The Secret Building Projects in Iraq You'll Be Paying For

Posted on April 14, 2006

The Iraq strategy grows murkier by the day. According to the Associated Press, we are building a giant "fortress-like compound" next to the Trigris River in Baghdad.

The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq's turbulent future. The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome. "We can't talk about it. Security reasons," Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.
A British tabloid even told readers the location was being kept secret � news that would surprise Baghdadis who for months have watched the forest of construction cranes at work across the winding Tigris, at the very center of their city and within easy mortar range of anti-U.S. forces in the capital, though fewer explode there these days.
The embassy complex � 21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report � is taking shape on riverside parkland in the fortified "Green Zone," just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein's, and across the road from the building where the ex-dictator is now on trial.
The Republican Palace, where U.S. Embassy functions are temporarily housed in cubicles among the chandelier-hung rooms, is less than a mile away in the 4-square-mile zone, an enclave of American and Iraqi government offices and lodgings ringed by miles of concrete barriers. The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almost half listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other U.S. mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the "Red Zone," that is, violence-torn Iraq.
This huge American contingent at the center of power has drawn criticism. "The presence of a massive U.S. embassy � by far the largest in the world � co-located in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is seen by Iraqis as an indication of who actually exercises power in their country," the International Crisis Group, a European-based research group, said in one of its periodic reports on Iraq.
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Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress appropriated only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted last year. Most has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on the project's "classified" portion � the actual embassy offices.

This is absolutely bizarre. Put this together with similar reports of numerous permanent military bases being build in Iraq and you have a picture that is quite different from the one being portrayed by the White House as to what exactly we're doing in Iraq. This is a major undertaking that is costing a lot of money. We're building permanent buildings in a complex that is the size of Vatican City. Yet we keep being told that we'll "stand down as soon as the Iraqi people stand up" and that the cost is under control. This is looking more and more like the same kind of activity seen in South Korea. Our military bases were built in South Korea in 1953 and so far they have cost us a tidy (inflation adjusted) $1 trillion.

Is this the plan for Iraq? Because I sure don't remember President Bush saying anything in his State of the Union address about occupying permanent bases in Iraq for the next 50 years at a cost of several trillion dollars.