Baath house: cleaning out the Iraqi embassy

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2003 by Eric Pfeiffer

The first move towards re-establishing the embassy came in late August when the Iraqi Governing Council's Ahmad Chalabi--then serving as president of the council on a rotating basis--stopped by for a visit. The first thing Chalabi and Alkaissy did was take down the dozens of photos and portraits of Saddam Hussein that hung in each of the embassy's rooms. A pile of the smaller pictures lies face down on a boardroom table in the ballroom. Standing more than four feet high, the largest of the portraits leans against a wall overlooking the mom's expanse. "This is one of the newer ones," Alkaissy says, laughing. "They'll probably want it for a museum somewhere."

That was, so far, the only thing Chalabi has done for the embassy, but Alkaissy has faith. "Chalabi is a very nice gentleman. He's very open-minded. He understood our needs. He promised he would do something, and I'm sum he is doing it."

But for the moment, the embassy's real boss like Iraq's is the American government, from which it receives occasional orders but with which it has little face-to-face discourse. The State Department has decreed that three Iraqi diplomats will come to the embassy when it reopens; two of the diplomats will come from Iraq's embassies in Algeria and Vietnam, one from Baghdad. But with all Iraq's assets frozen, the embassy building has been gathering dust, cobwebs, and neglect.

The ghosts of Saddam lurk everywhere inside the building. Behind the stack of portraits lies the embassy's library. Achmed leads me to a grand, glass-cased oak bookshelf over 10 feet wide holding hundreds of books with their covers inscribed in Arabic. Every single volume is Baath Party literature. "I'm tired of all this," he says."No one ever reads these." A dock hanging over a hallway near the main offices is stopped at 11:27 p.m. The last of the expelled officials shut it off as a marker of the moment when they were forced to leave.

We went back outside together. The State Department's maintenance crews were taking saws to the shrubs that just hours ago had shrouded the grounds. It was a fitting moment for departure: At the embassy, as in Iraq, the face-lift had begun.

Eric Pfeiffer is a Washington, D.C., writer.