Americans building "world's largest bunker" in Iraq

Bush's Baghdad Palace

Nicholas von Hoffman

{snips}

The Nation -- Among the many secrets the American government cannot keep, one of its biggest (104 acres) and most expensive ($592 million) is the American Embassy being built in Baghdad. Surrounded by fifteen-foot-thick walls, almost as large as the Vatican on a scale comparable to the Mall of America, to which it seems to have a certain spiritual affinity, this is no simple object to hide.

So you think the Bush Administration is planning on leaving Iraq? Read on.

This gigantic complex does not square with the repeated assertions by the people who run the American government that the United States will not stay in the country after Iraq becomes a stand-alone, democratic entity. An "embassy" in which 8,000 people labor, along with the however many thousand military personnnel necessary to defend them, is not a diplomatic outpost. It is a base. A permanent base.

There are these 8,000 Americans holed up in a private city, who do not dare to leave their fortified luxury bunker for fear of being killed or kidnapped and tortured if caught outside their fortified walls, and who are trying to run the country by giving orders to the Iraqi government, which is also operating out of the Green Zone, that vast fortified place isolated from the people of the country.

Democrats demanding an exit strategy from Iraq are routinely derided by the Bush Administration as cowards who "cut and run." But if this Embassy plan is not a form of cut and run, what is it? Instead of cutting and making a run for Kuwait, they intend to cut and run into what amounts to the world's largest bunker, a capacious rat hole where they can wait in safety until all the Iraqis have killed one another or all factions unite, march on this air-conditioned citadel and slit the throats of its irrelevant inhabitants.

read on: http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20060620/cm_thenation/20060703howl


my latest 2 cents: Cranking Up the Occupation (6-20-2006)

for whatever insurgent leader comes to power whenever we leave.

It only exists in reality, and on the internet..

(nom)

:rofl:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159&q=newman%27s

...aspects of this colossal white elephant, the master planners in the Pentagon don't seem to realize that one 'dirty bomb' or a 'suitcase nuke' detonated just outside the gates of the Yankee Lubianka will render those 15' walls about as useful as 15' of cotton candy. There is no such thing as an impenetrable fortification. Just ask the builders of the Maginot Line.

And is their water laced with fecal matter?

"USA Today has learned that the "massive new embassy, being built on the banks of the Tigris River, is designed to be entirely self-sufficient and won't be dependent on Iraq's unreliable public utilities." Thus, there will be no reason or excuse for any of the thousands of Americans working in this space, which is about the size of eighty football fields, to share the daily life experience of an Iraqi or even come in accidental contact with one."

suffering from these people and nearly everyne in this country is going to be touched close to home by the deaths of their soldier relatives, friends-friends relatives, and by retaliatory deaths. Tourism will suffer. We won't have any money for the disasters to come.

Hello China! Welcome. We bow to you because of our debt.

from the Ambassador in Iraq.

Even after pulling out our regular army. The article is slightly misleading as it says the Embassy itself is 104 acres. I would expect for them to be dozens of buildings in the complex, including as the author does mention, the Iraqi government. I would also expect big corps in the region to want space inside the complex. I'm not saying I agree with walling off the center of Baghdad though, is that to be a permanent function of the site? Does anyone have a link to the site design?

My current position is a 5 yr rollback on all troops stationed in Iraq btw. We have a legal responsibility to fix a country we invaded illegally. I didnt argue before the war that we need to follow international law only to ignore international law after we willingly broke it.

the point is that the Americans want to set up a sweet spot, far removed from the ugly realities that we created for the average Iraqi outside of the complex. It's typical, but exceptional in that we are an invading army, not invited liberators, We're imposing a top down infrastructure of authority which intends to dictate American ambitions to the compromised new authority using the intimidation of the threat of our military forces and a manipulation of whatever money and resources which enable the new authority to function.

Who is that man behind the curtain?