Powell plans Saigon-style embassy for Baghdad

The WaPo has spent just about all the past week milking the interview that Colin Powell gave them a few days ago for dribs and drabs of new information. (I guess that’s what you do on a “holiday” news week.)
So today’s drib was served up by Robin Wright in a piece titled “U.S. has big plans for legation in Iraq.”
Oops. Make that “embassy”.
Actually, in a direct quotoid used from the Powell massage-a-thon, Powell is reported as himself being a bit fuzzy as whether the new “thing” actually will be an embassy:

“The real challenge for the new embassy, so to speak, or the new presence will be helping the Iraqi people get ready for their full elections and full constitution the following year,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview this week.

So let’s just go ahead and call it a Legation, okay? As in Vietnam in the days of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”: “After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down the street… Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation…”

So the new Legation, “so to speak”, is going to come under State Department control. (Oh great. Now it’ll be Powell who’ll get all the blame as everything goed horribly wrong… Why doesn’t the man just resign?)
Most of the staff members of the new “presence” will still be working in the offices shoe-horned into various Saddamist monuments inside the very heavily guarded Green Zone. But according to Wright’s piece, “to avert the potential psychological fallout from staying in the headquarters of the previous dictatorship, the new embassy will officially be in a building not far from the ‘Green Zone’… The embassy, however, will have nominal use.”
Wright also reveals that for the existing, Bremer-led “presence”:

Staffing has been an issue in recent months. Many on the staff of L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, are young, comparatively inexperienced in the Middle East, non-Arabic speakers and political appointees rather than career Foreign Service officers. Some have already left or plan to do so before the occupation ends to work on the president’s reelection campaign, according to U.S. officials.

Good news, or bad, whaddya think? I mean, if they could screw up Iraq so badly imagine what they might do to Dubya’s re-election campaign?? On the other hand, I guess they do at least speak English, and maybe know a thing or two about this country of ours, unlike Iraq….
One more thing about the exact status of this new US presence (“so to speak”) in Baghdad after next June. To be an Embassy to someplace, that place has to have become credibly independent. Obviously that’s the plan.
Or more precisely, the plan is to have some photographable Kodak moment of stage-managed “transition” to some form of apparent “Iraqi self-rule” in around June– and then hope to heck that all the big US media people leave Iraq soon thereafter.
But I still wonder. What will all those 3,000 people actually do?