Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The
colossus of Baghdad
By Tom Engelhardt
sewage
systems in a city lacking most of the above. When
you look at the plans for it, you have to wonder:
can it, in any meaningful sense, be considered an
embassy? And if so, an embassy to whom?
The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland in the
most recent issue of the New York Review of Books
terms it a "base" like the United States' other
vast, multibillion-dollar permanent bases in Iraq.
It is
also a
headquarters. But what a head! What quarters! It
is neither town, nor quite city-state, but it
could be considered a citadel, with its own
anti-missile defenses, inside the increasingly
breachable citadel of the Green Zone.
It
may already be the last piece of ground in Iraq
(excepting those other bases) that the United
States, "surge" or not, can actually claim to
occupy and control fully - and yet it already has
something of the look of the Alamo (with
amenities). Some day, perhaps, it will turn out to
be the "White House" (though, in BDY's sketches,
its buildings look more like those prison-style
schools being built in embattled US urban
neighborhoods) for Muqtada al-Sadr, or some future
Shi'ite party, or a Sunni strongman, or a home for
squatters. Who knows?
What we know is that
such an embassy is remarkably outsized for Iraq.
Even as a headquarters for a vast, secret set of
operations in that chaotic land, it doesn't quite
add up. After all, the US military headquarters in
Iraq is already at Camp Victory on the outskirts
of Baghdad. We can certainly assume - though no
one in the mainstream media world would think to
say such a thing - that this new embassy will
house a rousing set of Central Intelligence Agency
(and probably Pentagon intelligence) operations
for the country and region, and will be a massive
hive for American spooks of all sorts. But
whatever its specific functions, it might best be
described as the imperial Mother Ship dropping
into Baghdad.
Amazingly, despite
complaints from Congress, the present US
ambassador is stumped when it comes to cutting
down on that planned staff of his - every one more
essential than the last - and the State Department
is actually lobbying Congress for an extra $50
million to construct yet more "blast-resistant
housing" on the vast site. Maybe this is what the
"build and hold" strategy, pushed by many
counterinsurgency types, really means. The US will
simply plan in Washington, design in Kansas City,
build through a Kuwaiti construction firm using
cheap imported labor, and try to keep building out
forever from the "embassy" in Baghdad.
As
an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing:
imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an
embassy from a democracy that had liberated an
oppressed land. From the first thought, the first
sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control
center suitable for the planet's sole
"hyperpower", dropped into the middle of the oil
heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington's
dream and Kansas City's idea of a palace fit for
an embattled American proconsul - or a khan.
When completed, it will indeed be the
perfect folly, as well as the perfect embassy, for
a country that finds it absolutely normal to build
vast base-worlds across the planet; that considers
it just a regular day's work to send its
aircraft-carrier "strike forces" and various
battleships through the Strait of Hormuz in
daylight as a visible warning to a "neighboring"
regional power; and whose CIA operatives feel free
to organize and launch Balochi tribal warriors
from Pakistan into the Balochi areas of Iran to
commit acts of terror and mayhem.
In
addition, the United States' commander-in-chief
president can sign a "non-lethal presidential
finding" that commits the US to a "soft power"
version of the economic destabilization of Iran,
involving, according to one report, "a coordinated
campaign of propaganda, disinformation and
manipulation of Iran's currency and international
financial transactions". The vice president,
meanwhile, can appear on the deck of the USS John
C Stennis to address a "rally for the troops",
while that aircraft carrier is on station in the
Persian Gulf, readying itself to pass through
those straits, and can insist to the world: "With
two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're
sending clear messages to friends and adversaries
alike. We'll keep the sea lanes open. We'll stand
with our friends in opposing extremism and
strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our
own forces ... And we'll stand with others to
prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and
dominating this region"; whose military men can
refer to Iraqi insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces".
And members of the congressional
opposition can offer plans for the dismemberment
of Iraq into three or more parts; and all of whose
movers and shakers, participating in the
Washington Consensus, can agree that one
"benchmark" the Iraqi government, also locked
inside the Green Zone, must fulfill is signing off
on an oil law designed in Washington and meant to
turn the energy clock in the Middle East back
several decades; but why go on?
To
recognize such imperial impunity and its symbols
for what they are, all you really need to do is
try to reverse any of these examples. In most
cases, that's in essence inconceivable. Imagine
any country building the equivalent Mother Ship
"embassy" on the equivalent of two-thirds of the
Washington Mall; or sailing its warships into the
Gulf of Mexico and putting its second-in-command
aboard the flagship of the fleet to insist on
keeping the sea lanes "open"; or sending Caribbean
terrorists into Florida to blow up local buses and
police stations; or signing a "finding" to
destabilize economically the US government; or
planning the future shape of the US from a foreign
capital. But you get the idea. Most of these
actions, if aimed against the United States, would
be treated as tantamount to acts of war and dealt
with accordingly, with unbelievable hue and cry.
When it's a matter of other countries
halfway across the planet, however, Americans
largely consider such things, even if revealed in
the news, at worst tactical errors or
miscalculations. The imperial mindset goes deep.
It also thinks unbearably well of itself and so,
naturally, wants to memorialize itself, to give
itself the surroundings that only the great, the
super, the hyper deserves.
Percy Bysshe
Shelley's poem "Ozymandias", inspired by the
arrival in London in 1816 of an enormous statue of
the Pharaoh Ramesses II, comes to mind:
I met a traveler from an antique
land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs
of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on
the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies,
whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of
cold command, Tell that its sculptor well
those passions read Which yet survive,
stamped on these lifeless things, The hand
that mocked them and the heart that fed. And
on the pedestal, these words appear: 'My
name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on
my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing
beside remains. Round the decay Of that
colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone
and level sands stretch far away."
In Baghdad, Saddam's
giant hands are already on the road to ruin. Still
going up in New York and Baghdad are two
half-billion-dollar-plus monuments to the Bush
imperial moment. A September 11, 2001, memorial so
grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it
will be a reminder only of a time, already long
past, when Americans could imagine themselves as
the greatest victims on the planet; and in
Baghdad's Green Zone, a monument to the Bush
administration's conviction that the US was also
destined to be the greatest dominators this world,
and history, had ever seen.
From both
these monuments, some day - and in the case of the
embassy in Baghdad that day may not be so very
distant - those lone and level sands will
undoubtedly stretch far, far away.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of
Tomdispatchand the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
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