LAT: New U.S. Embassy rises in Iraq
Conspicuously huge and self-contained but deemed inadequate for a disaster scenario, the compound is already taking fire.
By Alexandra Zavis, Times Staff Writer
July 24, 2007
BAGHDAD — Huge, expensive and dogged by controversy, the new U.S. Embassy compound nearing completion here epitomizes to many Iraqis the worst of the U.S. tenure in Iraq.
"It's all for them, all of Iraq's resources, water, electricity, security," said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlighted site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. "It's as if it's their country, and we are guests staying here."
Despite its brash scale and nearly $600-million cost, the compound designed to accommodate more than 1,000 people is not big enough, and may not be safe enough if a major military pullout leaves the country engulfed in a heightened civil war, U.S. planners now say.
Militants have fired shells into the compound in the fortified Green Zone, where more than 85 rocket and mortar strikes have killed at least 16 people since February, according to a United Nations report last month. Five more people died in fierce barrages this month.
"Having the 'heavily fortified Green Zone' doesn't matter one iota" when it comes to rocket and mortar attacks, said one senior military officer.
Like much U.S. planning in Iraq, the embassy was conceived nearly three years ago on rosy assumptions that stability was around the corner, and that the military effort would gradually draw down, leaving behind a vast array of civilian experts who would remain intimately engaged in Iraqi state-building. The result is what some analysts are describing as a $592-million anachronism....
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