Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Those were the final public words spoken by Sex Pistols frontperson Johnny Rotten at the Pistols' infamous final concert on Jan. 14, 1978 at San Francisco's Winterland ballroom. With that flippant quip, John Lydon, the human behind the Pistols' pop-cultural fiction, was then drunkenly and recklessly negating punk rock's false liberatory promises. That wild historical moment is now long gone, but Rotten's question can still sting sharply for anyone burned badly by false promises of liberation, be they pop-cultural, quasi-spiritual or--more to the point of what follows here--neo-conservative.

If right now there's a certain deadbeat privileged white liberator of dark-skinned peoples on the world stage of whom you're thinking unfondly, trust me, yes, we're going there. But first, let's recall another noteworthy punkers' heyday quip, this one from Dead Kennedys frontperson Jello Biafra, who, timelessly snarking Reagan-era US government dirty deeds in the DKs' 1982 classic "I Am The Owl," declaimed: "In ten years or so we'll leak the truth/but by then it's only so much paper."

Now, in Baby Bush time, Biafra might stand accused of fuzzy math. Truth be told, it's only taken the US government three years, not ten, to start covertly confessing the true motive behind the alleged liberation of a certain colonialist fiction located conveniently in a resource-rich region: namely, the establishment of permanent US military bases in Iraq.

On April 2, the Pentagon, through an obscure spokesperson, revealed that coalition forces in Iraq are spending millions in public money to establish at least six "enduring" bases there. Major Joseph Breasseale, a senior spokesperson for coalition headquarters in Iraq, told The Independent:

"The current plan is to reduce the coalition footprint into six consolidation bases--four of which are US. As we move in that direction, some other bases will have to grow to facilitate the closure [or] transfer of smaller bases."

Semantics is hell: Breasseale calls them "consolidation bases," while the Pentagon calls them "enduring," their word of choice for referring to many of the hundreds of bases it has around the world, "permanent" being an apparent taboo for the brass, at least in public. Argot aside, "the current plan" means that many US bases in Iraq, and across the Middle East (there are currently 106 in Iraq alone), will be consolidated into at least six central bases of massive scale and resources in Iraq (possibly up to 14, according to GlobalSecurity.org), all pointing toward intentions of a long-term US military presence in the region.

Breasseale's admission was preceded by a recent surge in long-running speculation on the topic of permanent US bases in Iraq--a topic whose status has slowly risen from the "moonbat" netherworld to acceptance in the mainstream media, a noteworthy local example being the Seattle Times, who on March 21 gave front-page above-the-fold coverage to the topic by publishing an Associated Press investigative report on base construction activities in Iraq. On the same day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorially admonished the pursuit of permanent bases.

It has long been the suspicion of many in the Western peace movement, and in the Middle East media, that the establishment of a long-term US military presence in Iraq was always one of the motives, if not the motive, behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Joseph Gerson, author of "The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign US Military Bases" and director of an American Friends Service Committee peace program, has said:

"The Bush administration's intention is to have a long-term military presence in the region ... For a number of years the US has sought to use a number of means to make sure it dominates in the Middle East ... The Bush administration sees Iraq as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for its troops and bases for years to come."

Evergreen State College geographer Zoltan Grossman concurs:

"After every US military intervention since 1990 the Pentagon has left behind clusters of new bases in areas where it never before had a foothold. The new string of bases [stretches] from Kosovo and adjacent Balkan states, to Iraq and other Persian Gulf states, into Afghanistan and other central Asian states ... The only two obstacles to a geographically contiguous US sphere of influence are Iran and Syria."

The Pentagon has in fact already spent at least $1 billion on US bases in Iraq. Last month, the House passed a $67.6 billion emergency bill to cover Iraq and Afghanistan military costs that included $348 million for base construction, as requested by the Bush administration. Fortunately an amendment was successfully added by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Ca., and her colleagues prohibiting any spending of that money on permanent base construction. And on April 4, a Senate appropriations panel stripped $177 million from the bill, adding an explicit warning for the White House against using taxpayer money to build permanent bases in Iraq. Nevertheless, permanent designs on Iraq are in still in the works.

The current US bases in Iraq likely to be permanent are indeed massive in scale. The largest, Camp Anaconda, an airbase near Balad, north of Baghdad, occupies 15 square miles, is home to at least 25,000 occupants (including 2,500 contractors, many working for Kellogg Brown & Root), has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a miniature-golf course, and a first-run movie theater, as well as a mile-long helicopter landing pad, home to up to 120 US helicopters.

At another such massive base, at al-Asad in western Iraq, there's even, among other American amenities, a Burger King outlet (which brings to mind New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's own deathless quip from The Lexus and the Olive Tree: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas.") Al-Asad looms large in the Pentagon's consolidation plans: the proposed emergency funding cut by the Senate on April 4 would have provided $7.4 million to extend the base's capacity and build new security fencing around the base, already 19 square miles in size.

Scholars of the neocon world might recognize all this publicly-funded grandeur in the delusions of the Project for a New American Century, including and especially their dream of "full spectrum dominance" over global political and economic power by means of global military supremacy. More recently, the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review Report, released on Feb. 6, declares the Pentagon's ambition to fight "multiple, overlapping wars," and states that the US will "also seek to ensure that no foreign power can dictate terms of regional or global security." Permanent military bases in Iraq would be key to achieving these goals, which are beginning to sound a lot more like "the job" George W. Bush keeps referring to when he claims the US will leave Iraq only "when the job is done."

While the Pentagon is effectively confessing what "the job" in fact is, the White House is staying the course of denial. On April 4, Condoleezza Rice testified before the House Appropriations Committee's foreign operations panel upon returning from her recent surprise visit to Iraq. When Rep. Steven Rothman, D-N.J., asked Rice, "Will the bases be permanent or not?," Rice replied craftily:

"I would think that people would tell you, we're not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days. We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places."

Yet another classic bald-faced Bush Bunch lie. Rice's demure denial clashes loudly with Grossman's assertions about recent US military history, as well as with the American concrete now being poured at Balad, al-Asad and elsewhere in Iraq.

Concrete is permanent. Feeling cheated yet?

While most ETS! readers of course never bought the Bush Bunch's "freedom is on the march" cowflop in the first place, we've still been cheated out of a lot of treasure and blood to assist the neocons in their goal of "full spectrum dominance" that's now revealing itself in the concrete at Camp Anaconda. As for the Beer Bong Caesar's liberatory promises to the Iraqi people, anyone who ever believed in Operation Iraqi Freedom has got to be embarrassed by now. In honor of John Lydon, perhaps we should form a coalition with all the erstwhile war supporters out there to petition for a name change for the ongoing Iraq debacle. How about Operation Enduring Concrete?