The Elephant In The Military Base

Speaking of Iraq policy, I seem to have misset my clock radio last night and instead of the usual NPR got what I think was C-SPAN Radio where they had Marina Ottaway on. She, unlike pretty much everyone else one ever hears talking on this subject, did an admirable job of raising the elephant in the corner of American Iraq policy, the fact that near as anybody can tell the administration is still trying to finagle some kind of permanent military basing agreement in Iraq. That the administration has managed to hew consistently to this agenda without ever stating that this is one of their major policy goals is astounding, and that the American media is consistently unwilling to discuss the point is appalling. What's even more astounding about it is that one regularly hears and reads in expert commentary that we ought to "make clear" that this isn't what we're doing. Apparently, it's impolitic to note that Bush isn't making it clear that we don't want permanent bases because we do, in fact, want permanent bases.

On the same subject, one of the more intriguing bits in Larry Diamond's forthcoming book is his discussion of American efforts to grant the pre-election, post-sovereignty interim government the authority to sign treaties (and to expedite the approval process for said treaties) with foreign powers. This was consistently resisted by virtually ever relevant Iraqi actors, and Diamond's book doesn't make it clear what, exactly, the hidden agenda was here, but one has to assume that the idea was to get a permanent basing agreement on paper before Iraq got a government reflective of public opinion on the subject. Also intriguing in a personal way is that apparently the CPA official in charge of trying to get this done (though the orders, according to Diamond, came straight from Washington) was Roman Martinez who was a couple of years ahead of me in school and, I think, editor of the oft-bizarre Harvard Salient.

The bases, though, are the important thing. This is, by all expert accounts, a huge problem in our Iraq policy, and our dear media doesn't see fit to even discuss it in a manner that comports with the facts to any reasonable degree.