Bill Richardson, on Meet the Press: “The Iraqis should be in charge of security and protecting our embassy and our personnel that stay there.”
I know too many people at the U.S. embassy in Iraq and in the Green Zone to take that proposal seriously. Americans work with host countries’ military, police, and security forces, but they don’t outsource the job of protecting Americans to anybody.
That idea reminded me of proposals from the likes of Tom Friedman and Richard Feinberg, who complain that our embassies look like fortresses, and are too imposing and unwelcoming.
Buddy, you go work in a building that might as well have a big bulls-eye painted on it. Easy for those of us back here to say that embassies abroad shouldn’t have such “high walls and wide moats.”