Two Presidents, 15 Questions, You Decide

Foreign Policy magazine's favorite new game: Who Said it - Bush or Obama?

Take the quiz here.

"When it comes to their rhetoric on Iran, there's less distance between the cowboy and the community organizer than you might think."

OBO's Excellent (Design) Adventure

Consumer Notice: This post is certified 100% free of Matters of Official Concern that are not referenced from publicly available sources of information. 

The Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has made its first official departure from the architectural diplo-kitsch of the Standard Embassy Design, and intends to replace the old U.S. Embassy in Mexico City (pictured above) with a bespoke masterpiece from the new Design Excellence program. All details about that masterpiece are still to be determined, so we'll have to trust OBO on that for now.

OBO announced the opening of a design competition for the Mexico City job on Friday:

The Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has shortlisted nine design teams for the New Embassy Compound in Mexico City, Mexico.

The shortlisted teams, in no particular order, are:

AECOM/Snohetta
Allied Works Architecture
Antoine Predock Architect / Moody-Nolan
Diller Scofidio + Renfro / Buro Happhold
Ennead Architects
Miller Hull Partnership
Morphosis Architects
Skidmore Owings and Merrill
Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects

Fifty-four firms responded to the public notification for prospective offerors [see it here] to compete. This initial shortlist of offerors will assemble their technical teams and submit detailed information on their organization and qualifications.

The Mexico City design/bid/build project, scheduled for construction award in fiscal year 2015, is the first solicited under OBO’s new Design Excellence program. This holistic approach to project development and delivery seeks to utilize the best methods, technologies, and staff abilities to produce facilities that are outstanding in all respects. The overall strategy focuses on the integration of purpose, function, flexibility, art, safety, security, sustainability, and maintainability.

That last sentence reads like it came straight out of an architectural charrette, which I'm sure it did. So, our project strategy will be to holistically integrate "purpose, function, flexibility, art, safety, security, sustainability, and maintainability" into a new office building. All that into the same building. Okay, but I think reality will set in at some point and OBO will need to make some unwanted trade-offs.

For starters, where in the enormous and densely-packed megalopolis of Mexico City is there a site that is large enough to build an Excellent Embassy on, but also close enough to the downtown business district and host government core to be highly functional for clients and embassy officers? That's trade-off Number 1 right there.

And there will be a trade-off on the program level, as well. An Excellent Embassy is going to cost more than a standard embassy design when all is said and done - yes, it will, despite the Design Excellence program stuff about higher first costs leading to lower life-cycle costs - and that means an old embassy at some less important post will not get replaced. OBO will choose to do one high-toned new building instead of two inelegant boxes.  

Regarding the design competition, I'm guessing that Skidmore Owings & Merrill has the inside track. SOM designed the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which was the second-largest overseas construction project ever undertaken by OBO and a Design Excellence project in all but name (see this for details), and also the late-1990s new U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. The Ottawa design was extremely un-fortressy, maybe too much so even for an embassy in Canada.

All reservations aside, I am looking forward to seeing how this excellent adventure turns out. If nothing else, it will be a refreshing change from the heavily standardized and regimented era of Major General (ret.) Charles C. Williams, Director and Chief Operating Officer, OBO, March 2001 to December 2007.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline Of The Week

"Beheadings Raise Doubts That Taliban Have Changed"





H/T to NRO's The Corner

New Embassy Compound In Kyiv

Twenty years ago the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was starting to break up into sixteen successor states ("the Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics"), which made for exciting times. One immediate consequence of the collapse of the USSR was that the other nations of the world had to very quickly set up diplomatic premises in the newly independent states, which were hyper-eager to receive them, since a foreign diplomatic presence would help to solidify their new status.

Problem was, almost all the available office properties back then were the ones being vacated by Soviet government agencies or the Soviet Communist Party. That was not good, since a former KGB headquarters would make a poor U.S. Embassy, for reasons of symbolism as well as practical considerations about eavesdropping devices. There would be bad ju-ju if our diplomats worked in buildings where dissidents had been tortured or killed.

In Kyiv, the solution was to acquire the former headquarters of the Komsomol - the Communist Party Youth League - as a stop-gap solution until a larger and more suitable place could be found. I remember everyone figured that we would move into a new embassy office building in two or three years, five years at the outside.

Today, after twenty years in the old Komsomol building, the U.S. mission finally moved into that new embassy compound.

United States Dedicates New Embassy Compound in Kyiv, Ukraine:

Following the 20th Anniversary of American-Ukrainian diplomatic relations celebrated on January 20, U.S. Ambassador John F. Tefft dedicated the new embassy facility in Kyiv today. Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, Volodomyr Lytvyn; Foreign Minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko; as well as Under Secretary for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy; Deputy Chief of Mission, Eric Schultz; and Deputy Director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), Heather Townsend participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Occupying a 10-acre site in the capital city of Kyiv, the multi-building complex is a platform for increased U.S. interaction with the Ukrainian people. The embassy’s permanent art collection celebrates the exchange of artistic expression between the United States and Ukraine through work by contemporary Ukrainian, American, and regional artists, curated by OBO’s Office of Art in Embassies.

The new embassy incorporates numerous sustainable features, most notably advances in engineering design to maximize efficiency and minimize energy use, a green roof system, and rain gardens which pre-treat stormwater before it is infiltrated on-site. The compound is registered with the Green Building Certification Institute and is entering the formal review process; it is the first LEED® registered project in Ukraine. B.L. Harbert International of Birmingham, Ala., constructed the project, which was designed by Page Southerland Page of Arlington, Va. The $247 million project generated hundreds of jobs in both the United States and Ukraine.

Since 1999, as part of the Department’s Capital Security Construction Program, OBO has completed 88 new diplomatic facilities and has moved more than 27,000 people into safe, secure, and functional facilities. OBO has an additional 41 projects in design or construction.

By the way, the new compound in Kyiv was built on the site of what had formerly been a huge junkyard. No bad ju-ju there.

What Does It Take To Be A "Global Crisis"?

Passport asks a real good question today: should Central America's drug violence be considered a global crisis? It sure seems to me that it ought to be considered a global crisis. If it isn't, then, what would it have to do to qualify?

Passport references a report from the U.N.'s International Narcotics Control Board to describe the state of drug-related violence in Central America (briefly, there are unprecedented levels of drug trafficking, transnational and local criminal gangs, fighting between and within drug trafficking and criminal organizations operating out of Colombia and Mexico, widespread availability of firearms, and the world's highest homicide rates), and then it offers a comparison with Syria.

Just how bad is it? To put things in perspective, in Syria, where the the United Nations is debating imposing international sanctions and many are urging humanitarian intervention, an astonishing 7,500 people are estimated to have been killed in the last 11 months. With Syria's population, that's almost 37 deaths per 100,000 people.

By comparison, Honduras has a murder rate of 82.1 per 100,000, the highest in the world. It's followed by El Salvador at 66 and Jamaica at 60 -- all driven primarily by drug violence. With only 8.5 per cent of the world population, Latin America and the Caribbean account for 27 percent of homicides.

I don't mean to minimize the tragic violence of the Middle East, but it's a bit astonishing how little [attention] this carnage closer to home gets in U.S. political circles, particularly since, as the world's largest drug market, North Americans are directly implicated in it.

Seven of the top ten national homicide rates reported in the U.N.'s global homicide study are in Central America and the Caribbean. In addition to super-high Honduras, El Salvador, and Jamaica, the others are: Guatemala, Belize, Venezuela, and St. Kitts and Nevis, all with around 40 homicides per 100,000 people. For context, the homicide rate in the U.S. is 5 per 100,000, the same as the rate for Europe as a whole.

All of that carnage is fueled by drug trafficking. With so much slaughter going on year after year, why doesn't Central America get even a fraction of the humanitarian attention the international community is currently pouring all over Syria?

The Tipping Point In Afghanistan?

How can the killing of two American military advisers inside the Ministry of Interior headquarters building, coming at the end of a week of rioting and outrage directed at all Western presence in the country, including the killing of two other U.S. soldiers by an Afghan policeman on Thursday, not be a tipping point in our over-long and increasingly pointless commitment to maintain a NATO coalition mission in Afghanistan?

The New York Times story on today's terrible incident (2 Americans Killed as Afghan Unrest Enters Fifth Day) seems to be the best of the still-pretty-thin accounts to be published so far. It gets right to the point by calling into question "the coalition's entire strategy of joint operations with Afghan forces."   

The order [to immediately pull all military advisers out of Afghan ministries] by the NATO commander, Gen. John R. Allen, came on the fifth day of virulent anti-American demonstrations across the country, and it was a clear sign of concern that the fury had reached deeply into even the Afghan security forces and ministries working most closely with the coalition.

Although there was no official statement that the gunman was an Afghan, in an e-mail sent to Western officials here from NATO headquarters the episode was described as “green on blue,” which is the military term used here when Afghan security forces turn their weapons on their Western military allies.

The killings, which happened within one of the most tightly secured areas of the ministry, add to the drumbeat of concern about a deepening animosity between civilians and militaries on both sides that had led to American and coalition forces being killed in increasing numbers even before the Koran burning ignited nationwide rioting. And the pullout from the Afghan ministries suddenly called into question the coalition’s entire strategy of joint operations with Afghan forces across the country, although General Allen said NATO was still committed to fighting the war in Afghanistan.

ISAF has said very little about the incident, and released no details. However, I notice that ISAF spokesmen and General Allen have consistently referred to the attacker in the singular (using the words "the person" and "the perpetrator" and "the individual," and never 'the person or persons') which makes me think that someone has a fairly good idea of what happened. But maybe I'm reading too much into that wording.

BBC has a few unsourced additional details, such as that eight shots were fired, that the shooting occurred in the MOI's command and control center, and that "the incident followed a verbal clash."

The WaPo's story likewise said that "one of the [unnamed Afghan] officials noted that the shooting occurred inside a secure room at the ministry that Afghan staff do not have access to." I've seen many similar comments today to the effect that NATO advisers work in a small compound-inside-the compound at MOI headquarters.

A few thoughts about all this:

• I'm sure that a personal security detail must have accompanied the two victims to MOI headquarters, yet there is no mention of them or of any shots they fired in defense. That seems to reinforce reports that the shooting took place inside a secure inner area within MOI headquarters. I assume the advisers would have been closely covered by their protective detail when they were arriving and departing MOI and exposed to armed Afghan policeman and guards, especially after last Thursday's fatal shooting by an enraged Afghan policemen of two U.S. soldiers in the province of Nangarhar.

• We can be sure that MOI headquarters has plenty of perimeter security, entry access controls, visitor screening, and identification/accountability of everyone in the building. The odds that this attack was committed by an outsider, as the Taliban has claimed, are vanishingly small. Moreover, the attacker was someone authorized to be armed inside the building, or else was able to access a weapon after he got there. He was almost certainly an insider, and maybe even an Afghan counterpart to the NATO advisers.

• The attacker was able to walk away afterwards unhindered, leaving the [purportedly] secure interior area of the headquarters and going back into the surrounding general work area, and maybe even outside the building before it was locked down. How come? Most likely because he is a senior official who could just blow past MOI access controls and security. Or else he is someone being assisted by senior MOI officials who are now hiding him.

• The attacker did not leave behind a fall guy to take the blame; for instance, a low-level guard who could be killed and left at the scene with the murder weapon in his hand. How hard would it have been to do that, and avoid a lot of consequences for the MOI? (Maybe that's a cold-blooded idea, but don't tell me the Afghan MOI isn't full of people who would do exactly that without a second thought.) That suggests the attack was spontaneous and unplanned, in accordance with the BBC's report about a "verbal clash" preceding the shooting.

I've seen no statement from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul as to whether it, like ISAF, will withdraw its presence from Afghan ministries and severely limit any movements outside the embassy. I assume it will. What else can it do? So, I guess we'll be conducting the very best diplomacy we can during this crisis without leaving the embassy compound.

Hillary Refuses To Wear The 'Silly Shirt' At Mexico G-20

The UK Daily Mail has been all over this sartorial scandal:

Wearing a lime green shirt, the Secretary of State was placed in the middle of the foreign ministers - all dressed in crisp white shirts - for a G20 'family photo' in Los Cabos, Mexico.

-- snip -- 

For the photograph, Clinton was joined by leaders including the EU's foreign policy representative Baroness Catherine Ashton, Mexico's Patricia Espinose and South Africa's Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

But it was an outfit not unexpected from the Secretary of State, known for her loud-coloured, boxy jacket and trouser suit combinations.

She raised eyebrows on a state visit to Barbados in June 2010 when she chose a gaudy bright orange trouser suit to meet the country's vice president.

Her questionable fashion choices led Project Runway's Tim Gunn to ask the following year: 'Why must she dress that way? I think she's confused about her gender. All these big, baggy menswear tailored pantsuits? I'm really serious.'

-- snip --

The Department of State was unable to identify a dress code which the Secretary of State had missed.

Why didn't the State spokesman tell the press that we in the U.S. of A. have a native dress code that proscribes wearing white after Labor Day? That might have been better than nothing.

What a bunch of wet blankets we have in this administration! First it was Obama, refusing to do a 'silly shirt' group photo at all as host of the Pacific economic summit conference, and now Hillary refusing to put on a Guayabara shirt.

So strange, especially when you remember how her husband was always the life of the party. I don't understand why none of his joyously unrestrained behavior has ever rubbed off on her. Aren't long-term couples supposed to resemble each other?