At the corner of 18th and P Streets NW sits a lightly orange colored building which doesn’t betray its importance unless you look closely at the nameplate. It’s not a haughty, tall building with exacting lawns with regular visitors of meditative performers, and it barely attracts any notice. Except as an arbiter of national well-being, as demonstrated by its lawn.
The embassy of Iraq has had one of the most curious lawns in the brief time since I have lived in DC. During the height of the cold war between the US and Iraq, during sanctions, but before the Iraq War, the greenery around the embassy was a city wildlife preserve, slum level grade. It hosted tall weeds, grasses of many shades of wilting and pallid greens, the occasional flower and probably a snake or two. It was the eyesore of the block, a clear sign of the deep enmity between the regime in Baghdad and the United States. It was a neglected, rejected outpost of a nation that couldn’t care any less.
In the run up to the war, the embassy did little to change its look, and the building itself seemed to grow more and more decrepit. The flag rarely flew, and it was assumed that the space was as abandoned as the Philippines old embassy (which was rumored to occasionally house vagrants and could have been an opium den of old if the Australian embassy next door hadn’t been such a tight run ship. It remains an eyesore by the way.) which had grass sprouting through the asphalt and a forlorn chain hanging between two sloping poles, as if it had given up keeping the most brazen illegal parker away.
After the end of hostilities, and when the CPA was installed, the embassy seemed like it would have a renaissance. It was not as abandoned, though there were no representatives of a national government that it could send to house in the structure, yet it picked up a little. The lawn looked like someone, perhaps the Secret Service’s special lawn care team, had dropped by every few months to clean things up a bit. There are a number of curious rules regarding what can and cannot be done on embassy property by the host nation (generally one should assume nothing can be touched) but the Secret Service does register complaints and can apparently in some cases perform some work, though I doubt a shoddy lawn and a fence slowly falling toward the sidewalk merits their interest.
After the establishment of the provisional government, the lawn was changed, seemingly forever. There were borders of bright flowers, arranged with care, the grass was meticulously cut and the building looked less like a dirty orange of a tired USAIR seat on a 727 and more like a model of proper care that a Wessie would be proud of. The wrought iron fencing was replaced and sparkled with new paint. Truly a new beginning.
Today, perhaps as good an indicator as ever, the lawn look unkempt. It wasn’t as bas as during the late pre-war years, but it was again a little wild, with a few haphazardly placed tulips wilting in the late April sun. The grass was well on its way to tall, the fence perhaps ready to sag. The building itself was as empty looking as it had been before.
Whether the theory holds up that embassy maintenance, especially of the greenery, is a sign of how well a nation is doing in the world, or its standing with the host nation, is of course up for debate. I’m just having some fun.
