U.S. opens embassy — its biggest — in Iraq

January 6, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

BAGHDAD (AP) — The United States inaugurated its largest embassy ever on Monday, a fortress-like compound in the heart of the Green Zone — and the most visible sign of what U.S. officials call a new chapter in relations between America and a more sovereign Iraq.

U.S. Marines raised the American flag over the adobe-colored buildings, which sit on a 104-acre site and have space for 1,000 employees — more than 10 times the size of any other American Embassy in the world.

“Iraq is in a new era, and so is the Iraqi-U.S. relationship,” Ambassador Ryan Crocker proclaimed.

In perhaps an unintended sign of the new relationship, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not attend Monday’s ceremony because he was traveling in Iran, a country the U.S. has accused of aiding and arming Iraqi militants.

Explaining the opening of such a large embassy three years before the U.S. must finish withdrawing its 146,000 troops from Iraq, Crocker told The Associated Press that it is vital for the U.S. to remain involved in nonmilitary ways.

“I think we have seen a tremendous amount of progress,” Crocker said before the ceremony, “but the development of this new Iraq is going to be a very long time in the making, and we need to be engaged here.”

Crocker said Baghdad was looking to the West for the first time since the Army’s 1958 revolution that toppled Iraq’s monarchy and set the stage for the ascendancy of the Baath party, which dominated Iraq until the 2003 invasion.

“Iraq has defined itself in general hostility to the West and the United States. You now have a fundamentally different state and society taking shape that values those relations, that values those contacts, that wants its children educated in American and other Western universities. And we need to be there as a partner to ensure that those relationships are solidly built and well-maintained,” he said.

“We will be engaged in different ways as security continues to improve and as Iraqi security forces are more and more in the lead. But that engagement over the long term is key,” he added.

The veteran diplomat has served many years in the Middle East, where a lack of U.S. resolve in Lebanon 20 years ago opened that country to meddling from Iran and Syria.

The inauguration of the $700 million embassy came just days after a security agreement between Iraq and the United States took effect, replacing a U.N. mandate that gave legal authority to the U.S. and other foreign troops to operate in Iraq.

Under the new security agreement, U.S. troops will no longer conduct unilateral operations and will act only in concert with Iraqi forces. They must also leave major Iraqi cities by June and the entire country by the end of 2011. Another accord mapped out the bilateral relations.

Crocker said that since the 2003 invasion, “perhaps no single week has been more important than this past week. On Dec. 31 we left the Republican Palace.”