Permanent Bases the World Over

[illinoisprogressive]

From Alternet. the bush administration and pentagon had plans for permanent bases and began building them during the invasion.
and the plan is to never leave. They call it The Korean Model.
It was reported in 2003 in the NY times and when Rummy denied this story, it dropped from site and the media never reported on it until the korean model became known to the public.
it is a long article but, very important to take the time to read and it's alarming.

From alternet;

From 2003 to the present, the work building, maintaining, and continually upgrading these bases (and their equivalents in Afghanistan) has never ended. Though the huge base-building contracts were given out long ago, consider just a couple of modest contracts of recent vintage. In March 2006, Dataline, Inc, of Norfolk, Virginia was awarded a $5 million contract for "technical control facility upgrades and cable installation," mainly at "Camp Fallujah, Iraq (25 percent), Camp Al Asad, Iraq (25 percent), Camp Taqaddum, Iraq (25 percent)." In December 2006, Watkinson L.L.C. of Houston was awarded a $13 million "firm-fixed-price contract for design and construction of a heavy aircraft parking apron and open cargo storage yard" for al-Asad Airbase, "to be completed by Sept. 17, 2007." In March 2007, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems was awarded a $73 million contract to "provide recurring requirements such as operations and maintenance support for base local area network, commercial satellite communication, technical control facility, and circuit actions, telephone, land mobile radio and both inside and outside cable plant installations. ... at 13 bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and six other nations which fall in the United States Central Command Area of Responsibility."

snip

Since the Gulf War in 1990, such base-creation has been on the rise. The Bush, Clinton, and younger Bush administrations have laid down a string of bases from the old Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union (Romania, Bulgaria) and the former Yugoslavia through the Greater Middle East (Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates), to the Horn of Africa (Djibouti), into the Indian Ocean (the "British" island of Diego Garcia), and right through Central Asia (Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan, where we "share" Pakistani bases).

Bases have followed our little wars of recent decades. They were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates around the time of our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the former Central Asian SSRs after the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq, of course, after the invasion of 2003 where they were to replace the Saudi bases being mothballed as a response to Osama bin Laden's claims that Americans were defiling the holiest spots of Islam.

In effect, when it came to bases in the post-9/11 years, the emphasis was, on the one hand, encircling Russia from its former Eastern European satellites to its former Central Asian SSRs and, on the other hand, securing a series of bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, a swath of territory known to the administration back in 2002-2003 as "the arc of instability." Iraq was, obviously, but part -- though a crucial part -- of such imperial dreaming about how to dominate the planet. And yet the military ziggurats that made those dreams manifest, and all the billions of taxpayer dollars and the obvious urge for "permanence" that went with them, were largely left out of mainstream reporting on, debate about, or discussion of the occupation of Iraq.

http://www.alternet.org/story/54047/?page=3

[elocs]

1. I have read that the U.S. has over 700 permanent bases in 130 countries,

with 6000 bases in this country and our territories. This is much more fitting of an Empire than a Democracy.

[H2O Man]

2. In 1992

Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz authored a paper for their boss, Secretary Dick Cheney. The plan called for a permanent US military presence on six continents to deter any "potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

When the document was leaked to the press, there was a strong response from democrats. It was dropped for a few years -- in fact, for the years we call "the Clinton administration's 2 terms." But in 2002, the Wolfowitz and Libby plan came back to life as official US policy, and was released by the White House under the new title "The National Security Strategy of the United States."