One for the Next Debate

Campaign 2008 is underway early, so those of us who care have to mark a lot of time waiting for something meaningful to happen in the long, long run-up to the caucuses. So here's a fun exercise: Drafting debate questions for the hopefuls. Here's one I find particularly interesting.

Dear Hopeful:

On the day the next administration takes office, the largest embassy in the world will be the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. This 104-acre behemoth, four times the size of the United Nations headquarters, is scheduled to be completed (while the rest of the city sweats and makes do with sporadic electricity and running water) in September 2007, on time and within its budget of almost $600 million.

The only rational purpose for such a monstrous edifice, meant to house a permanent staff of 1000, is to serve as the headquarters for a massive and permanent US presence in Baghdad. On the day the next administration takes office, this notion will be obsolete. It's a neoconservative relic, an artifact of a governing philosophy that will be outdated and abandoned by anyone who has a prayer of being the President-elect in January 2009. There is no way that individual will be committed to a massive and permanent US presence in Baghdad. Even the Republicans are fleeing the Bush Administration smog cloud.

Nor is there any way to know for certain how long Iraq, or whatever has its capital in Baghdad in the future (assuming Baghdad even has a future as a capital), will even choose to have diplomatic relations with the US.

The building is a colossal, humiliating white elephant. No foreseeable post-neocon US policy can possibly have a use for it.

Debate question, then: What will you do with the building?