It’s Not What they Say; It’s What they Do
by Jeff Davis
The key to understanding what is going on in the minds of our lords and masters in Washington DC is to look at what they DO, not what they SAY. Judging by what they DO. Using this criteria, it is crystal clear the United States has no intention of EVER leaving Iraq.
As always, we have to turn to foreign newspapers for information on what the United States is doing. This information no longer makes it into the American news media. The Guardian newspaper in the U. K. reports on the ongoing construction of the mammoth United States Embassy in Baghdad: “The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush’s intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale. Rising from the dust of the city’s Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September. It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls.”
The bureaucratic peons among our empire’s busy civil servants will be compelled to live rough. The Guardian reports that “Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.The US ambassador, however,” (read Imperial Viceroy in Iraq) “will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft. ‘They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.’ “
The Guardian continues: “The need to make the compound secure is a top priority. The Green Zone - the fortified four square miles in which the Iraqi and American governments and other international officials operate - used to be relatively peaceful but in recent months has come under almost daily rocket and mortar fire. This month the US embassy ordered its people to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times when in the open after four foreign contractors were killed by a rocket landing beside the present embassy. The multiple cranes surrounding the construction site of the new embassy have already attracted attacks from insurgents. Last week five contractors were wounded in a rocket assault. Despite the peculiar pressures, the Bush administration says the embassy will open in September, and be fully staffed by the end of the year.”
The Americans are also ticking off the Iraqis by building this white elephant solely with foreign “contract” labor, including Filipinos and Koreans who are housed separately within the fortified security zone. The locals aren’t even being allowed to make a few bucks in a job less suicidal than police or army recruit.
Look, let’s cut the crap. 104 heavily fortified acres and a compound bigger than many college campuses is not an embassy. It is the headquarters for what the neocons envision as a future oil empire in the Middle East, run by their sock puppets like Maliki, Chalabi and Karzai. The present government is run by men who are above all businessmen, and they’re simply not going to sink that kind of money into a building, which they might have to abandon in the future. Neither is the Pentagon going to sink billions of dollars into building those four PERMANENT military bases in Iraq. Let’s face it, folks, your GRANDCHILDREN are going to be coming back from the Iraq occupation in body bags.