The cable focused on the Iraqi staff of nine in the Public Affairs section of our gargantuan embassy and, though it got some media attention, few of us really read such long documents beginning to end, so let me summarize. It dealt with Iraqis who have to leave the Green Zone each night for Red-Zone Iraq and return each work-day morning. In their Red-Zone neighborhoods, the employees often got but an hour of power for every six hours without (one area lacked city power for "over a month"); spent endless hours in gas lines (12 hours on a day off for one employee); were taunted by Iraqi guards, who seem to belong to (assumedly Shiite) militias, at Green-Zone checkpoints; could not tell family members where they actually worked; faced mounting criticisms of the U.S. at home; experienced sectarian strains in homes and neighborhoods; could not protect their own children; did not take home their American cell phones (fearing these might ID them for death); are in some cases "planning for their own possible abduction" by entering code names for friends and colleagues into their Iraqi cell phones; cannot be called by the embassy on holidays or weekends without having their "cover" blown; regularly know of people dying and often attend funerals ("every evening" in one case); if female, are being intimidated and harassed for not "covering up" and for using cell phones (a "suspected channel to licentious relationships with men"); have to regularly modify behavior, language, and dress as they pass into different neighborhoods controlled by different militias; and find that in their neighborhoods "the central government… is not relevant."

The memo concludes, "Although our staff retain[s] a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see that their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials." In other words, even inside the heavily guarded American embassy, signs of incipient civil war can be observed.

But perhaps all you need to know is this: According to Khalilzad's cable, "More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames." In other words -- as with the President's five-minute notification time for the Iraqi prime minister -- the embassy is not reliably secure.

Whoever wrote this cable for the ambassador notes that "in March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate." In Iraqi minds, then, already the shades of Saigon, 1975 are arising.

At the very moment Bush and Co. were painting a picture of progress in Iraq, the ambassador's memo bluntly notes that "even upscale [Baghdad] neighborhoods such as Mansur have visibly deteriorated." The splendid New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise had a piece on this in the Saturday paper, Fear Invades a Once-Comfortable Iraqi Enclave. She writes: "[Once] Baghdad's Upper East Side… but… no longer the address everyone wants… [n]ow Mansour, a religiously mixed area just three miles from the fortified Green Zone, feels more like wartime Beirut than Park Avenue, and its affluent residents worry that the wave of violence that has devoured large swaths of Baghdad has begun encroaching on them." As you read on, it only gets grimmer. For instance, the owner of a well-known, upscale "Sweet Shop" that was satchel-bombed, she writes, "blamed the Americans for the security troubles, an opinion expressed by many in Mansour -- Shiite and Sunni alike."

And none of this includes the mayhem that followed that turning "tide" -- the murder of one of Saddam Hussein's lead lawyers, the small spike in American troop deaths, the steady stream of sectarian killings, or the gun battles that broke out between Sunni insurgents and the Sadrist militia (and came to include American troops) on Haifa street, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, once known as "Death Street," and a notorious hotbed of insurgent activity that was long ago supposedly reclaimed by Iraqi troops.

Green Zones inside Green Zones: In good times and bad, the Bush administration has always had a Green-Zone strategy in Iraq, but never an "exit strategy" because they never planned to depart (and still don't). From the beginning, they expected to hunker down in a series of permanent bases, largely away from major population centers, and these, to the tune of billions of dollars, have since been built. The biggest of them is Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, "a small American town smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq," with 20,000 American troops, most of whom never leave the base, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges, four mess halls, as well as extensive bus routes -- and it's still being upgraded. Bases like Balad were meant to be little islands of well-fortified and well-guarded American irreality at the heart of the planet's "arc of instability" (think: its oil lands).

When the administration was received in Iraq so much more poorly than any of its officials ever dreamed, they simply fortified more heavily and settled into the chaotic ruins of the country for the long haul. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the new American embassy rising inside the Green Zone, a massive citadel inside what's already our citadel. It is, as Nicholas von Hoffman pointed out recently in the Nation magazine, the most permanent of bases. Known to Iraqis as "George W's Palace" (a sly reference to Saddam's elaborate former palaces), it is to be the biggest, most expensive "embassy" on the planet to the tune of at least $592 million (and probably more) -- a mini-state within a fortified city-state with 8,000 employees, "twenty-one buildings, 619 apartments with very fancy digs for the big shots, restaurants, shops, gym facilities, a swimming pool, a food court, a beauty salon, a movie theater... and, as the Times of London reports, ‘a swish club for evening functions.'" When it comes to electricity and water, it will operate independently of the rest of Baghdad. With its own missile defense system, it will be the global bunker of bunkers.