Call me Ishmael. I was doing a little research last night for a comment that I planned to add to smintheus' excellent diary on the low-key release of the Pentagon's quarterly assessment of Iraq stability. I wanted to point out a few facts about the mammoth new embassy we are building in Baghdad. But then, as sometimes happens when I try to write a simple comment, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of facts and figures. When I dusted myself off, I found that my facts and figures had created a kind of a prism that I could look through and make, what appeared to me, some kind of sense of the White House strategy for increasing troop levels in Iraq.
Read on brave kossacks!
First, some exciting facts about our new embassy!
Indeed, the massive $592-million project (See correction, following. ed.) may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation in the war-torn nation. Located on a on a 104-acre site on the Tigris river where U.S. and coalition authorities are headquartered, the high-tech palatial compound is envisioned as a totally self-sustaining cluster of 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world.
The 1,000 or more U.S. government officials calling the new compound home will have access to a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. In addition to the main embassy buildings, there will be a large-scale US Marine barracks, a school, locker rooms, a warehouse, a vehicle maintenance garage, and six apartment buildings with a total of 619 one-bedroom units. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities. The total site will be two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC.
http://www.corpwatch.org/...
Whoa. Let's pause for a reality check on that 592 million dollar figure everyone's been tossing around. Embassy construction was originally estimated to cost over a billion.
In his FY2006 budget request, President Bush did not include funds for construction of the U.S. Mission in Iraq. A week after submitting his FY2006 budget to Congress, the President sent Congress an FY2005 emergency supplemental funding request. Included in the supplemental is more than $1.3 billion for the embassy in Iraq: $690 million for logistical and security costs for the embassy in Baghdad and $658 million for construction of the new embassy compound there. Included in the latter are the costs of housing, a power plant, enhanced security, and expedited (24-month) construction.
http://www.fas.org/...
(Condoleezza Rice testified to the above before The Senate Appropriations Committee on February 17, 2005)
In other words, a kind of a utilitarian palace to rival anything Saddam ever built, and apparently just as resented.
"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...State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the embassy, old and new, saying it's indicative of the work facing the United States here..."It's somewhat self-evident that there's going to be a fairly sizable commitment to Iraq by the U.S. government in all forms for several years," he said in Washington.
http://www.commondreams.org/...
As the massive embassy coalesces against the Baghdad skyline, it can be assumed that, as "the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation in the war-torn nation," it at the same time coalesces as the highest-value target in all of Iraq for the insurgency. Just as taking the town of Tikrit and the Presidential Palace symbolized the end of the battle for Iraq for Americans, the evacuation of the U.S. embassy would symbolize, dramatically, the end of the U.S. occupation for Iraqis.
The problem for the U.S. is that Iraqi mortars have a 4 kilometer range, meaning that to secure the embassy, our forces need to secure at least a 4 kilometer perimeter, in all four directions. Mortar attacks have been steadily increasing in Iraq since June 2003, one month after G.W. Bush gave his May 1st victory speech. L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, a diplomat and protégé of Henry Kissinger, issued CPA order No. 2, disbanding the Iraqi army, which included thousands of trained mortarmen, on May 23rd. Meanwhile, just last month (11/06), Jane's reported that Iraqi insurgents had unveiled a rocket with a range of 20 kms. 20 kms, according to globalsecurity.org, is the size of the security perimeter around strategic locations like airfields in Iraq. So that means, as far as I can tell, that our forces, or some trusted branch of the Iraqi armed forces yet to materialize, would need to control more than 400 square kilometers to secure the new U.S. Embassy against rocket and mortar attacks. Baghdad itself is 300 square kilometers in size.
I think this means the following: in order, to save the crown jewel of the neoconservative plan for Iraq, a billion dollar investment and the largest U.S. embassy in the world, we would need to control all of Baghdad.
Strangely enough, this is exactly what the "double down" surge strategy is meant to accomplish:
Bush's national security team is debating whether additional troops are needed to secure Baghdad — a short-term force increase that could be made up of all Americans, a combination of U.S. and Iraqi forces, or all Iraqis, a senior Bush administration official said in Washington on Saturday.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
This calls into question the rhetoric about gambling that accompanies discussion of the White House plan to increase troop levels in Iraq by as many as 40,000 souls. Instead of "doubling-down," perhaps it's more accurate to say that all we're doing is scrambling to cover a billion dollar bet that has already been made.
Furthermore, once the embassy staff moves in, sometime after June 2007, likely under cover of the proposed surge, it's arguable that withdrawal from Iraq becomes much more problematic for any succeeding administration. Unless the security situation in Iraq radically improves, we will be essentially holding thousands of our own people, many of them civilians, hostage to current Iraq policy in a fortified compound in the heart of one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Ceding control of Baghdad means opening the embassy to mortar and rocket attacks, which would soon become intolerable. Losing control of Baghdad means losing our supersized embassy, which is likely to be accompanied by the same kinds of devastating imagery that we're all familiar with from the fall of Saigon. The stink of failure that those images will invoke will be very difficult to wash away (somebody please send this diary to Harry Reid).
I don't mean to be a nattering nabob of negativism, but perhaps, in closing, it's also worth thinking about another supposedly impregnable fortress in the midst of hostile territory, and the tragic hubris that was the key to its complete destruction. The place I am thinking of was a French military base deep inside Indochina in 1953. It took its name from the nearby village. That village was called Dien Bien Phu.