Eagleburger: It's nuts, insane, counterproductive and it won't work

[Rose Siding]

He's talking about the opulent and heavily staffed American embassy in Baghdad.

"I defy anyone to tell me how you can use that many people. It is nuts . . . it's insane and it's counterproductive . . . and it won't work," says the Republican former secretary of state and member of the Iraq Study Group. "I've been around the State Department long enough to know you can't run an outfit like that."

The nerve center of Iraq reconstruction efforts, housed in an ornate former Saddam Hussein palace with soaring ceilings and its own espresso bar, the embassy in Baghdad is one of the largest foreign missions ever operated by the State Department. Its complexity and expense, some say, hampers reconstruction efforts and drains cash from diplomatic efforts worldwide.

According to a State Department count, about 1,000 federal employees report to the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, not including hundreds of private contractors......At $923 million for the 2006 fiscal year, the budget was 20 times that of the Beijing embassy's that year, according to the State Department. More than two-thirds of the money pays for security.....It is possible for senior employees to earn more than the secretary of state, who makes $186,600 a year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030101497.html

[pscot]

1. Congress writes the checks to pay for this

Why don't they stop payment.Hard to see how that would "endanger the troops".

[pokercat999]

2. That would require a Democratic Party that wasn't

"in on it". Just like repugs their main interest is in getting re-elected. To get re-elected requires huge amounts of $$. To get huge amounts of $$ requires doing what Corporate America wants you to do......stuff their pockets from the US Treasury and/or allow the legal rape of the American middle-class. Simple enough? The first attempt at a solution is to have strict term limits, after that we need laws governing the use of $$ in federal campaigns with severe punishments for violators.

Of course that's expecting the fox to guard the hen house, not gonna happen. A National referendum on term limits would probably pass overwhelmingly, however we'll never see it.