I didn't think the U.S. could go any more over the top than it did with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq

i guess i was wrong... take a gander at this complete with moat...


A model of the US Embassy in Battersea, complete with
moat 30m wide and rolling parkland

The United States has unveiled plans for its new $1 billion high-security embassy in London — the most expensive it has ever built.

[...]

A moat 30 metres (100ft) wide and rolling parkland will separate the building from the main road, protecting it from would-be bombers and removing the need for ... blast barriers... .

The State Department sought to play down the cost of security measures, noting the expense of London building work. But the price puts the London embassy above the US’s most fortified missions, including the Baghdad embassy, which cost $600 million (£390 million) but required a further $100 million of work on air conditioning, and the Islamabad embassy, still under construction, which has cost more than $850 million.

kinda makes me nostalgic for the mere $600M+ spent to construct the u.s. embassy in iraq...


U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, Iraq

i wasn't aware of it, but there's also a new u.s. embassy under construction in islamabad, pakistan, at the hefty price tag of $850M... is it any wonder people in other countries hate us...?

(thanks to kevin at cryptogon...)

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If our government wasn't so damned arrogant, we'd have the good grace to be ashamed of ourselves

disgusting...

The United States inaugurated its largest embassy ever in the heart of the Green Zone on Monday, officially opening the fortress-like compound that was built as a testament to America's commitment to Iraq.

Addressing an inauguration ceremony under tight security, Ambassador Ryan Crocker said the $700 million embassy was testimony to America's long-term friendship with Iraq, where about 146,000 U.S. troops are deployed.

"From this embassy in the years to come, we look forward to building our partnership and contributing to the future," Crocker said.

meanwhile...

Attacks once again rocked Baghdad a day after a suicide bomber killed at least 38 people at a Shiite shrine just four miles north of the site of the new embassy. Four bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad just before noon on Monday, killing four people and wounding 19.

i hope those occupying the seats of power in the REAL iraqi government feel comfortable in their new home...

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Juan Cole: close the Iraq embassy

i agree 110%...

in full...

I don't try to start an internet campaign very often, because the blogosphere has its own priorities and logic that are democratic and should not be forced. But here is a plea for everyone in the blogging world to help force congress to save our diplomats.

Bush is trying to Shanghai several hundred foreign service officers and force them to go to Iraq. They are protesting.

Now is that time for all Americans to stand up for the diplomats who serve this country ably and courageously throughout the world, for decades on end. Foreign service officers risk disease and death, and many of them see their marriages destroyed when spouses decline to follow them to a series of remote places. They are the ones who represent America abroad, who know languages and cultures and do their best to convince the world that we're basically a good people.

The Jesse Helms Right always hated the State Department, because it is about compromise and finding peaceful solutions, whereas the US Right is about war, violence and imposing its will on people. But is is the State Department that, despite some lapses over the decades, generally embodies the best of what America is abroad.

The guerrillas in Iraq constantly target the Green Zone and US diplomatic personnel there with mortar and rocket fire. State Department personnel sleep in trailers that are completely unprotected from such incoming fire. At several points in the past year, they have been forbidden to go outside without protective gear (as if outside were more dangerous). The Bush administration has consistently lied about the danger they are in and tried to cover up these severe security precautions.

The US embassy in Iraq should be closed. It is not safe for the personnel there. Some sort of rump mission of hardy volunteers could be maintained. But kidnapping our most capable diplomats and putting them in front of a fire squad is morally wrong and is administratively stupid, since many of these intrepid individuals will simply resign. (You cannot easily get good life insurance that covers death from war, and most State spouses cannot have careers because of the two-year rotations to various foreign capitals, and their families are in danger of being reduced to dire poverty if they are killed).

There is, in addition to the daily danger, no good escape route for civilian personnel from Baghdad. The troop escalation will be reversed by next year this time, and as the US draws down, the Green Zone is in danger of being overwhelmed by the Mahdi Army. The State Department employees sent there for two year missions are the ones who may end up in secret JAM prisons, as happened in Tehran in 1979.

Bush should not be allowed by Congress to commit this immoral act against the civilians who serve us so faithfully.

Please write your congressional representatives and senators and demand that the US embassy be closed and the forced deportation of US diplomats to Iraq be halted.

The Democrats have been facing the dilemma that they are blocked from doing much about Iraq. This is something they can do. Cut off funding for the embassy and force most of the diplomats home. This is the way to start ending the war.

Now.

good for you, professor cole... good for you...

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Did anyone honestly think, for even the briefest of moments, that this WASN'T going to happen?

United States Embassy, Iraq

Iraq Embassy Cost Rises $144 Million Amid Project Delays
Planning, Workmanship Cited as Problems

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 7, 2007; Page A01

The massive U.S. embassy under construction in Baghdad could cost $144 million more than projected and will open months behind schedule because of poor planning, shoddy workmanship, internal disputes and last-minute changes sought by State Department officials, according to U.S. officials and a department document provided to Congress.

ok, let me ratchet my cynicism up yet another notch... i think this kind of cost overrun is deliberately orchestrated to keep the massive river of cash flowing... the common wisdom says it's due to incompetence but i no longer believe that... the iraq war, just like every other war that preceded it, generates unimaginable wealth for the right people, usually those who are strongest in their support for those who will make war the principal tool of our foreign policy... the amount of money consumed by the illegal iraq war is so vast as to be beyond comprehension, at least for us ordinary folks for whom a few grand is a small fortune... but, folks, it was PLANNED to make money, not to depose saddam, not to dispose of wmd, not to free the iraqi people and not to spread democracy to the middle east... just like the sub-prime mortgage debacle, it was initiated to make money, pure and simple, and in that it has been a stupendous success...

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The fraudulence of the "War on Terror"

nothing we don't know already...

The fraudulence of the "War on Terror," however, is clearly revealed in the pattern of subsequent facts:

• In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorist. Offers by the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden were ignored, and he remains at large to this day.

• In Iraq, when the United States invaded, there were no al Qaeda terrorists at all.

• Both states have been supplied with puppet governments, and both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in strategic proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.

• The U.S. embassy nearing completion in Baghdad is comprised of 21 multistory buildings on 104 acres of land. It will house 5,500 diplomats, staff and families. It is ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy in the world, but we have yet to be told why.

• A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate shows the war in Iraq has exacerbated, not diminished, the threat of terrorism since 9/11. If the "War on Terror" is not a deception, it is a disastrously counterproductive failure.

• Today two American and two British oil companies are poised to claim immense profits from 81 percent of Iraq's undeveloped crude oil reserves. They cannot proceed, however, until the Iraqi Parliament enacts a statute known as the "hydrocarbon framework law."

• The features of postwar oil policy so heavily favoring the oil companies were crafted by the Bush administration State Department in 2002, a year before the invasion.

• Drafting of the law itself was begun during Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, with the invited participation of a number of major oil companies. The law was written in English and translated into Arabic only when it was due for Iraqi approval.

• President Bush made passage of the hydrocarbon law a mandatory "benchmark" when he announced the troop surge in January of 2007.

but it never hurts to keep things like this exposed to the full light of day...

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Any lingering doubts about Iraq's sovereignty have now been put to rest

iraq is, plainly and simply, merely a pawn of the united states government...

The security company Blackwater USA was approved Friday to resume escorting American officials in Baghdad, just days after the fatal shooting of 11 Iraqis galvanized the Iraqi government over the company's conduct and the immunity its employees enjoy from Iraqi law.

The decision by the U.S. Embassy came despite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's insistence that the State Department sack the company and his government's demand that Blackwater and other such security firms be stripped of the immunity granted them in 2004 by L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the former U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

can you imagine something like this happening in the united states and having the government of another country announcing that they were going to go ahead and continue what they were doing on our soil despite our government's demands...? i didn't think so...

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Tom Tomorrow on our endless ability to be distracted

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Iraq - a continuing litany of death

juan cole provides the gruesome summary...

122 US troops died in Iraq in May, the worst total since late 2004.

A radical Salafi group in Baghdad claimed to have killed two US embassy employees, a husband and a wife, after robbing them of large sums. The US embassy will only say that the two are missing. An AP cameraman was shot and killed on Thursday.

A massive suicide bombing of police recruits in the largely Sunni city of Fallujah west of Baghdad killed 30 and wounded 20 on Thursday, a day when Iraqi authorities announced that almost 100 persons were killed, found dead, or injured [Arabic] in political violence. (Western wire services appear to have put their stories to bed before the full scope of the carnage was apparent.] Five bodies turned up in Mosul; there was a bombing in Baghdad that killed 1 and wounded 3; at least 2 were killed by rocket fire in Tal Afar (link). 29 bodies showed up in Baghdad streets and a lecturer in Fine Arts was shot down in Basra (link).

it never gets better, it only gets worse...

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Call to action - post the Iraq Embassy photos all over the goddam blogosphere

i'm feeling more than a little feisty this evening...

from think progress...

On Tuesday, ThinkProgress highlighted photos of the U.S. embassy in Iraq, which is set to open in September. Projected to cost $592 million, the embassy will have a staff of 1,000 people and operating costs will total $1.2 billion a year. The complex will be 104 acres, which is the size of approximately 80 football fields.

[...]

According to news reports, “Some U.S. officials acknowledged that damage may have been done by the postings and used expletives to describe their personal reactions.” But what kind of damage has been done — damage to security or public relations?

ok, goddam it, if that's the game they want to play, i was first in line in the think progress post's comments section to volunteer to post the goddam pictures on this blog...

here ya go... and if i find any more, i'll post them too...


Main building, front entrance

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Suspicious of establishing a long-term presence in the Middle East? Ya THINK...?

i've read enough of dan froomkin to know that he's not making the statement in the last paragraph of this snippet as a blinding glimpse of the obvious...

The White House, long irritated by the frequent use of Vietnam as a metaphor for Iraq, embraced its own analogy yesterday: South Korea.

[...]

It's troubling because American troops have been in South Korea for more than 50 years -- while polls show the American public wants them out of Iraq within a year.

[...]

And it's telling because it gives credence to persistent suspicions that establishing a long-term strategic presence in the Middle East was a primary motivation for this misbegotten war in the first place.

anybody with two brain cells to rub together could have figured out that we went in to iraq to stay, and every single thing that's happened since has borne out that conclusion... i am with atrios 110%, we are going to be in iraq forever, as long as this crowd and their republican and democratic enablers in congress continue to have their way...

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HOLY FREAKIN' CRAP!

i had seen excerpts from this wapo article but i hadn't seen the accompanying photo...



The $1B+ new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY...! any american who isn't embarrassed to death by this obscene display of empire run amok is seriously living on another planet... and, as e. buttler at the barstool chronicles (who tipped me off to this photo) says...

Well, of course wounded vets at Walter Reed have to live with rat shit, mold spores, and who knows how many other manifestations of privatized "care," when the Stalinist freaks they so inexplicably serve operate raj-style embassies, such as this one located in the Halliburton-approved subsidiary otherwise known as Iraq.

a new embassy is a-building in skopje, macedonia, on a hill overlooking the city, next to the 12th century fortress... i can't wait to see what kind of over-the-top monstrosity THAT turns out to be...

and, naturally, the u.s. interests come ahead of any local, historical, cultural, or religious interests...

[The] American plan to construct $50 million United States Embassy on Gradiste hill overlooking capital of Skopje, Macedonia, runs into opposition from many Macedonians, who consider hill as one of most important historical sites in country, as well as home to recently discovered 300-year-old cemetery that may hold as many as 2,000 graves; they want Macedonian government to cancel its deal to sell land to US government and designate area as national heritage spot; it appears unlikely that would happen; US Amb Lawrence Butler denies that proposed building would damage historical remains or artifacts.

that article was dated almost three years ago... the new embassy in skopje is projected to open this year...

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