While WTC Site is still a hole in the ground, Huge US Embassy Compound in Iraq nears completion:

[cyberpj]

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.

MUCH MORE + PHOTOS:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-embassy24jul24,0,7085179.story?coll=la-home-center

[wtmusic]

1. That embassy will make a great holocaust museum 20 years from now nt

[cyberpj]

7. If Iraqis even let it stand that long. nt

[ramapo]

2. Nothing like no-bid contracts for K&R and the boys

Would've been nice to rebuild parts of our urban areas instead of this fiasco. What a silly idea.

[WinkyDink]

3. WTC is property of NYC.

[nickyt]

4. While New Orleans and Biloxi are still holes in the ground,

Huge US Embassy Compound in Iraq nears completion

[Zensea]

5. That's because democracy is messy

unlike dictatorship.

[bdamomma]

6. it's all about the oil that is what it is all about.