At least John Edwards' house wasn't paid for by taxpayers

Here is what your tax dollars are now paying for in Iraq. Funny how this project is coming in on time and on budget:

When the idea of building a new US embassy in Baghdad was first mooted by the American administration in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, there seemed to be a grandiose logic to it.
The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush's intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.

Rising from the dust of the city's Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.

It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.

The US ambassador, however, will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft.

They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.

But commentators and Iraq experts believe the project was flawed from its inception, and have raised concerns it will become an enormous, heavily targeted white elephant that will be an even greater liability if and when the Americans scale back their presence in Iraq.

"What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are," Edward Peck, a former American diplomat in Iraq, told AP.

"What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it's blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?"

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 about 1,000 US diplomatic and military staff have been using one of his former palaces as a make-shift embassy, which several observers have criticised as giving the regrettable impression that the Americans merely replaced Saddam's authoritarian rule with their own.

Joost Hildermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group, said of the new embassy: "This sends a really poor signal to Iraqis that the Americans are building such a huge compound in Baghdad. It does very little to assuage Iraqis who are angry that America is running the country, and not very well at that."

Why not build a 400-foot high golden statue of George W. Bush clad in the flightsuit, complete with codpiece and a halo, in front of the place while you're at it?

Here you have a country where most people have little to no electricity, little clean water, homes bombed to smithereens, and George W. Bush is building Xanadu? With the exception of the so-called "Freedom Tower" to be built in lower Manhattan, have you ever heard of a bigger "Architecture As Fuck you" project?

And all this while Captain Codpiece is threatening to veto a $3.5% increase in pay for U.S. soldiers and a $40/month increase in benefits for all those baby brides who are becoming widows so that George Bush can leave this mess for someone else to clean up; and while Iraqi children are making $7-10 a day making bombs for insurgents so that their families can eat.

(h/t: Americablog and Cernig)