The Embassy

The last two days have been about checking out at the US Embassy in Baghdad. Depending on with whom you speak, this compound is a) the world’s largest embassy; or, b) the world’s most expensive embassy; or, c) the world’s most poorly constructed embassy. Perhaps all three. It is an impressive site with two-tone sand-colored cubes placed around the largest expanse of manicured lawn in Iraq. The place is crawling with desperate inmates. The longer I am confined here, the more thankful I am that my two years in Iraq were spent in the real country.

The place is lousy with foreign service officers (FSOs). They infest every corner – swilling skim milk cappuccinos at the Green Bean, complaining about the lack of fresh strawberries at the dining hall, bitching that flies are permitted within the Embassy compound. Given the quarters in which I am housed, the food provided at the dining hall (I had actual fried eggs and real bacon for breakfast this morning), and the amenities available within the compound, I have to remind myself that this is a hardship post. Imagine having Johnny Walker Blue on the shelves at the Welch Super Service? The Embassy Store has Blue ($174), and Green ($47), and Black ($40), and Red (for the maintenance crew and the Peruvian guards, I suppose).

If not the biggest US embassy in the world, it has to be near the top. There are between 3,000 and 5,000 people living here (again, it depends on who is telling the story) on an plot of land about half a mile long and a quarter mile wide.

I was told today that the price tag on this place was over $800 million. And construction continues. It will break a billion easily. The cost of building embassies and consulates must be going through the roof. Initial numbers being thrown around for the Basra Consulate are in excess of $500 million. It must be the added cost of security.

Repairs are ubitiquious on practically every building on the compound. One of the decorative three-story awnings on an administrative building detached itself and showered the walkway below with chunks of concrete. There are horror stories of bathrooms not flushing because they were never hooked to the sewer lines and showers sending electricity through the bodies of would-be clean FSOs. Before the place opened somebody realized that there were only enough rooms for half of the folks employed by the Embassy. The solution was to retrofit the rooms. When that was done, it adversely impacted the air conditioning systems.

Google the Embassy in Baghdad. Select Google images. The place has a certain Stalinist charm. Call me Old School but I like the idea of US embassies all looking like Mt. Vernon, or Montecello, or better yet, Tara. I think every American embassy should spend as much as we have on the lawn here in Baghdad to grow magnolias on the grounds. Our embassies should be little pieces of the US. American art should adorn the halls. American customs – sandlot baseball, Frisbee, picnics – should be standard fare at a US mission. There should be easy access to grills and maybe even a drive-in picture show. There is no better way to introduce foreigners to Americans than to invite them to see how we live. That, in part, is how we won the Cold War.

If I were an Iraqi, I doubt that I would be impressed by America based on the Baghdad compound. There is little about it that celebrates who and what Americans are. I suspect that the only lesson the Iraqis get from the American Embassy – which cannot be seen from the road that passes in front of it because of the walls – is that we are afraid. Few Iraqis will get into the US compound. Few Americans are allowed outside the gates.

You have to ask yourself what a billion dollars is buying us?