Shrinking a $750 million embassy

IF YOUR TRAVEL agency had planned a guided tour of the American Embassy in Baghdad, you can count on a change of itinerary . The $750 million diplomatic Taj Mahal, which opened with overwheming confidence and fanfare back in January 2009, is undergoing major shrinkage.

The State Department during the Bush years boasted of its mammoth size as a tribute to the bond between a bright new Iraqi future and the Americans who saved it from monstrous excesses of the late Saddam Hussein. It would rank as the largest embassy in the world much as a university would boast of the biggest football stadium that would seat a mid-city population.

Indeed, we were told it covered more acreage (104) than 80 football fields to accommodate 16,000 employes at a modest cost of, oh...$6 billion a year. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker described the weighty investment as a "new era" in U.S.-Iraqi relations. That came years after uber- hawk Richard Perle declared upon the invasion that within six months, there would be a big plaza in downtown Baghdad named for George W. Bush.

But like so many of the airy feel-good prospects of Iraqi rebirth, the hometown regime had something less sanguine to say about it, even to the point of delaying shipments of supplies to the colony. (Fortunately, it has yet to poison the wells.) For security reasons, the embassy staffers were confined to their designated walled zones.

What to do for damage control? The U.S. State Department says it will cut America's presence in half, with many of outcasts having served as contractors. Is it necessary to report that there is no plaza named for Dubya, and that the length of the conflict far exceeded Richard Cheney's prediction that it would end in a few weeks or a couple of months?

Iraq, auto industry: No praise of GOP folly

I HAD ONCE THOUGHT that the worst flogging of reality occurred in the days following the invasion of Iraq. It was the hollow reassurance by the hawkish Bush Administration officials that likened the war to a brief walk in the park. A few reminders as the pro-war hucksters paraded through the TV talk shows to validate the grand design to bring instant peace to the world:

"I think it will go relatively quickly. Weeks rather than months." - Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003.

"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that." - Donald Rumsfeld , Feb. 7, 2003.

Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, two key Bush hawks that helped design the war plans, inisted that American troops would be treated as liberators by the Iraqis. Perle even went so far as to say that within six months of the invasion, a plaza in down Baghdad would be named in honor of Bush.

How could so many apologists for a single destructive plan be such villains?

Well, some of the untidy elements of that failed group have been showing up in the rebirth of the American auto industry. Thanks to Dick Polman, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, whose work appeared today in the Beacon Journal, we can review the psychotic response by the right-wing Ninjas on Capitol Hill who lashed the Bush-Obama bailout of once-bankrupt GM and Chrysler as a dangerous leftwing government invasion of private industry.

A few of his examples will serve the point on how these Republicans ganged up on President Obama as a reincarnation of Lenin. Or was it Hugo Chavez, who's still around?:

Sen. John McCain, who remains the GOP's media star-in-waiting, declared: "Anybody who believes that Chrysler is going to survive, I'd like to meet them." (Have you thought about taking a walk along Chrysler's assembly lines these days, John?)

Or Rep, Eric Cantor, John Boehner's Little Sir Echo, except that he smiles more than Number One, who warned that Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid were trying to build a car that he wouldn't want to drive. Why? The Obama crowd will "run it into the ground." (The limo's waiting, Eric.)

Can't overlook Boehner, the Man of the House: The rescue effort "guarantees failure at taxpayer expense."

Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama: "'I wouldn't loan them any money. General Motors...is headed down this road to oblivion. Should we intervene to slow it down, knowing it's going to happen. I say no."

Fortunately for the country, guys, it wasn't your call and we can understand why you'd prefer to say nothing and move on to other things. As Polman notes, both companies are now out of bankruptcy and showing profits. He notes that President Obama's intervention saved many livelihoods. Since 2009, the auto industry has added 52,900 jobs.

So where are these critics to concede their job-killing errors? Oh. there's still ObamaCare. And abortion. And, well,...you know the drill. There's always something, right?