06 July 2015

America’s billion-dollar mission in Lebanon

Middle East Eye

As I’ve written about on more than a handful of occasions, a pet paranoia cultivated by the US in recent years has been Iran’s perceived encroachment into America’s “backyard.”
Back in 2008, Michael Rubin of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute warned that the Iranian embassy in Managua, Nicaragua, was “now the largest diplomatic mission in the city.” This and other Iranian efforts in the region supposedly indicated that former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “might see Latin America as a beachhead from which to conduct an aggressive strategy against the United States and its allies.”
As journalist Charles Davis has noted, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also jumped on the bandwagon, announcing: “The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua… And you can only imagine what that’s for.”
As it turned out, “imagine” was the operative word.
In July 2009, The Washington Post reported from Managua that, “here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.” According to the paper, Nicaraguan government officials “say the US Embassy complex is the only ‘mega-embassy’ in Managua.”
The recent revelation of US plans for a ginormous new embassy in Lebanon - right next door to the current ginormous US embassy in the village of Awkar north of Beirut- further underscores America’s hypocrisy in decrying alleged Iranian violations of its own backyard while setting up camp in Iran’s. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.