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Friday, June 01, 2007

Your tax dollars at work
Posted by Jill | 6:41 AM
Salon reports on the architectural firm constructing the U.S. palace -- I mean embassy -- in Iraq posting renderings of the finished edifice on its web site. The company has since taken its site down completely (at the insistence of the State Department, which obviously and understandably didn't want us to know what they were doing), but you can see a small drawing at Salon's article and Corrente Wire has snagged a nice fat copy of the artist's rendering of the swimming pool at the facility.

From the Salon article:

Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush-administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein's mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian-Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of U.N. sanctions. Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, "the Hands of Victory," supposedly modeled on Saddam's own, holding 12-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly; while, as Jane Arraf has written, Saddam's actual hands, "the hands that wrote the orders for the war against Iran and the destruction of Iraqi villages, the hands handcuffed behind his back as he went to trial and then was led to his execution are moldering under ground."

It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad wanted their victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant's exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam's pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday's private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them themselves); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose -- are you surprised? -- one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Baghdadis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to Saddam's benighted land.

And then, as the Iraqi capital's landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration's dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even one of Saddam's palaces, roomy enough for a dictator interested in the control of a single country (or the odd neighboring state), wasn't faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet's New Rome.

Hence, Missouri's BDY. That Midwestern firm's designers can now be classified as architects to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the company seems proud of it. You can go to its Web site and take a little tour in sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its Bush-inspired wonder, its particular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this: At $592 million, its proudest boast is that, unlike almost any other American construction project in that country, it is coming in on budget and on time. Of course, with a 30 percent increase in staffing size since Congress approved the project two years ago, it is now estimated that being "represented" in Baghdad will cost a staggering $1.2 billion per year. No wonder, with a crew of perhaps 1,000 officials assigned to it and a supporting staff (from food service workers to Marine guards and private security contractors) of several thousand more.

When the BDY-designed embassy opens in September (undoubtedly to the sound of mortar fire), its facilities will lack the gold-plated faucets installed in some of Saddam's palaces and villas (and those of his sons), but they won't lack for the amenities that Americans consider part and parcel of the good life, even in a "hardship" post. Take a look, for instance, at the embassy's "pool house," as imagined by BDY. (There's a lovely sketch of it at its site.) Note the palm trees dotted around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis courts discreetly in the background. For an American official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily fortified, 4-mile-square Green Zone during a year's tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on the taxpayer's dollar) is undoubtedly no small thing.


This little shack will cost $1.2 billion of our tax dollars every year just to operate it in a style to which the oil-soaked barons occupying it are accustomed, and will be guarded by the same guys who have endured a lack of armored vehicles and even food. Never mind the resentment that an Iraqi population whose homes and lives have been decimated by fixe years of pointless war will feel at a bunch of filthy-rich U.S. occupiers frolicking around the pool with their Saudi buddies -- that is, when they aren't being kidnapped and murdered.

And who's getting that $592 million in construction costs? Not the people doing the actual building. Skippy reports on the slave labor being used to construct George W. Bush's Mesopotamia Xanadu.

With Kubla Khan Bush planning a 50-plus-year occupation of Iraq and the Republican Party's new Big Strong Ersatz Daddy Fred Thompson adopting a corollary to Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine about staying there indefinitely, I'm sure those still living during that 50 years of sectarian warfare set loose by President Pencil-Dick's invasion will be thrilled to have this bloodstained edifice in their midst as a constant reminder of to whom Iraq now really belongs.

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