To add some detail: a little investigative work has revealed that ECA's headquarters are located at a dutch air-force base in the south of Holland, next door to the facilities of Fokker Flight Services og Fokker Elmo. To the people of Iceland however, this is so far just a faceless company that nobody has heard of before.

Once Iceland officials expelled US personel from the air base they could have known what was going to happen to their economy in the short time that followed. The turmoil of Iceland economy energes as a logical outcome of their previous dids.

A question: was the US expelled from the Icelandic air base or did they leave out of their own accord? If the US was expelled, then yes, we can all safely assume that their dire economic situation has been cooked up in Washington. America is extremely powerful economically, especially against small countries that are dependent on it, like Iceland used to be.

Watch out, it is a new world oreder coming! By the way, will human rights sub-committee head Heidi Hautala of Finland, her deputy Laima Andrikiena of Lithuania, Thijs Berman of the Netherlands, and Kristina Partelpog of Estonia hold rally in support freedom of assembly Icelandic air base? Just wondering.

AFAIK, the American military left their Icelandic base because they were trying to save money, given their commitments elsewhere (Afghanistan and Iraq). It probably didn't help that, whilst the governing political party in Iceland supported the US presence, many opposition groups did not. Then and now, nobody is likely to attack Iceland but if they did, the US air force is not very far away. The Americans have been closing bases in Western Europe for some years now, whilst opening some bases in newer NATO member states in Eastern Europe where they feel more welcome and operating costs are less. ECA looks to have an impressive amount of military hardware for their training programs - it must have cost a lot of money and one wonders if they will be able to recoup enough solely through training. Maybe they have wealthy benefactors who might need to borrow their hardware for jobs in which it would be embarrassing for a particular country's armed forces to be seen to be involved. @lolo The Icelanders created their own problems by being greedy. They had lots of money, low unemployment and cheap energy but wanted higher investment growth rates as offered by the dodgy American banks trying to hide mortgages which were never going to be repaid.

The US forces left Iceland by their own accord, no one expelled them, they simply did not need the facility any more. The airbase is utilized by NATO countries, the USA among them, as they share airspace policing duties (The USAF has 10 F15 fighters here at the moment) The article is quite wrong in most of it´s description of Iceland, it is still one of the wealthiest countries in the world with among the highest standards of living and the emigration in recent months have mostly been foreign nationals returning to their homelands.

Ordinary working people in Britain lost a lot of money because their town councils invested their local taxes in Icelandic banks because of the favorable interest rates some of the money came from some of the most deprived areas in Britain schools and roads cannot now be renewed or repaired because Icelandic banks refuse to pay back the money.yet they now sell their souls to mercenaries. iceland is two hundred miles from where i stay in Scotland and their fishermen are scooping up all the fish and paying no attention to quotas which ensures everyone has a far share and fishing stocks are maintained i can understand now how Russia feels about Georgia

This has all the stink of a thin edge of the wedge program. Get the Iceland government addicted to the money and then up the stakes by converting the base to a mercenary headquarters, basically the largest and only army in the country. Mercenary armies are the anathema to democracy and are typical use by foreign corporations to subdue local populations by extreme acts of violence, they never solve the problem, they simple extend it out while as much profit as possible is extracted from a country basically invaded by foreign corporation using mass murderers for hire. Russia is no longer the threat and is more likely to allow air force training with other nations, not as a military tactic but peace promoting tactic, demonstrating that Russia is rapidly becoming a modern democracy and capable of far reaching statesmanship. This would totally undercut the OPFOR opportunities which in reality make very little sense.

Such unsubstantiated over-the-top speculations, clearly aiming to sow confusion, need not be published in this manner. The title suggest this as a done deal, when it fact, this is probably just a smoke of different colours emanating from Iceland. Just like in England where poor working class retirement systems were put at risk in cassino-economy that was Iceland, neither England nor Iceland have the population with the strenght of convicion or character to demand that the culprits pay. The head of a bank that did the booming business based on an outright fraud, lives comfortably in London. Did UK financial oversight bureucracy warn the pension funds of the risks they are taking? Did those that invested heed those warnings? There were no warnings, as it mattered not to the financial elite in UK if some poor people were robbed, while they themselves slurrped the cream of such Ponzi-schema "banking". And even today, I would bet that the infuriated UK public does not ask a single question about the manner in which their own banks "leveraged" money, skimmmed the profits, and left the public with the debt. And all the "stimulus" on both sides of the Atlantic just served the big pockets to shelter their money, while the public will be stuck with "belt tightening" to "pay" for "living beyond their means" just like in Greece. And to forget their "entitlements", as if the poor Joe did not pay for those "entitlements" many times over. While others gambled with his money. Yet, the public is content to blame other working slobs for not wanting to go into debt penury for something they did not benefit from. And the media is keeping everyone as dumb as possible.