Beirut and the Birth of the Fortress Embassy

Habib Battah 

April 10, 2024

On a late July day in 2023, amid the pine tree hills overlooking the Bay of Beirut, 14 bright yellow tower cranes and thousands of workers toiled over the construction site of the third US embassy in Lebanon.

The new US embassy under construction in Awkar with a view of Beirut in the distance. Photo courtesy of the US Embassy in Beirut’s X feed, May 5, 2023.

At over 40 acres, the new Beirut embassy, a 19-structure ziggurat that dwarfs any government facility in Lebanon, is the second largest in the world after Baghdad’s. Its billion-dollar estimated budget rivals the cost of the US embassy in London, and it is about four times its size, despite Britain having ten times Lebanon’s population and 130 times its GDP.

No specific reason has been offered for building such a massive compound in Lebanon. According to the State Department’s website, the “primary purpose” of any US Embassy is to “assist American citizens,” visiting or living in the host country. But such explanations are belied by Lebanon’s relative size and economic status. Rather, the new embassy, like that of Baghdad, speaks to longstanding US military interests and activity in Lebanon and the wider region.

[Continue reading at:  https://merip.org/2024/04/beirut-and-the-birth-of-the-fortress-embassy/ ]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

We certainly like to think that this new fortress embassy is for the ultimate good of Lebanon. After its 1958 deployment of 10,000 Marines in Beirut to protect Lebanon from being annexed to the ill-fated improvised "Arab" union between Egypt and Syria, the US became a major contributor to Lebanon's demise and descent into hell. Instead of assisting this tiny, yet highly symbolic, country of coexistence between Islam and Christianity, a model rejected by rabid supremacist Jewish Zionists and extremist fundamentalist Muslims, the Americans betrayed their own values by catering to the Arab Muslim dictatorships around (for their oil) and to the criminal ethnic cleanser of Palestine, the Zionist colony of Israel in Palestine. Instead of upholding the Lebanese model of coexistence, the US - mostly the republican administrations of Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. - continuously beat up on the freedom-seeking Lebanese since the 1970s and to date, directly intervening to favor hostile countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others against Lebanon, in a long series of short-sighted expedient policies that served its own mercantile interests and the ideological barbarity of Arab and Israeli interests.