Eideard

Will they continue to send the weekly checks?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Catholic Ireland’s stunning decision to close its embassy to the Vatican is a huge blow to the Holy See’s prestige and may be followed by other countries which feel the missions are too expensive – and useless, unproductive.

The closure brought relations between Ireland and the Vatican, once ironclad allies, to an all-time low following the row earlier this year over the Irish Church’s handling of sex abuse cases and accusations that the Vatican had encouraged secrecy…

“This is really bad for the Vatican because Ireland is the first big Catholic country to do this and because of what Catholicism means in Irish history,” said a Vatican diplomatic source who spoke on the condition of anonymity…

Over time, this will be seen as only the first of many departing a seat at the foot of the papal throne.

Dublin’s foreign ministry said the embassy was being closed because “it yields no economic return” and that relations would be continued with an ambassador in Dublin.

The source said the Vatican was “extremely irritated” by the wording equating diplomatic missions with economic return, particularly as the Vatican sees its diplomatic role as promoting human values…

Promoting human values? Only if your values are stuck into the 14th Century, your concern for your flock is cemented in 19th Century politics.

World’s leading example of bunker architecture

The largest U.S. embassy in the world has very large problems keeping track of vehicles and millions of dollars of other equipment, from cell phones to medical supplies, according to a new State Department Inspector General’s report…

One glaring problem is tracking down vehicles or even knowing how many the embassy needs, according to the report. There are 1,168 standard and armored vehicles assigned to the embassy but 159 are unaccounted for and an additional 282 don’t show up on the official database.

“Motor pool personnel have struggled to ascertain the owners and users of these vehicles to properly inventory them,” the report says. “Denying fuel and maintenance to vehicles until they are accounted for may solve this issue.”

The inspector general warns too little oversight of medical supplies, especially of controlled substances, such as morphine and oxycodone, risks “a significant vulnerability for misuse and fraud.”

Millions of dollars of communications gear are improperly tracked, according to the audit. Cell phones that are unassigned still rack up monthly charges, wasting an estimated $286,000 dollars a year.

“Some assigned phones are underused or unused, and extensive charges for overseas calls have been associated with both assigned and unassigned phones,” the report says. The investigators calculated “the embassy could save more than $740,000 by disconnecting unassigned and underused phone lines and curtailing international calls…”

In other words, Embassy Baghdad is still being run like Congress. We get to pay for both.

The State Department’s announcement on Tuesday that it had selected a design by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake for its new embassy in London was not exactly uplifting news.

The proposed building — a bland glass cube clad in an overly elaborate, quiltlike scrim — is not inelegant by the standards of other recent American Embassies, but it has all the glamour of a corporate office block. It makes you wonder if the architects had somehow mistaken the critic Reyner Banham’s famous dismissal of the embassy’s 1960 predecessor on Grosvenor Square — “monumental in bulk, frilly in detail” — as something to strive for.

The project as a whole, however, is a fascinating study in how architecture can be used as a form of camouflage. The building is set in a spiraling pattern of two small meadows and a pond that have as much to do with defensive fortification as with pastoral serenity: an eye-opening expression of the irresolvable tensions involved in trying to design an emblem of American values when you know it may become the next terrorist target.

It’s hard to think of a project, in fact, that more perfectly reflects the country’s current struggle to maintain a welcoming, democratic image while under the constant threat of attack…

The abundance of green space contributes to the design’s environmentally friendly image. Circuitous paths weave through the park, which in renderings is full of young professionals. The main entry plaza for the building, which extends along the edge of the pond before slipping under one side of the colonnade, is conceived as a lively public space.

But the real function of these landscape elements is to serve as camouflaged security barriers. The northern pond is a reflecting pool — but also a castle moat. To the south, a concrete wall frames the outer edge of the lower meadow, which can be patrolled by guards.

Above it, walled off by a second barrier, the higher meadow can be used for occasional embassy events but will otherwise be closed to the public. To get to the plaza, visitors will have to pass first through a high-security entry pavilion, much as they do to enter the current embassy.

A result is an architectural sleight of hand. And the effect is likely to be oddly disquieting: an array of clearly visible public zones that will actually be inaccessible to the public.

Next time the Republicans are in power they’ll probably finish the moat. That may even be a necessity. Perhaps, Vauxhall Station will be the entrance to the British Green Zone.

Holbrooke and Gilani
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

This Op-Ed piece is typical of Ghori’s rants. Nationalist before democrat, though both interdependent. A retired career diplomat.

‘The Americans are coming, and coming big,’ according to media pundits in Pakistan. And none should blame them for going over the top because the figures being bandied about are, to say the very least, flabbergasting.

What’s on the drawing boards in Washington and Islamabad are the blue prints for vastly increasing the number of American personnel manning one of the most important diplomatic presence in the 21st century for the Americans in Pakistan. Apparently, Washington feels that its battery of 750 men and women stocking the American Embassy in Islamabad is far too inadequate to cope with the job on their hands. They need to be given a big injection to inflate their muscles. The magic potion said to be brewing would add at least another thousand people on what’s being described as a ‘war footing’…

Though he wanders off into hallucinations suitable to a delusional Right – or Left, a useful question is raised about the purpose and goal of the new Pakistan diplomatic fortress.

Read the rest of this entry »

You get the idea

The United States has announced plans to leave its landmark embassy in central London’s tony Mayfair district and build a safer facility in a far less fashionable suburb south of the River Thames.

The move, which will end a 200-year U.S. association with London’s Grosvenor Square, is part of American efforts to secure diplomatic staff in compounds — a push that began in earnest after deadly al-Qaida bombings at two U.S. embassies in East Africa a decade ago.

Over the last decade, U.S. diplomatic outposts have been transformed from showcases for American openness to heavily defended fortresses. Around the world from Athens to Abidjan, embassies built in a spirit of with colonial elegance or postwar openness have been transformed with fences, blast walls and other barriers against attack.

“This has been a long and careful process,” Tuttle said. “We looked at all our options, including renovation of our current building on Grosvenor Square. In the end, we realized that the goal of a modern, secure and environmentally sustainable embassy could best be met by constructing a new facility.”

It’s fracking hilarious that these creeps feel it necessary to include “Green” goals into the equation for construction of a political Maginot Line.

The United States has been selling embassies and other diplomatic buildings around the world as it consolidates diplomatic staff into more secure and modern compounds, often away from city centers…

The move will bring a stark change in surroundings for the embassy’s 800 staff. The current building is a stone’s throw from designer boutiques and expensive restaurants. The future site sits near railway lines, public housing projects, a fruit-and-vegetable market and derelict Battersea Power station — although on the up side, Tuttle said the embassy would have a river view.

They’re going to allow windows?

And he reassured Britain — “our best friend and ally in the world” — that the new embassy would be just as close to Parliament and other government buildings as the old site…

Of course. You wouldn’t want to make it too difficult for the governors of the 51st state to report to headquarters.

Does it look like a Cash Register – or just another Bunker?

The ferocity of the reaction in the German media to the fortress-like new U.S. embassy in Berlin, which former U.S. President George Bush will inaugurate on July 4th, strikes me as a reflection of the strains in German-U.S. relations since 2003’s Iraq conflict.

It underlines just how long gone the days of the Cold War really are. Then, when Berlin was the front line in the Cold War, America was West Germany’s best friend and U.S. soldiers were welcome across the country.

Architectural critics in Germany have slammed the boxy building with narrow windows as being reminiscent of Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The embassy is a picture of a country traumatised by 9/11 and by the consequences of globalisation, of a nation with such heavy armour that it can no longer see the world,” wrote conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this year.

Other critics have been just as hostile, deriding it as a discount supermarket, a prison, a bunker and like Fort Knox.

Once upon a time, the United States was a nation of courage and confidence. Now, led by greedy and arrogant Oil Patch Boys, no one even remembers how our nation survived the burning of the White House and the Capitol by British invaders during the war of 1812. Americans must think the Pearl Harbor Memorial just grew out of the tidal waters of Honolulu.

Whatever the case and cause, our Fearless Leaders rely nowadays on structures of state better suited to Stalin than Jefferson.