A Visit To The Green Zone

I freely admit to being a frequent critic of the US government on policy and procedure – with ample reason – but I have to say my dealings with the citiizen services section at the US Embassy in London over the past week or so have been a model of efficiency and pleasantness. They couldn’t have been more helpful and produced an emergency passport within 2 hours. By comparison the UK passport agency is a Kafkesque nightmare of stupid beurocracy, made ten timesworse by uneducated, rude and untrained staff and a rapacious charging policy.

Mind you, we had to go through what looked like the Norrh/South Korean border zone to get that exemplary service: roads leading into Grosvenor Square are closed, there are tank traps and steel barriers and armoured police with submachine guns at regular intervals and ID required at numerous checkpoints. If that’s not enough to intimidate, there’s the big fuckoff cameras on poles every couple of feet that swivel to watch you as you negotiate the maze of barriers and checkpoints.. I have no doubt there are armed police on the roof and on surrounding buildings too.

I wonder how much thiis must cost – and more to the point, who’s paying?

On my sporadic visits to the embassy over the past twenty years or so (the last time was 1996) the only apparent security has come from from the spit and polished, buzz-cut US marines in full dress uniform on guard at the imposing front doors, with a few desultory British plods lounging about outside for show. No doubt there was much more security than that, but it wasn’t so dramatically in-your-face as today. Then the public face of the US to its host countries was ebulliently confident, if not hubristically arrogant – it was the confidence of knowing it was the big kid on the block and could deal with any threat, even though there were arguably more threats from more terrorist groups then than there are now. There was no need to put up barriers and gun turrets: what the embassy said was ‘We are America. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”.

But not any more, because they did come and have a go, largely as a result of that hubristic arrogance.

What the US embassy says externally (now that it more resembles a fragment of disintegrating Death Star, with all its bristliing antennae and visible armour) rather than power and confidence, is “We’re scared shitless and we don’t care who knows it”.

But I’m glad to say that the Americans inside themselves were, as always, cordial and efficient -and, as always, I wondered how people who are so cordial, pleasant and efficient can have produced such a fucked up government as this one.