Where is the largest U.S. embassy? If you think it's in London, Paris, Moscow or Beijing, you're not even close. Every one of those embassies is not even a tenth the size of the biggest one. Where is it? Baghdad.
If you've never been there, try to imagine a compound on 104 acres with 21 buildings, not counting 619 blast-resistant apartments. It has a commissary, of course, and a movie house. And it has tennis courts, a swimming pool, and a rec center with a gym to keep personnel from getting bored. And then there are department stores for the ladies, three hospitals in case everybody gets sick at the same time, and its own airline for frequent fliers. Lastly, there's a food court to rival the ones in stateside malls, with free food for everyone. Why not?
We need all this to support 16,000 people, including 2,000 diplomats. To put that in perspective, the 2010 census counted 13,453 souls in all of Perquimans County, North Carolina, where I live. The Baghdad embassy is not just an embassy: it's a city within a city.
Why so big? Well, the pencil pushers in Foggy Bottom figured they needed that many people to help the Iraqis become a stable democracy. Now, how do you think the Iraqis feel about Americans in Shangri-La taking time out from their pool-side lounge chairs to tell them how to run their country? You guessed it. Actually, our trained diplomats don't do much of that anymore, because they don't venture out of the compound. Ever since our troops left town, there has been a tremendous rise in sectarian violence in the streets of Baghdad. It's just not safe for Americans, you see.
So why do we still have an embassy of that size in Baghdad, which, by the way, costs the United States $6 billion a year to maintain? Eureka! The rumor is that the geniuses in the White House think it might be a good idea to cut back a little. Wow! How brilliant is that?
It's enough to make a guy want to vote for Ron Paul.
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