Back in May 2007, I stumbled across online sketches
at the website of a Kansas architectural firm hired to build a monster
U.S. embassy-cum-citadel-cum-Greater-Middle-Eastern command center on
104 acres in the middle of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. They offered an
artist’s impressions of what the place would look like -- a giant
self-sufficient compound both prosaic (think malls or housing projects)
and opulent (a giant pool, tennis courts, a recreation center).
Struck by the fact that the U.S. government was intent on building
the largest embassy ever in the planet’s oil heartlands, I wrote a
piece, “The Mother Ship Lands in Iraq”
about those plans and offered a little tour of the project via those
crude drawings. From TomDispatch, they then began to run around the
Internet and soon a panicky State Department had declared a “security breach” and forced the firm to pull the sketches off its website.
Now, more than five years later, we have the first public photos of the embassy -- a pool, basketball court, tennis courts, and food court
to die for -- just as the news has arrived that the vast boondoggle of a
place, built for three-quarters of a billion of your tax dollars, with
a $6 billion State Department budget this year and its own mercenary air force, is about to get its staff of 16,000 slashed. In a Washington Post piece
on the subject, Senator Patrick Leahy is quoted as saying: “I’ve been
in embassies all over the world, and you come to this place and you’re
like: ‘Whoa. Wow.’ All of a sudden you’ve got something so completely
out of scale to anything, you have to wonder, what were they thinking
when they first built it?”
The answer is: in 2004, when planning for this white elephant of
embassies first began, the Bush administration was still dreaming of a
Washington-enforced Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East
and saw it as its western command post. Now, of course, the vast
American mega-bases in Iraq with their multiple bus routes, giant PXes,
Pizza Huts, Cinnabons, and Burger Kings, where American troops were to
be garrisoned on the “Korean model” for decades to come, are so many ghost towns, fading American ziggurats
in Mesopotamia. Similarly, those embassy photos seem like snapshots
from Pompeii just as the ash was beginning to fall. Meanwhile, in
Afghanistan, the news is similarly dismal with drawdowns and withdrawals
suddenly the order of the day. Something’s changing. It feels
tectonic. Certainly, we’re receiving another set of signs that American
imperial plans on the Eurasian mainland have crashed and burned and
that the U.S. is now regrouping and heading “offshore.”
What a moment then for Noam Chomsky to weigh in on the subject of American decline. (His earlier TomDispatch post “Who Owns the World?”
might be considered a companion piece to this one.) For him, a
TomDispatch first: a two-day, back-to-back two-parter on imperial
hegemony and its discontents. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast
audio interview in which Chomsky offers an anatomy of American defeats
in the Greater Middle East, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
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