ENDURING BASES

Only mega-successful levitation would force the Pentagon to get rid of its must-list of four "enduring bases" (whatever the costs) in Iraq:

• al-Asad Air Base in Anbar province;

• sprawling Balad Air Base, with attached Camp Anaconda in the Sunni belt;

• Tallil Air Base in the south; and

• Camp Qayyaragh near Irbil, Kurdistan.

And we're not even talking of the three Baghdad bases -

• Camp Victory (adjacent to Baghdad, formerly Saddam Hussein International Airport);

• Camp Taji (25 kilometers north); and of course

• the 10-square-kilometer, hit-every-day-by-mortars Green Zone, which is a base in itself containing the Vatican-sized, 40-hectare, biggest embassy in the world.