US twists civilian arms to fill Fortress Baghdad
By Guy Dinmore, Financial Times, 7 January 2007
The embassy compound being built inside Baghdad’s Green Zone covers 104 acres, making it six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York. A city within a city for more than 1,000 people, it will have its own water, sewers and electricity, six apartment buildings, a Marine barracks, swimming pool, shops and some walls 15 feet thick.
I don’t agree with all of the opinions that John Hanchette put forth in his review of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. But he provides a more detailed view of services available to residents of the Emerald City than Guy Dinmore did for the Financial Times:
Bremer set up shop in Saddam’s most luxurious palace on the banks of the Tigris in the so-called Green Zone (the Emerald City reference in the book’s title), a secure, four-miles-square enclave surrounded by vaulting blast walls. It was inaccessible to Iraqis (except for well-searched, non-resident maids, waiters and grunt workers) and it turned quickly into Little America — a place of several bars, cold beers, a disco, American women attired in hot pants, a movie theater, dry-cleaning services, barbecues and buffets piled high with pork, swimming pools with uniformed drink-fetchers, a shopping mall where one could purchase porno films, row upon row of new SUVs … most of this run by Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former firm.
Back to Dinmore:
The State Department has told the Financial Times that the US civilian presence in Iraq has “grown considerably beyond the numbers projected for the new embassy compound”, which is scheduled for completion by September 1 at a cost of $592m (€455m, £307m).
The department and other agencies, such as the Pentagon and Treasury which also supply staff, are working out how to accommodate the extra numbers that Mr Bush is expected to announce this week. Recruits are being attracted to one-year posts by a mix of cajoling and inducement – an almost doubling of their salary, four trips outside Iraq and guarantees of favourable postings afterwards.
Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, and other officials have repeatedly sent cables to personnel around the world saying diplomats have a patriotic duty to volunteer for Baghdad and the expanding “provincial reconstruction teams”, where diplomats work out of military bases.
“Baghdad dwarfs everything else. It is becoming a monster that has to be fed every year with a new crop of volunteers,” says one diplomat.
There’s that word again: cajoling. At least Dinmore got it right in the title.
A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad:
Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy
by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch, 17 October 2006
John Owen didn’t realize how different his job would be from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.
Then seven months into the job, he quit.
Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”
Be sure to read the insert:
Pentagon Finds Worker Abuse and Trafficking in Iraq, but Penalizes No One