... employee, that is.
Eric Pfeifer has an excellent story about the last remaining employee in the Iraqi embassy in Washington.
There's one part of this story that really bothers me.
For the last seven months he's been the sole contact for 300,000 Iraqi citizens living in the United States, attempting to manage the embassy's affairs from the confines of his Alexandria home. "I couldn't do anything," he says. "I didn't have authorization from the State Department. The Iraqi community wants passports. These people have visas that need to be renewed and I can't help them. They can't return to their families and they can't establish themselves here. They are stuck."State has arranged for three Iraqi diplomats to serve in the embassy when it re-opens. Two of the diplomats will come from Iraqi embassies in Algeria and Vietnam, the third will be from Baghdad. Alkaissy has brokered an agreement with the Algerian government to sponsor Iraq's embassy until its assets are no longer frozen.
While I applaud the Algerians for their noble decision, I wonder why the US isn't paying for this. We are, after all, the ones who started this.
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