A Whole Pile of Nutshells

From Tal Afar, I flew by helicopter to an airfield a few miles north of Tikrit, called Forward Operating Base Speicher. The headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division, Speicher is an"enduring FOB" -- one of a handful of gigantic bases around Iraq to which American forces are being pulled back, as smaller bases are handed over to the Iraqi Army. Speicher has an area of twenty-four miles and the appearance of a small, flat, modular Midwestern city; there is a bus system, a cavernous dining hall that serves four flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream, a couple of gyms, and several movie theaters. At least nine thousand soldiers live there, and many of them seemed to leave the base rarely or not at all: they talked about"going out," as if the psychological barrier between them and Iraq had become daunting. After three months on the base, an Army lawyer working on the Iraqi justice system still hadn't visited the Tikrit courts. A civil-affairs major who had been in Iraq since May needed to consult a handbook when I asked him the names of the local tribes...

Much of the activity at an enduring FOB simply involves self-supply. These vast military oases raise the spectre of American permanence in Iraq, but to me, they more acutely suggested American irrelevance.

I've noted before the curious determination of American military forces to make sure there's plenty of ice cream and big screen televisions in the war zone, and I've tried to describe the slipshod nature of our actual, you know, military effort.

Speaking of nutshells: At my own FOB in northern Kuwait, we just got soft serve ice cream machines in the dining facilities, at long last supplementing the six flavors of Baskin-Robbins and the freezer full of assorted ice cream bars. Fascinating to think that someone, somewhere sat in an office, looked at our FOB, and thought: Not enough ice cream, yet.

So to those who wonder about the effect of a near-term American abandonment of the war in Iraq, I offer the suggestion that the American military mostly never made it into the war in the first place. There's a whole lot of motion; there's not much action. It's hard to imagine the eventual success of an effort that so far appears to be focused on getting Baskin-Robbins to the war zone, while the long-present civil affairs officers have to look in the handbook to see who lives in their area of operations. We are watching 160,000 people try to pretend that they're somewhere else, fighting from a growing distance. And for Iraqis the implications of that tactical distance are awfully serious. The increasing (and, I suspect, irreversible) irrelevance of the American military in Iraq is incalculably dangerous for everyone involved.