Remember the Alamo!Follow

This self-contained compound will include the embassy itself, residences for the ambassador and staff, PX, commissary, cinema, retail and shopping, restaurants, schools, fire station and supporting facilities such as power generation, water purification system, telecommunications, and waste water treatment facilities. In total, the 104 acre compound will include over twenty buildings including one classified secure structure and housing for over 380 families.

Color me skeptical, but I find it unlikely that it'll cost 1.2 billion dollars per year to support a structure that cost 592 million to build.

Where'd you get those numbers?

Although the State Department has not budged from an original embassy price tag of $592 million, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) complained two weeks ago to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of a "growing size in costs" and a staffing increase of more than 30 percent since Congress approved the State Department's plans two years ago. Leahy chairs the appropriations subcommittee in charge of the foreign operations budget.

"We have 1,000 Americans at the embassy in Baghdad," Leahy told Rice at a hearing. "You add the contractors and the local staff, it comes to 4,000 . . . a deviation from the plan that we'd agreed to." According to Senate staffers, operating costs now total $1.2 billon a year.

More likely, that's the entire projected budget for all of Iraq, not just this one structure.

-- A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week -- nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year -- as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases to support the extended deployment and scrambles to fix or replace equipment damaged in combat.

Another major factor, however, is ``the building of more extensive infrastructure to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq

Every year they should knock it down and build two new ones!

Even the super-protected "Green Zone" - the nerve center of US operations and the Iraqi government - has become increasingly insecure.

Two people were killed and 10 more wounded by mortar fire into the Green Zone on Thursday, the second day in a row that it had come under fire. So dangerous has the area become that the US Embassy warned all residents this month to keep outdoor travel to a minimum and "remain within a hardened structure to the maximum extent possible and strictly avoid congregating outdoors". Those who work outdoors were ordered to wear bulletproof vests and helmets at all times.

"In any other embassy, we would have been evacuated," one State Department staffer told McClatchy Newspapers this week. "They are going to wait until 20 people die, then the people back in Washington will say we have a problem."

I meant "all of our costs with regard to embassy security and accomidations in Iraq". You know. As opposed to just that cost for this one compound.

Instead of rice pilaf with turkey or fish -- Monday night's main entree, according to embassy spokesman Dan Sreebny, who said he topped it off with two cookies -- the staff would have to make do with military Meals Ready to Eat, freeze-dried concoctions with prescribed amounts of starch and protein, capable of withstanding parachute drops and remaining edible for three years after packaging.

"We've run out of some things," Sreebny said. "I miss my yogurt in the morning and my fresh-cut melon."

Instead of all these elaborate infrastructures we should be using the money to build a big wall around the whole of the country. Napoleon has the same idea - when he saw the Great Pyramids he figured out that the blocks used to build them were enough to construct a wall around the entirety of France six feet high.

The saddest part is that 150 years later they still hadn't figured out why that wasn't such a brilliant idea...

Coz, you know, his expansionist dreams worked out so well...

A US architect working on the construction of a massive new US embassy in war-torn Baghdad quickly removed plans and drawings of the proposed compound from its website Thursday after a protest from the State Department, officials said.