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The only good thing that can be said about Bush’s Presidential Library is that it is not being built with taxpayer dollars. The same can’t be said for the Bush Administration’s grandest monument to stupidity--the American Embassy in Iraq.
· It will be the largest U.S. embassy in the world by a factor of ten. It consists of 21 buildings on 104 acres, six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York city, larger than Vatican City. It will house a delegation of more than five thousand people. It will have its own water, electric, and sewage systems, and it is surrounded by a fortress wall of concrete fifteen feet thick.”-- CounterPunch, 3/30/07
Congress appropriated $592 million for the embassy, which was originally scheduled to be completed in June 2007; but like all of Bush’s plans for Iraq, it is running a little behind schedule and a little over-budget.
· “The new embassy, a 104-acre complex in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, which has been the target of sporadic mortar and rocket attacks, has become a symbol of wartime mismanagement. It's months behind schedule and the subject of two criminal probes.”-- McClatchy Newspapers, 2/29/08
The price tag is now $740 million and the latest tentative date for completion is March 31, 2008; but no one is making any promises.
So far, no one has explained why we need to build the world’s largest embassy in Iraq, but the Iraqis seem to understand:
· “The thousands of Americans at the embassy will not be there to facilitate diplomatic relations; they’ll be there to run the country.”--Raed Jarrar, Iraq consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, Truthout.org, 2/22/08
So, as night falls on Baghdad and the city grows dark for lack of electricity; Iraqis in the area surrounding the Green Zone can bask in the glow emanating from the lighted softball field in the New Embassy Compound. When Iraqi families can’t draw enough putrid water from their faucets to fill a cooking pot, they can console themselves with the knowledge that there is a swimming pool full of clean, chlorinated water just beyond the barb wire and the barricades--in the New Embassy Compound.
This is the Bush Administration’s idea of how to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. What do you think?
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