American Way of War (8 page)

Ever since H. G. Wells wrote
The War of the Worlds
in 1898, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which implacable aliens with superweapons arrive from space to devastate our planet. But what if it turns out that the implacable aliens are actually us—and that, as in the sixteenth century, someday in the not-too-distant future U.S. “ships” will “burst from space” upon the “coasts” of our planet with devastation imprinted in their programs. These are, of course, the dreams of modern Mongols.

Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.

We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and gods. Nowadays, at least, it’s easier to identify the various wonders of our world with their architects. Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable brain for the U.S. veterans of that war. Frank Gehry dreamt up his visionary titanium-covered museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim. The architectural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc.), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest wonder of all—an embassy large enough to embody Washington’s vision of an American-reordered Middle East. We’re talking, of course, about the U.S. embassy, the largest on the planet, being constructed on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of Baghdad’s embattled Green Zone. As Patrick Lenahan, then Senior Architect and Project Manager at BDY, put it (according to the firm’s website): “We understand how to involve the client most effectively as we direct our resources to make our client’s vision a reality.”

And what a vision it was. What a reality it’s turned out to be.

Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein’s mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of United Nations sanctions. Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, “The Hands of Victory,” supposedly modeled on Saddam Hussein’s own, holding twelve-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles
of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly.

It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad wanted
their
victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant’s exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam’s pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday’s private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose—are you surprised? —one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Iraqis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to the benighted land.

And then, as the Iraqi capital’s landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration’s dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even a palace roomy enough for a dictator wasn’t faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet’s New Rome.

Hence, BDY. That Midwestern firm’s designers can now be classified as architects to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the company seems proud of it. You could, in May 2007, go to its website and take a little tour in sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its particular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this: At a pricetag of at least $592 million, its proudest boast was that, unlike almost any other American construction project in that country, it was coming in on time and on budget (though, in the end, the cost overruns for the embassy would be humongous). Of course, with a 30 percent increase in staffing size since Congress first approved the project, it is estimated that being “represented” in Baghdad will cost a staggering $1.2 billion
per year
.

The BDY-designed embassy may lack the gold-plated faucets installed in some of Hussein’s palaces and villas (and those of his sons),
but it was planned to lack none of the amenities that Americans consider part and parcel of the good life, even in a “hardship” post. Consider, for instance, the embassy’s “pool house.” (There was a lovely sketch of it at the BDY website.) Note the palm trees dotted around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis courts discretely in the background. For an American official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily fortified, four-mile square Green Zone during a year’s tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on the taxpayer’s dollar) would undoubtedly be no small thing.

Admittedly, it became harder to think about taking that refreshing dip or catching a few sets of tennis in Baghdad’s heat once the order for all U.S. personnel in the Green Zone to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times went into effect. Lucky then for the massive, largely window-less-looking Recreation Center, one of more than twenty blast-resistant buildings BDY planned for. Perhaps this will house the promised embassy cinema. Perhaps hours will be wiled away in the no less massive-looking, low-slung Post Exchange/Community Center, or in the promised commissary, the “retail and shopping areas,” the restaurants, or even, so the BDY website assured visitors, the “schools” (though it’s difficult to imagine the State Department allowing children at this particular post).

And don’t forget the “fire station” (mentioned but not shown by BDY), surely so handy once the first rockets hit. Small warning: If you are among the officials staffing this post, keep in mind that the PX and commissary might be slightly understocked. The
Washington Post
reported at one point in 2007 that “virtually every bite and sip consumed [in the embassy] is imported from the United States, entering Iraq via Kuwait in huge truck convoys that bring fresh and processed food, including a full range of Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, every seven to 10 days.”

When you look at the plans for the complex, 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 more aptly termed it a “base,” like our other vast, multibillion-dollar permanent bases in Iraq. It is also a headquarters. It is neither town, nor quite city-state, but it could be considered a citadel, with its own anti-missile defenses, inside the breachable citadel of the Green Zone. It may already be
the last piece of ground (excepting those other bases) that the United States, surge or no, can actually claim to fully occupy and control in Iraq—and yet it already has something of the look of the Alamo (but with amenities). Someday, 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 constructed in embattled American urban neighborhoods) for the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, or some future Shiite party, or even a Sunni strongman.

What we know is that such an embassy is remarkably outsized for Iraq. Even as a headquarters for a vast, secret set of operations, it doesn’t quite add up. After all, our military headquarters in Iraq are at Camp Victory, on the outskirts of Baghdad. We can certainly assume—though no one in our mainstream media world would think to say such a thing—that this new embassy will house a rousing set of CIA (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.

As an outpost, the 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.

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 Straits of Hormuz in daylight as a visible warning to a “neighboring” regional power; whose Central Intelligence Agency operatives feel free to organize and launch Baluchi tribal warriors from Pakistan into the Baluchi areas of Iran to commit acts of terror and mayhem; whose commander-in-chief president can sign a “nonlethal presidential finding” that commits our nation to a “soft power” version of the economic destabilization of Iran, involving,
according to ABC News, “a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions”; whose vice president 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”; members of whose Congress 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.

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 essentially 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 economically destabilize the American government; or planning the future shape of our country 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, we largely consider such things, even if revealed in the news, at worst as 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 deserve.

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:

In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s giant hands are already on the road to ruin. In New York and Baghdad, our near billion-dollar monuments to our imperial moment: a 9/11 memorial, as yet unbuilt, so grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will be a reminder only of a time, already long past, when we could imagine ourselves as the greatest victims on the planet, and in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a monument to Washington’s conviction that we were also destined to be the greatest dominators this world, and history, had ever seen.

From both of these monuments, someday those lone and level sands will undoubtedly stretch far, far away.

In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, “humanitarian aid” in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In a startling number of
them, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that are comparable to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped-down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does—carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations.”