No words

[tikistitch]

Luxury hotels and golf: welcome to the Green Zone

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad's Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

A $5bn (£2.5bn) tourism and development scheme for the Green Zone being hatched by the Pentagon and an international investment consortium would give the heavily fortified area on the banks of the Tigris a "dream" makeover that will become a magnet for Iraqis, tourists, business people and investors. About half of the area is now occupied by coalition forces, the US state department or private foreign companies.

A golf course.

In the middle of Baghdad.

Comments

[nitasee.livejournal.com]

For the love of... Yes, this is what we went to war over. Not to bring democracy but to make Bagdad into another Disney golf resort. For the West.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

If you read on (c'mon, I dare ya) a spokesman notes that another challenge is they have NO WORKING SEWER SYSTEM.

[nitasee.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose that would be a problem. But nothing our mighty tax dollar$ can't fix. And once more the government will be putting out all the money for some corporation to profit from.

Cynical? Moi?

[aoi-no-neko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is just what the Iraqi people need. Sure.

More likely just another sink hole to funnel our good ol' American tax dollars away (into someone's pocket)

Hum, I wonder, was that one of Saddam's body doubles they executed and instead snuck him out of the country and hid him in the Pentagon? Because this thing is right up his alley.

[girlontheleft.livejournal.com]

I'm just repeating comments I've seen elsewhere, but... wouldn't it make more sense to subsidize a huge tourism project like this in New Orleans?

(As if it'll ever be built! I wasn't aware the Pentagon dabbled in real estate investment fraud.)

*twitch*

[jabberwockypie.livejournal.com]

People are getting evicted all over the place, food is more and more expensive, gas is $4 a gallon . . .

And yet we have enough money to build a golf course in Iraq?

We approach this with perhaps a dose of realism,"
No. Nononononono. "A dose of realism" would involve finding the person who came up with this brilliant plan and kicking some sense into them.

'Scuse me, I'll be in the kitchen. I don't want my head to explode all over the carpet.