DEBILITATION & DESTRUCTION: THE EFFECT OF U.S. MILITARY BASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST HANNAH KIRELY

Hannah Kirley

DEBILITATION AND DESTRUCTION: THE EFFECT OF U.S. MILITARY BASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Picture an American summer camp, a place with a swimming pool and classic American food. Now imagine a military base in the Middle East. Most likely, the images that come to mind are of spartan- -like facilities in a deserted area, not the modern facilities of a summer camp. Yet those qualities are just as applicable to a U.S. military base. Through slow violence, environmental imaginaries, and Orientalist ‘othering’, military bases in the Middle East debilitate the local people and land, transforming environmental imaginaries in both the eyes of the American soldiers and the native civilians.

Slow violence is delayed destruction dispersed across time and space, and is typically a product of environmental occurrences, such as climate change or varied forms of pollution. Slow violence is a form of structural violence; violence which occurs when social structures differentially expose bodies to vulnerability and harm. However, due to its delayed temporalities and fluidity in form, slow violence is less static and more agentless than structural violence. The agentlessness of slow violence is reflected in the fact that responsibility is rarely taken for the violence caused, as the violence is typically naturalized via colonial environmental imaginaries. Environmental imaginaries are “ideas that groups of humans develop about a given landscape...that commonly includes assessments about that environment as well as how it came to be in its current state”.

Environmental imaginaries can be toxic. By thinking of a certain landscape as barren or harsh, any damage that happens to the land (manmade or otherwise) is seen as natural because it was such a harsh environment to begin with. This process is known as denaturalizing. The concept of ‘Othering’ is the “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region” . To expand on Edward Said’s definition of othering, Naomi Klein writes that “Once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction”. The ‘other’ in this conversation is the land bases are built on, and the local people who live on this land. Because they are from the Middle East, this type of othering is specifically known as

Orientalist othering, as the Orient is viewed as inferior and undeveloped compared to the West. Many Westerners’ imaginaries of the Middle East include vast spaces of desert, a harsh, infertile land - see the imagery conjured when imaging a military base in the Middle East. We then transfer these properties onto the people that live on this land. If the people are able to endure such a harsh environment, then they must be a tough people able to endure hardships and more accustomed to such struggle, like invasions, occupations, war or bombing. These imaginaries are emphasized by the separation of U.S. servicemen and women from the local people and contribute to the slow violence.

I ask my audience to take note of two things: first, this essay is not concerned with broader effects of military bases on countries, such as long- -term economic effects, or international political ramifications. There is much existing research on these subjects, as well as the debated merits of bases as a military strategy. This essay instead seeks to demonstrate the detrimental effects on the people whose land is occupied by the bases, as their voices are often left out of the narrative or go unconsidered. This leads me to my second note. My research was much more difficult than I anticipated, largely because of the significant absence of an important voice in the literature: the voice of the people surrounding the bases. I sifted through countless works arguing against military bases and deployment which all cited the harms and costs to Americans but failed to mention the harms to the people native to the land the bases are built on. Given the classic imperialist erasure of a key narrative i.e. the voice of people local to the base area , many of my initial questions have gone unanswered, such as, what happened to the people that used to live on the land the base was built on, and how have Middle Eastern civilian views on America and its military changed? I was unable to find interviews with civilians living outside these bases, or interviews with soldiers describing their expectations of life on the base compared to the realities. However, despite these unanswered queries, I believe I have gathered enough information to claim that U.S. military bases in the Middle East perpetuate slow violence through harming local peoples and their land. In turn, these harms, directly and indirectly, alter the environmental imaginaries of both American soldiers and Middle East civilians perpetuating an imperialist view of the Middle East.

1 0 A Forward Operating Base, or FOB, is a military base used for tactical operations. The first U.S. military base in the region was established in 1945 in Saudi Arabia through an agreement between President Roosevelt and the Saudi royal family that consisted of “military protection in exchange for cheap oil for US markets and military”. This was the start of American occupation in the area. Research has been conducted on U.S. military bases finding more sites established in undemocratic states as a means to secure American hegemony, as well as the dual purpose of military bases which is not just to defeat terrorism, but also to provide resource security i.e. protection over American economic assets in the region - primarily oil. This hegemonic strategy has given rise to an enormous U.S. military presence in the Middle East, with over 50,000 troops still stationed there. Given the size of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, there are between 600-800 bases in the region. Due to the number of secret bases, and smaller temporary camps, the actual number of bases is unknown. This is an alarming fact in itself as not disclosing this statistic demonstrates the imperialist entitlement the U.S. military exercises over the land they occupy.

Most U.S. bases in Iraq were built from preexisting Iraqi bases but a number have been renovated completely, including Camp Bucca, the largest prison camp with some of the most modern facilities in the region. Many of these bases are like miniature cities, with movie theaters, pools, fast food restaurants, retail stores, their own sewage treatment facilities, and power plants.

Human Harm

U.S. military bases harm humans through slow violence by denying civilians connection to the land, debilitating people through toxic waste, and deteriorating relations between civilians surrounding the bases and the rest of the host nation’s citizens. Bases implement a modern form of colonization and deny civilians’ connection to the land in the Middle East through imposing the colonizer’s culture upon the colonized people. When the U.S. military sought to create a base in southern Iraq, they told a laborer he would be working in a place called Bucca. The man, an Iraqi native, insisted there was no such place, and he was right. The U.S. created the whole city of Bucca, named after American fire marshal Ronald Bucca, out of thin air. By creating a new place on the map and naming it after something or someone that has nothing to do with Iraqi culture, this base is a perfect example of how modern colonialism denies Iraqis their connection to the land because they don’t have control over their own space or cities. This colonialist renaming is not unique to Bucca. Camp Justice in Baghdad in fact used to be called Camp Banazi but was renamed in 2004 in an U.S. Army campaign to promote a Aerial view of Camp Arifjan Soldiers enjoying leisure time at Camp Arifjan friendlier image. Renaming the camp belittles the Baghdadi citizens’ connection to the former Camp Banazi just as does occupying it in the first place .

The two photos (right) are taken from a U.S. soldier’s blog while he was stationed at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. The blue luxury of the swimming pool and relaxed attitude conveyed in the first photo contrast the second, sepia toned and spartan looking base, but they exist as one. The setup of this FOB is standard; large hangars spread out over a stretch of land that is clearly not integrated with the surrounding environment. The borders of the FOB are clearly demarcated in the second photo, defining the separation between the soldiers and the civilian community. The aerial view allows us to see into the nearby farmland and community that seems from this angle not too distant from the camp. This is significant because U.S. military bases are not built in the isolated desert of our environmental imaginaries. They are surrounded by villages,

rivers, cities, and farmland. The isolation of soldiers - seen through the separation of base and village in the aerial photo of Camp Arifjan - affects their imaginaries because they aren’t able to understand how life in the Middle East interacts with the land. Confined to the base, American soldiers occupy the space, rather than integrating with it. Notice the caption of the second photo, taken from a U.S. soldier’s blog while he was stationed at Camp Arifjan in 2012. There is not a single mention of the civilians in close proximity to the base, but rather a detailed description of the base’s modern amenities. The modernity of the base only exacerbates imaginaries of the Middle East as a rural wasteland, because of the contrast it creates with the surrounding village. Technology has become the hallmark of civilization, so it is unsurprising that these bases are a haven of modernity in a landscape perceived to be backwards and technologically inferior by the architects of these bases. Because these technologies are so different that what can be found in the surrounding area ( a New York Times article notes that the bases are “a world apart from Iraq, with working lights, proper sanitation”) the soldiers are exposed to the contrast between their lifestyle and the lifestyle of the civilians nearby.

These so-called “cities in the sand” are built entirely from the ground up by companies contracted from the U.S. military to give the American soldiers some semblance of “civility” while they are posted in a strange country with foreign and unfamiliar surroundings. Who decided that Subway restaurants are essential to U.S. military operations? Why does a McDonalds signify to American soldiers that they are living in a civilized community? These needs, as well as the swimming pools and malls, speak to the barrier Westerners impose on themselves, to separate themselves from the ‘other’, less civilized “Orientals.” When European colonizers first wrote back describing the people they encountered in the Americas, the words they used were “barbaric” and “savages.” They dismissed the natives’ way of dress, religion, food, and daily rituals. They established their own European camps and attempted to convert the American natives to their way of life. By establishing U.S. military bases and bringing their own restaurants and technologies with them, the American military is practicing the same form of imperialism their European ancestors began centuries ago.

The physical setting of FOBs is important in understanding the dynamic between the civilians and the soldiers. While Camp Arifjan was in a more rural location, this photo, taken by Private First-Class Al Barrus, shows Iraqi Shiites protesting outside the main gate of Camp Justice, formerly Camp Banazi. These photos demonstrate the way U.S. military bases occupy land in a way that disregards the local connection to the land. As Ghassan Hage writes, there is an “intrinsic connection between the invasion, occupation, domination, and exploitation of an ‘othered people’ and the invasion, occupation, domination, and exploitation of an ‘othered nature’” The protesters in this photo are living out the intrinsic connection between the occupation the ‘othered’ land, and the occupation and ‘othered’ people.

The next harm is the most tangible. There has been a rise in respiratory illnesses, birth defects, rashes, cancer, and general unexplained illnesses in civilians that have lived near U.S. military bases in the Middle East. In order to address the reason behind the rise in health risks, the harms must be contextualized. Respiratory illnesses and birth defects are not the same as death, but they are so debilitating that the continuation of a normal life is impossible. Debility is intentional endemic injury. When the U.S. military burns over 1,500,000 pounds of toxic waste per day in open-air burn pits that carry lethal chemicals into nearby fields and rivers and pollute the air, the injuries that result from this are both endemic - contained to those who are exposed to the toxins, and intentional - the harm is not great enough to kill, only maim so as to be life-altering, but not life-threatening. This burned waste consists of plastics, Styrofoam, electronics, and unexploded weapons. The image (next page) is what burning that waste looks like. The photo comes from an article detailing the illnesses U.S. veterans are facing due to their exposure to burn pits. When examining the image we see only the agent of destruction, the aerosol cans, and are told about the immediate victim, the U.S. soldier. We don’t see or hear about the other Iraqi victims. Eric Bonds, who has researched this phenomenon behind burn pits, articulated this point:

“ [while journalists] describe the pollution itself, how it billowed over military bases and covered living quarters with ash and soot, such accounts never mention that this pollution would not

Iraqi civilians protesting outside Camp Justice in Baghdad Soldiers outside a McDonalds at a base in Kuwait Studies have been conducted on American veterans who were exposed to the toxic burn pits, but not on the civilians who were also subject to harm. The missing narrative is precisely why this is an example of slow violence. By writing about the harms of burn pits of U.S. soldiers, and then separately documenting the maladies that Iraqis are experiencing, the media is enforcing the ‘agentless’ aspect of slow violence that makes birth defects in the new generation of Iraqis seem fluke-like and unrelated to the environmental injustice that occurred, even when at some camps, the people operating the pits were Iraqis. This is certainly not to discount the harms suffered by the U.S. soldiers, whose’ maladies are very real, despite continued denial by the Department of Defense on any mal-effects from burn pits. Still, Bonds makes an important point, which is that if strong and healthy young men, as U.S. soldiers are our best physical specimens, are suffering from these illnesses, then how can local civilians, populations comprised of the old, weak, pregnant, and very young, possibly stand a chance against this debilitation?

The next harm is qualitatively different than physical debilitation, but still just as toxic for communities. Camp Speicher was one of the few military bases to employ local civilians instead of third-country labor. In fact, almost all the young men in Sokur, the town by the base, worked at the base for almost the entirety of the nine-year war. During the war, this helped and hindered the townspeople. While employment and general well-being increased, death threats against the townspeople from their fellow Iraqis also increased. The idea that the town was working with the Americans was blasphemous. So much so that the Sokuris couldn’t go into the next town over to shop because of attacks against them. During the war, the villagers say that this hostility from their own countrymen didn’t bother them, as the American soldiers would construct fences around the town and drop off groceries to keep the townspeople safe. However, now Camp Speicher is empty. The people of Sokur don’t have the job security, or the protection, that came with cooperating with the base. And the townspeople certainly can’t seek employment nearby, due to their reputation as traitors among Iraqis. As the Americans were leaving Camp Speicher, all townsmen who had been employed at the base received letters of recommendation and commemorative plaques. Said one former employee of his letter of recommendation, “When I want to die I’ll show this to a business” in Iraq”. The implied animosity here of his fellow Iraqis is part of a pattern that follows U.S. military bases in the Middle East; terrorist attacks on U.S. bases have risen alongside the anti-American sentiment that is a product of the occupation and invasion. By building FOBs, the American military is risking their own soldiers’ lives, and the lives of the civilians who live near the base. By forcing locals to participate in a conflict merely by being in the same vicinity, military bases strip civilians of their autonomy and potentially their lives.

Environmental Harm

U.S. military bases harm the environment in multiple ways. From continuing to occupy the land long after the bases are abandoned, to polluting the water and land, to toxifying the air from burn pits, the environmental damage is evident.

“Once overseas bases are established, they tend to be remarkably

durable, regardless of how the actual functions of those bases evolve…even when military technologies, economic climate, or geopolitical alignments change”. This quote from Embattled Garrisons speaks to the unnatural way bases will dominate a landscape. Even after the U.S. military has no use for their bases, they will remain on the land, occupying a space that could be used for farming or houses, because they are so indestructible. They remain a permanent reminder of military invasion. This photo (top-right), originally from MSNBC, was used in a Daily Mail article describing “Iraq’s New Ghost Towns”. Taken in Camp Cooke, this photo shows the 1000-building camp, now entirely empty. While the outer shell of these bases is likely to endure almost forever, the abandoned equipment, machinery and materials are not as impervious to climate. The Environmental Protection Agency has a list of sites demarcated as the most toxic and dangerous to humans and environment alike; 900 out of the 1300 sites are abandoned military bases. Through leaks and spills, hazardous chemicals like explosive fluids, metal solvents, and pesticides, filter into the soil and groundwater - the same groundwater used to grow local civilians’ crops. In locations with nearby rivers, civilian drinking water is contaminated as well. Like the chemical leaks from equipment, toxins from the burn pits also infiltrated the groundwater, toxifying the nearby land and water. In the U.S. burning waste in one’s backyard is illegal, due to the damaging effects it can have on a person and the land, but US military bases still burn waste in other countries fully knowing the harms that it carries. Thus, environmental imaginaries of the Middle East as a hostile environment only continue to expand as people will regard the land with a whole other level of toxicity. U.S. military bases don’t just perpetuate climate change, they perpetuate environmental orientalism.

In addition to the chemical changes to the environment, burn pits alter the environment aesthetically. At Balad Air Base in Iraq, the base where the picture of burning aerosol cans was taken, (photo on the next page) the smoke produced from the burn pit was so intense and “such an invariable part of the horizon that software engineers writing a program to help fighter pilots navigate their way onto the base made it a central part of the digitally simulated skyline”. The plume of smoke was so constant it actually was drawn into a map of the area. What does this alteration mean for the The now empty Camp Cooke in Iraq

people who rely on the map, and the people who live under the plume of smoke? How does its permanence affect the environmental imaginaries? Had one not known what this photograph was depicting, the source of the smoke could easily have been mistaken for a car bomb, or other explosion, instead of a burn pit. Behind the cloud of smoke in the upper left-hand corner, we see the sun completely obfuscated by the thick toxic smoke. This photo was taken by Staff Sergeant Greg Roberts, who’s housing unit was only half a mile away from the burn pit. Roberts states that “there was a constant plume in the air and the black silt combined with the powdery sand covered everything”. The imaginary of a hostile land comes not just from the smoke plume, but also from the isolation, both physical and conceptual, of the military bases. From the aerial photo of Camp Arifjan, we saw how the rigid borders of the camp isolate soldiers from the civilians, but these borders also isolate the soldiers from truly experiencing the land. As soldiers are interacting more with their base than the surrounding environment, they are exposed to a different environment than the civilians living on the land. This image (next page) is from another veteran’s blog documenting his time at FOB Gaines-Mills in Kurdistan. The perspective of the photo is so directly aimed at the mud, we can tell what the soldier is trying to convey even without reading the caption.

“In short Gains-Mills was a truly miserable place. Now to add to this picture of misery I need to explain something about Iraq. It has only two seasons. Hot (and dusty) and the muddy season. It doesn't really rain, just kind of stays over cast, and there's mud everywhere. Its kind of like living in a swamp,

The infamous smoke plume at Balad Air Base

A road outside Camp Gaines-Mills

and even walking takes effort. Worse, it gets mighty cold, with a pretty nasty wind that does its best to sap the warmth right out of your bones. In short, it is a miserable country year round."

The last sentence is precisely the sort of destructive and naive narrative constructed from an institution that isolates its members. Toxic from the smoke, and miserable from the mud, these imaginaries turn the Middle East into a sacrificial land, barren and inhospitable, with no reference to the slow violence that made them this way, reinforcing the agentless injustice.

Conclusion

By examining the mindset of U.S. military servicemen stationed at bases in the Middle East, we can conclude that US military bases successfully ‘other’ the land they occupy, and the people who inhabit this land. Through direct physical, environmental, and mental harm, the landscape of the Middle East is so othered that the land and the people, both physically through disfigurement and mentally through disconnection, cannot return to the homeland that once flourished. While this study draws on the perspective of U.S. military servicemen, as previously mentioned it is missing the critical voice of local people displaced by these military bases. Future studies should seek to include this narrative, perhaps via first-person interviews or social media posts by locals on the topic. Going forward, this article should serve as a reminder for the military-industrial complex that by building bases, harmful imaginaries are also being built. These have detrimental consequences for all human life that surrounds these bases. Further research should be done on how to reduce the slow violence induced by bases, and this article fits well within the discussion on the overall necessity of military bases.

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