Marking the beginning of the post-Saddam Hussein era in Iraq, the U.S. State Department is planning to allocate $35.8 million to contruct a state-of-the-art embassy in Baghdad. The funds would come from President Bush’s $74.7 billion supplemental budget for the war.
Spokesman Richard Boucher told the press during a March 25 briefing in Washington, D.C., that the new structure will “represent the people of the United States to the free people of Iraq.”
Boucher could not confirm if the new building would be built on the site of the existing embassy building, which was abandoned before the kickoff of the 1991 Gulf War. He could not comment on the condition of the exising embassy structure, either.
