The mammoth complex under construction for an impressive American presence in Iraq adds hundreds of millions of dollars to the military costs, reconstruction costs, and the incomparable cost in lives. Will this American investment make it too difficult for politicians to call the troops home from an unstable Iraq?
In Vietnam, Americans left behind an old embassy. In Baghdad, departure now would mean the abandonment of a virtual town in the 5.6. square mile International Zone, into which a treasure of American bucks has been invested. According to a Congressional Research Service report the administration expects this embassy to cost $1.5 Billion when staffing and maintenance are added. Appropriations have come from a variety of sources, none of them in the regular budget, and “many have had difficulty in discerning exactly what the Administration has already received.”
A week after submitting his FY2006 budget request, the President sent Congress the 2005 emergency request, H.R. 1268, the Emergency Supplement Appropriations Act for Defense, the War on Terrorism, and Tsunami Relief. Ultimately, Congress approved
$592 million for construction of a new embassy compound in Baghdad… The proposed embassy will… house 1,020 staff and 500 guards.
The contract was awarded Halliburton’s construction arm, Kellogg, Brown and Root, with construction under its subcontractor, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting. Details, including the identity of the firm’s officers, are in CorpWatch.
The new embassy is being built entirely by imported labor, a workforce of 900, mostly Asians, living on site.
Scheduled for completion in June 2007, the 104-acre embassy compound, roughly the size of the Vatican, will resemble a mini-state, entirely independent from the outside world. It will generate its own power, pump its own sewage and draw its own water.
Within the compound there will be six buildings containing 619 apartments for diplomats, a barrack for Marine guards, separate residences for the ambassador and his deputy, a gym, a swimming pool, a club, a food court, a beauty salon, a vehicle workshop and a warehouse.
I can see pulling Coalition troops out of Iraq immediately for any number of reasons. I’m not fussy. But this huge embassy project has been under construction for several months already. That’s a lot to abandon. I can’t envision a decision to leave it as defenseless as the embassy in Iran besieged in 1979, when 70 Americans were held hostage 444 days after the Ayatolla replaced Shah.
Maybe Republican warmongers and whoever else were merely premature in promoting the investment in an enormous U.S. embassy compound. Maybe they weren’t calculating, knowing that a Congress which had committed so very much to warfare and construction in Iraq was unlikely to bow to popular insistence we leave now and not next year. It’s worked so far. Maybe they weren’t really evil, and just got lucky.