Are US Marines Expendable?

Claude Salhani

Oil, understandably, remains vital to the West's national security. But what is inexcusable is to repeat the mistakes of the past and place that many Marines in a single compound where the history could repeat itself.

Deploying US Marines in uninhabited desolate terrain in Afghanistan to secure an area where oil pipelines get built may be considered crucial to the national security of the United States.

After all, oil is vital to keep our cars running, our airplanes flying, our homes heated and our tanks, ships, helicopters and other military vehicles operating. But what remains inexcusable are plans to bivouac more than 3,000 US Marines in a single compound in hostile territory.

The Washington Post carried a recent report that military operations in Delaram, in the southwest of Afghanistan, where some 3,000 Marines are to be deployed is "far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. Yet, the US Marines are deployed and are fighting in that part of the country." The report states that Delaram is a day's drive from the nearest city and refers to it as 'the end of the Earth.' The Marines are trained to fight to hell and back, but should'nt the politicians back home think twice before placing the leathernecks in such great numbers in a single area?

The Marines, according to the Post, are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see. By this summer, more than 3,000 Marines-one-tenth of the additional troops authorised by President Obama in December-will be based there. It may well be a desolate place but it does not mean that Taleban and other Islamist groups could not launch rockets and mortar attacks on the Marines and be gone before the Marines have time to react. Israel, with all its sophisticated equipment and operating on home ground, remains unable to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at its border towns and settlements.

With that in mind what are the chances of the Marines on foreign soil, in a hostile environment and where it is difficult to identify friend from foe, of being more successful in 
 preventing attacks?

One thought jumps to mind: Beirut, October, 23, 1983. Every US Marine knows what that date signifies. That was when the Marines suffered their largest loss of life in any single day since the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. In the early morning of Sunday, Oct. 23, 1983, a single terrorist driving a truck packed with explosives drove his vehicle into the Battalion Landing Team building near Beirut International Airport housing US Marines serving with the Multinational Peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

The bomb killed 241 US servicemen, mostly Marines. Moments later another similar attack took out a building housing French paratroopers, killing 58. The attack against the Marines was the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. The mistake committed in Beirut was to allow a large number of troops in a single location, and that, despite objections from Col. Timothy Geraghty, the Marine commander on the ground, who feared his men were placed in a vulnerable position. Col. Geraghty's complaints, warnings and requests to amend the situation was over-ridded by his superiors in Washington, both civilian and military.

Today Marines are being sent once again into harm's way without a clear-cut vision of where the mission is heading, or why. The Post asks why are the Marines deployed in this remote part of Afghanistan and asks if this is the best way to make use of a force such as the Marines. The mission, according to the report, will likely tie up two Marine battalions and hundreds of Afghan security forces until the summer.

Bruce Gagnon comments in an article written for Global Research that the top Marine commander in Afghanistan, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, wants his Marine units ''to push through miles of uninhabited desert to establish control of a crossing point for insurgents, drugs and weapons on the border with Pakistan. And he wants to use the new base in Delaram to mount more operations in Nimruz, a part of far southwestern Afghanistan deemed so unimportant that it is one of the only provinces where there is no U.S. or NATO reconstruction team."

The obvious question then is why? Gagnon once more: The proposed pipeline route is to move Caspian Sea oil through Turkmenistan into Afghanistan and then finally through Pakistan to ports along the Arabian Sea where US and British tankers would gorge themselves with the black gold.

The game being played out today is for control of who controls the flow of oil. ''The whole reason the US is in Afghanistan and Pakistan today is to deny those pipelines from being routed through Russia, China, or Iran,'' says Gagnon. When you look at the map where the US Marines are operating inside Afghanistan it is in areas, says the writer of the article, that must be controlled if pipelines are to be built and safely exploited.

Oil, understandably, remains vital to the West's national security. But what is inexcusable is to repeat the mistakes of the past and place that many Marines in a single compound where the history could repeat itself.

Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times