Huge Baghdad embassy is a "$600M anachronism"; an Iraqi: "It's as if it's their country..."

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: New U.S. Embassy rises in Iraq
Conspicuously huge and self-contained but deemed inadequate for a disaster scenario, the compound is already taking fire.
By Alexandra Zavis, Times Staff Writer
July 24, 2007

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.

"Having the 'heavily fortified Green Zone' doesn't matter one iota" when it comes to rocket and mortar attacks, said one senior military officer.

Like much U.S. planning in Iraq, the embassy was conceived nearly three years ago on rosy assumptions that stability was around the corner, and that the military effort would gradually draw down, leaving behind a vast array of civilian experts who would remain intimately engaged in Iraqi state-building. The result is what some analysts are describing as a $592-million anachronism....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-embassy24jul24,0,7085179.story

[babylonsister]

1. STILL winning hearts and minds, I see.

:(

[Gman]

2. The entire point is not whether or not its ever even used

it's that the contractors got to make some big bucks building it. This entire war is about a lot of people looting the treasury and making a ton of money.

[conspirator]

3. It is US land now. There are still a few natives to kill. But it's practically on the bag.

:sarcasm:

[Amonester]

4. Have they painted that big target image on the wall there yet...

or they may just save the monies for that, since it's not really needed.

The target image is there even if it isn't visible...

[Yael]

5. People dying in the streets and contractors are building a building to nowhere

Wake me up when its over, k?

[WinkyDink]

6. At least it's a big target.

[Warpy]

7. I know how the Iraqi feels

because I generally feel that my presence in my own country is only grudgingly tolerated. On bad days, I feel like I'm part of an infestation that is on the list to be exterminated.

[Hideboh]

8. You know what

The actual construction cost was something like $92million and
the rest is in Cheney's secret Halliburton...