Embassy Setback

Over at Danger Room, Sharon Weinberger, who spent a month in 2003 as a public diplomacy officer at the U.S. Embassy in Doha, Qatar, has an interesting perspective on the massive new embassy going up in Baghdad. "In reality," she writes, "American embassies are increasingly cut off from those very countries in which the U.S. is supposed to be fostering better relations, and worse, create caricatures of the detached diplomat more interested in tennis than work." But there's a reason for that, she adds: to provide "setback," that is, distance between an embassy and the people who might attack it. More from Weinberger's post:

It would be simple to blame the State Department for cutting itself off from the world, but that’s not really fair. The embassies are the way they are for the same reason that we are deploying increasing numbers of armored vehicles to Iraq: a response to attacks. The embassies are targeted because they are symbols of America; we fortify them to protect Americans and to deny enemies an easy target.