New U.S. Embassy rises in Iraq

[sabra]

Source: LA Times

Conspicuously huge and self-contained but deemed inadequate for a disaster scenario, the compound is already taking fire.

BAGHDAD — Huge, expensive and dogged by controversy, the new U.S. Embassy compound nearing completion here epitomizes to many Iraqis the worst of the U.S. tenure in Iraq.

"It's all for them, all of Iraq's resources, water, electricity, security," said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlighted site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. "It's as if it's their country, and we are guests staying here."

Despite its brash scale and nearly $600-million cost, the compound designed to accommodate more than 1,000 people is not big enough, and may not be safe enough if a major military pullout leaves the country engulfed in a heightened civil war, U.S. planners now say.

Militants have fired shells into the compound in the fortified Green Zone, where more than 85 rocket and mortar strikes have killed at least 16 people since February, according to a United Nations report last month. Five more people died in fierce barrages this month.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-embassy24jul24,0,7085179.story?coll=la-home-center

[Glimmer of Hope]

1. I am so ashamed. Has anyone seen the Iraq embassy in DC?

I walk by it all the time and its not quite as nice.

[arewenotdemo]

2. Helicopters from Green Zone roofs, baby.

It's only a matter of time.

[bleedingheart]

3. I think that embassy is nothing more than a brothel

Uncle Sam (our treasury) goes to the brothel and the corporate whores offer services like constructing a safer embassy...so Uncle Same forks over the cash and the corporate whores screw us...

Nothing more than a brothel.

[Spazito]

4. So, this is the size of Vatican city.....

When completed in September, the compound will have the amenities of a small town, with six apartment buildings, a palm-fringed swimming pool, a gym, fast-food outlets, a barbershop and beauty salon, and a commissary stocked with the comforts of home. It is designed to be entirely self-sufficient, boasting its own power plant, wells and wastewater treatment system, according to a December 2005 report for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Plans are also being drawn up to build short-term housing for several hundred additional people on a currently unused portion of the site, said Patrick F. Kennedy, the State Department's management policy chief, who traveled to Iraq in May to review embassy staffing. How much the housing will add to the price tag has not been determined.

snip

The magnitude of the new compound, with nearly the same acreage as Vatican City, has convinced many Iraqis that the United States harbors long-term ambitions here, even as domestic pressure mounts to start bringing the troops home.

"They're not leaving Iraq for a long time," said Hashim Hamad Ali, another guard, who called the compound "a symbol of oppression and injustice."


Anyone think the US will "voluntarily" leave Iraq? I sure don't.