Iraqis bristle as U.S. opens world's largest embassy
BAGHDAD — For the average American who will never see it, the new US Embassy in Baghdad may be little more than the Big Dig of the Tigris.
Like the infamous Boston highway project, the embassy is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption.
For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colored compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol both of what they have become in the five years since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and of what they have yet to achieve.
"It is a symbol of occupation for the Iraqi people, that is all," says Anouar, a Baghdad graduate student who thought it was risk enough to give her first name. 'We see the size of this embassy and we think we will be part of the American plan for our country and our region for many, many years."
The 104-acre, 21-building enclave - the largest US Embassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome - is often described as a "castle" by Iraqis, but more in the sense of the forbidden and dominating than of the alluring and liberating.
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2 comments:
Who cares what Iraqis think, it's only their country.
No, it's our country until they pay back the debt they owe us. In oil. And democratic beaconage. So far all they've done is suck in terrists so we can fight them there. It's not enuff. So we're pitching a tent for a while.
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