Perino: WH Does ‘Not Seek Permanent Bases in Iraq’

General Lute said on Monday we’ll negotiate them. Ali al-Dabbagh wouldn’t rule them out. But at the White House press gaggle today, Dana Perino denied the Bush administration’s interest in long-term U.S. military bases in Iraq. From AFP:

“We do not seek permanent bases in Iraq,” spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters after Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said Monday that the flashpoint issue would be part of negotiations to decide the future of US troops in Iraq.

Yawn. This standard formulation is nothing new for the administration. Zalmay Khalilzad, for instance, used the same words as far back as 2005, and the Iraq Study Group still considered the statement less than categorical. After all: what would we do if Iraq just happened to offer us open-ended access to certain military installations, or access renewable in x-number of years? Very, very rarely will a host country deny the U.S. a re-up on a military base: it took the Philippines nearly 100 years to get us out of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base.

There’s a sense in which our presence at those bases wasn’t “permanent,” and another in which we didn’t “seek” permanence. But it’s one in which the literal meaning has to be interpreted in direct contradiction to the events and issues those words describe. Luckily, the American Philological Society calls that interpretation a “Perino.”