What exactly would American bases in Iraq be for? If, according to the terms demanded by the Iraqi government, and hysterically supported by people in Iraq (not "the Iraqi people"), such bases could not be used for attacks on other countries -- such as Iran, such as Syria -- then what are those bases for? Are the Americans to remain there, at great expense, exhausting an American military already desperate for troops (and trying to get former Reservists and National Guardsmen who have left to come back, to please come back one more time), in order not to project power in the Middle East, but merely to intervene to keep the Iraqi government afload against its domestic enemies, or possibly to serve as "peacekeepers" to ensure that sectarian and ethnic troubles do not get out of hand? 

Is that a sensible thing for the American military to do? Is that a sensible use of its officers and men, and of another two-three hundred billion dollars that is spent every year now in that "ungrateful volcano" (Churchill's perfect phrase  describing Mesopotamia, circa 1920) in Iraq? 

The Bush Adminisetration and its loyalists have always assumed, and always allowed it  to be known, that they were absolutely confident that they could build a half-dozen mega-bases, and have apparently done so or at least almost completed them, bases that they blandly assumed would be under t permanent American control, and so useful for "projecting American power all over the Middle East."

It was never to be, and that was said here before -- it would never be.

And it will never be, because the Muslims of Iraq, or their various factions and groups, once they were done using the Americans for their own purposes, would never allow them to fulfill their own, American, plans.

There is no surprise here. If there is surprise and disappointment in the Pentagon or anywhere else in the government, that is because Islam, and Muslim minds and hearts, have not been understood.