…and this is a 
Embassy embarrassment
Category: Politics
Posted on: June 4, 2007 12:04 PM, by PZ Myers
So, I'm reading about this elaborate, extravagant erection to GW Bush's ego being built in Iraq—
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.
—sure, it's got a movie theater, a swimming pool, a mansion, and all kinds of bomb-proof walls, but none of the important construction details are given. Is there a helipad on every roof? Are the stairs to the roof wide, sturdy, and sheltered from sniper fire? Are there provisions for rapid transport of essential documents to the roof? How about self-destruct mechanisms to clean up any confidential materials that have to be left behind?
I hope there are also some very strict standards on what kind of art is on display in the embassy. It's so embarrassing when new tenants come along and laugh at your "psychotic porn".
Comments
I'll bet it has several chapels.
Posted by: Reginald Selkirk | June 4, 2007 12:07 PM
And we used to laugh at those science fiction novels and movies which showed the ruling elites of the future living in high-tech paradises fortified to protect them from the disenfranchised hordes dwelling outside.
Posted by: Mark Plus | June 4, 2007 12:15 PM
And I used to laugh at David Weber's stories of clueless bureaucrats and long suffering military protagonists...I never thought that his clueless bureaucrats would come off BETTER than real life ones...
Posted by: gwangung | June 4, 2007 12:43 PM
The similarity to the famously vandalized statue of Saddam is eerie.
Of course an embassy will signify that US hasn't left Iraq willy-nilly. But there are a lot of other projects such as water plants and other aid that could do that without at the same time signifying the war.
The private paintings of Saddam isn't quite the outer symbols of his rule as an embassy is. And I would like to see an historian describe the cultural environment and precedents. Isn't Muhammad iconography likewise overblown?
The glorification of weapons and their use seems sick though. :-|
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | June 4, 2007 1:04 PM
And I would like to see an historian describe the cultural environment and precedents. Isn't Muhammad iconography likewise overblown?
Er, no, because Islam generally forbids depictions of any people or animals, and in particular depictions of Mohammed.
Posted by: ajay | June 4, 2007 1:13 PM
"It's so embarrassing when new tenants come along and laugh at your "psychotic porn"
For a minute I thought you were talking about John Ashcroft and the Spirit of Justice statue.
Posted by: justacoolcat | June 4, 2007 1:21 PM
The psychotic porn guy apparently has a few thin spots in his knowledge of 20th century art. Saddam was clearly into Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta. Those murals weren't "pure dreck", they were genre art in the style and vocabulary of 1970s fantasy book covers, like it or not.
Posted by: Martin R | June 4, 2007 2:12 PM
Who knew Saddam was a Louis Royo fan?
Translation: "This is not a pipe."
Posted by: Dustin | June 4, 2007 2:37 PM
Albert Speer would be proud.
Posted by: natural cynic | June 4, 2007 2:48 PM
I sure hope invaders don't take over our paradise and laugh at our psychotic porn .
Posted by: llewelly | June 4, 2007 2:48 PM
Someone please tell me what the difference is between Saddam's palaces and G.W. Bush's?
Posted by: HPLC_Sean | June 4, 2007 3:30 PM
Is there a helipad on every roof?
I assume that you mean rapture pad on every roof.
Posted by: jimmiraybob | June 4, 2007 3:32 PM
@pz:
don't be silly pz. having an exit stratgey is a sign of weakness. if we even think about the possibility that we might have to retreat, they have already won.
Posted by: arachnophilia | June 4, 2007 3:37 PM
[sarcasm}Why do you hate America, PZ?{/sarcasm}
On a somewhat related note, I wondered if Haliburton moving its HQ to the Middle East might be more closely related to money-laundering than to getting Haliburton close to its customers. Does it say who gets the contract to build this monstrosity?
Just asking.
Posted by: MikeM | June 4, 2007 3:55 PM
Do all (or most) US embassies have swimming pools and things like that?
Posted by: Oran_Taran | June 4, 2007 4:12 PM
I wonder whose idea the art-based hit piece was. Whether you read it as an art review or some crappy posthumous psycology, it's an extremely weak set of assumptions meant only to slander a corpse. Does that qualify as journalism anywhwere else but in the fevered imaginations of chickenhawks and their yellow press? I love over-the-top comic book style murals, and I also enjoy Heironymus Bosch as well as the guy who does 30 second portraits of rock stars by flinging quarts of paint onto the sides of buildings. Not to mention R. Crumb. I wonder what gruesome secrets Jonathan Jones could squeeze from my psyche with that information. I also wonder where he hides his Mapplethorpe prints.
Posted by: Neil | June 4, 2007 4:16 PM
mapplethorpe?
i like joel-peter witkin. wtf does that say about me? (but bosch gives me nightmares. go figure.)
frankly, when the article didn't have any good pictures, i stopped reading. what use is artistic mudslinging critiques if you're not going to even show the art in question?
Posted by: arachnophilia | June 4, 2007 4:33 PM
"Someone please tell me what the difference is between Saddam's palaces and G.W. Bush's?"
Thomas Kinkade, I would imagine.
Posted by: Rey Fox | June 4, 2007 4:41 PM
Admitting to have one may be, but having one? Fearless Flightsuit had an exit strategy for Vietnam.
Posted by: David Marjanović | June 4, 2007 5:27 PM
That future is now. The fortresses are our wealthy nations and cities, and we keep the disenfranchised conveniently overseas, and occasionally in our inner cities and slums. We're so accustomed to this reality that we don't even find it odd.
Posted by: globalizati | June 4, 2007 7:55 PM
The new embassy, which probably won't be an embassy for long, should be named the Dubya Palace, with the name chiseled an inch deep in the granite facade, the better to remind us in the future not to repeat follies such as this.
If our diplomatic staff requires a medieval fortress to keep them from harm then something is seriously wrong with our political policies. I think Bush's folly will become a tourist attraction not much different than the long empty castles built in what is now Syria, Turkey and Lebanon by European crusaders centuries ago.
Posted by: Keanus | June 4, 2007 10:25 PM
Oh? IIRC some blogs discussed of Mohammed one can buy in the streets. But I haven't seen this myself, neither here or by visiting a country with predominantly mohammedans.
I found these descriptions and pictures of art though: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007934 ; http://www.godweb.org/mohammedpaintings.htm .
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | June 4, 2007 11:38 PM
Helipads and self destruct devices sound good, but more can be done. Sure, they have a swimming pool, but can it be filled with sharks who have frikin' laser beams attached to their heads? Then we could call it Cheney's palace.
Posted by: Ian | June 4, 2007 11:49 PM
It costs a lot more than just 0.592 trillion bucks: it requires a lot of extra protection that costs nearly that much annually, plus lots of lives (cost utterly uncomputable).
They must reap the dividends from their (ongoing) investment.
No wonder they want to stay there.
I wonder if it will have anything to do with diplomacy. I wonder who got the contract to build this monstrosity. I wonder who is getting our money.
Posted by: Arnosium Upinarum | June 5, 2007 3:36 AM
Neil
You can only do posthumous psychology on someone who's dead - check the date of the Grauniad piece. At the time, all the news media were showing the opulenece of Saddam's lifestyle, the general open point being that he was insulated from the sanctions that the Iraqi people suffered under. The unspoken point, perhaps, was to demonstrate how absurd was the claim that the palaces were where he kept his WMD.
Posted by: Robin Levett | June 5, 2007 4:18 AM
I can't help wondering if the reason the place is so big is to make sure some of the helicopter take-off points will be out of the range of shoulder-fired munitions. Had Stingers been invented, back in the Saigon days? The denouement might have gone very differently....
Posted by: Eamon Knight | June 5, 2007 1:13 PM
What should be even more embarassing is the low number of Arabic speakers at the embassy. What should be even more embarassing than that is the sheer size of the thing. And topping even that should be the criminal means by which this was installed ...
Posted by: Keith Douglas | June 6, 2007 12:10 AM
It's likely the proscription against depicting Mohammed is a recent development within Islam, maybe 16th or 17th century. There are dozens of images from the era of the early Arabic and Persian dynasties, and the early Ottoman Empire.
Posted by: False Prophet | June 6, 2007 7:46 AM