Over there

Last week I watched the final episode of Ken Burns' documentary, The War. If you haven't seen it, you can rent it on DVD from Netflix, etc. Very interesting as it attempts to tell the story of WWII from the perspective of the men and women on the ground... and at home.

I also just read William Langewiesche's essay on the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad:

What on earth is going on? We have built a fortified America in the middle of a hostile city, peopled it with a thousand officials from every agency of government, and provided them with a budget to hire thousands of contractors to take up the slack. Half of this collective is involved in self-defense. The other half is so isolated from Iraq that, when it is not dispensing funds into the Iraqi ether, it is engaged in nothing more productive than sustaining itself. The isolation is necessary for safety, but again, the process paradox is at play—and not just in Iraq. Faced with the failure of an obsolete idea—the necessity of traditional embassies and all the elaboration they entail—we have not stood back to remember their purpose, but have plunged ahead with closely focused concentration to build them bigger and stronger. One day soon they may reach a state of perfection: impregnable and pointless.