HOUSE SAYS NO PERMANENT OCCUPATION. Twenty-four Republicans were the only House members yesterday to vote "no" on a resolution that would prevent the United States from establishing "any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq or to exercise United States economic control of the oil resources of Iraq.” Republicans claim the bill was little more than political theater, since the Bush administration has never said it supports a permanent occupation of Iraq. But as Spencer Ackerman reported in the Prospect last year, the construction of massive American military infrastructure in Iraq suggests otherwise:
[The Army] started dispensing contracts to defense firms that could build and maintain an infrastructure sufficient to support an indefinite U.S. military presence. At Fort Monmouth, 6,000 miles from Iraq, a communications project was born, called the Central Iraq Microwave System, or CIMS.The CIMS project has a simple objective: to connect the sprawling U.S. base outside of Baghdad, known as Camp Victory, with the rest of the U.S. bases in Iraq. Three aspects of CIMS are especially noteworthy: First, it's a land-based network of huge communications towers and underground fiber-optic cables, rather than a comparatively costly but temporary system reliant on satellite signals. Second, it won't connect every base in Iraq to Baghdad -- just the bases that the United States plans on keeping far into the future. Finally, its completion will connect Baghdad to the other U.S. military installations in the Middle East, from Qatar to Afghanistan.
--Dana Goldstein
