Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.04.2006, Blaðsíða 5

Well, it’s official now: the event we predicted last
November (The Base Bows Out, on www.grape-
vine.is) has finally happened. Not that we were the
first, of course. The signs had been there for a long
time, whether you’re talking about the downsizing
over the past 15 years, the base’s command switch
from Joint Force Command (in Virginia) to the
European Defence Command (in Germany) in
1999, or the fact that the US told Iceland in 2003
that it was going to withdraw the aircraft. Which
makes it pretty peculiar that Prime Minister
Halldór Ásgrímsson reacted to the announcement
of the base’s closing with any degree of surprise, as
he did the day after the announcement was made.
Perhaps sensing how out of touch this would make
him seem, he said about a week later that he’d
expected the base to close.
Whether he expected it or not, the most
bizarre reaction out of this series of events is the
emphasis being placed on what Iceland’s going to
do for defence now. Ásgrímsson’s been putting a
lot of effort into this subject, organising talks with
officials from different NATO countries, writing
a letter to President Bush and speculating on the
cost of buying a helicopter. Many in the Icelandic
government are putting together all kinds of dif-
ferent defence scenarios, with the Social Demo-
crats forming a special committee, “Independent
Foreign Policy,” with the purpose of carving out
new defence strategies.
Meanwhile, the real danger of the base’s de-
parture is being all but ignored: the economic hit
that Keflavík’s going to take.
According to Statistics Iceland, the base em-
ploys around 640 Icelanders. Add to this outside
contractors who do work on the base, and that
total reaches over a thousand. These people will be
out of work within the next few weeks to months.
Add to this the men and women of the US Navy
and Air Force who go to town and spend their
money, and the economic impact becomes that
much greater.
Suspend belief for a moment and assume that
the base’s departure did, in fact, catch the Icelan-
dic government by surprise. Why is so much effort
being put into avoiding a scenario that’s not at all
likely to happen (Iceland being attacked militarily)
while the scenario of a massive economic drought
in Keflavík – which is entirely likely to happen
with the next few months – gets cursory atten-
tion from the Icelandic government in the form
of a brief visit from the Prime Minister and some
vague notions that people will simply commute to
Reykjavík for work?
It’s a shame the government won’t give the
men and women paying their salaries the same at-
tention they’re giving to staving off unrealistic and
imagined threats. The real threat posed to Iceland
by the base’s departure comes from within.
The Phantom Menace
EDITORIALS
Bart Cameron, Editor
I have only been on one military base in my life,
and when I tell my war-protesting friends about
that experience, I feel I have to give an aside. Vis-
iting Keflavík’s NATO base, even when America
was at war, wasn’t a very militaristic experience.
As Paul Nikolov writes in this issue’s feature,
the vibe in Keflavík is decidedly laid back. In fact,
when I visited, two years ago, the base felt like a
community college. Most of the soldiers I talked
to were open about having political views that
were to the left of the current administration, and
it was the norm to hear people describe their stay
in Iceland according to how many college credits
they could earn while here.
The most amusing documentation of the
surreal effect the base had on Icelandic life that
I have come across was the recent documentary
Bítlabærinn Keflavík. In the movie, we see how
Keflavík, which had exposure to soldiers and
soldiers’ record collections, brought rock music to
Iceland. In a particularly amusing turn of the film,
a soldier explains how he also undertook to bring
LSD to Iceland, but decided against it, having
seen how fearless the locals were with substances.
One consistently gets the impression that the
Keflavík NATO base was essentially the predeces-
sor to the Internet—the place the world came into
Iceland. On its departure, one is tempted to look
back wistfully.
In fact, coupled with the massive loss of jobs,
and the immense new economic responsibilities
Iceland has to undertake in the base’s absence,
I have been silly enough to state, out loud, that
allowing the base to leave is not a good thing for
Iceland.
For a few days after I made such a comment, I
was called everything short of Imperialist Ameri-
can Pig Dog… actually, I was called an Imperialist
American Pig Dog. The only person who heard
my viewpoint and took it easy on me was someone
who lived in Keflavík, and who had a keen aware-
ness of how many jobs were going to be lost.
Trying to understand how I came into such a
conflict, I thumbed my way through the back is-
sues of the Grapevine, back to the bone of conten-
tion I have always had with this paper: issue one.
Issue one of the Grapevine presented a feature on
the base written by the first editor, an intelligent
and amusing novelist, journalist and musician
named Valur Gunnarsson. Mr. Gunnarsson went
to the Keflavík NATO base, and described it as
the home of “Jackboots on Ice,” or, essentially,
home to the modern day Nazis.
Since I took over the Grapevine, I have
apologised for the comment a number of times.
Yes, I feel President Bush and his administration
have committed war crimes and their actions are
inexcusable. In fact, I feel the current war is the
blackest mark on the difficult history of American
international policy, an action that it will take
probably a century to attempt to rectify if and
when the most powerful country in the world gets
a leader with an IQ above room temperature, and
a personality set to thoughtful, not rabid.
However, the soldiers I met at the Kefla-
vík base have not been hateful people, nor have
I heard or read inflammatory, dehumanising
rhetoric from American sources, outside of one
American television channel, Fox News, which is
watched by a tiny percentage of Americans and a
seemingly larger percentage of aghast Europeans.
I have always felt Mr. Gunnarsson’s comments
were inexcusable. Until it came to putting out this
issue.
The March 18th protests are covered in detail
in this paper, and you can read about the films that
were screened, and get some idea of how many
members of the intelligentsia spoke up against
Icelandic involvement in Iraq. If you are like me,
when you read about Ari Alexander’s short film,
you will wince and maybe even stop reading.
Personally, I got a bit angry to see that Hallgrímur
Helgason and Halla Gunnarsdóttir among others
were putting their reputations behind a meeting
that would show a film that was so propagan-
dist—a film that focused on beheadings, rape and
the other horrible faces of war. A short speech that
followed the film stated the following: look what
Iceland has contributed to.
The typical reaction to a film of beheadings
and brutality of war shots is to say “Are your
hands really so clean?” You can say any number of
things about Icelandic policy in the last thousand
years: there has been a tendency towards corrup-
tion, and those with power have tended to oppress
the masses, there have been hundreds of years of
starvation despite rich natural resources. But, for
the last thousand years, Iceland did avoid doing
any other nation any harm.
Then, in 1941, Iceland started housing the
most powerful military in the world. And finally,
in 2003, the most powerful military in the world
coerced Iceland into signing on to an inexcusable
war.
While I believe that the Keflavík base had a
number of positive effects on Iceland, and while I
believe the soldiers were, for the most part, good
people, they were soldiers. Iceland wasn’t forced to
house the Keflavík Diplomacy Centre, or Keflavík
International University, but an installation with
the specific job of making war, something Iceland
has been opposed to for a thousand years.
In this light, extremist comments from locals
and the refusal to shed a tear over the loss of long-
time neighbours and employers might be more
understandable.
No Tears Over These Lost Jobs
Paul F. Nikolov,
Journalist
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