'Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club'

If any additional evidence were needed to prove that (sur)reality has killed satire in the past seven-and-a-half years, a Michael Howard story in Tuesday's Guardian delivers the coup de grâce.  

^{This is what U.S. military planners have in mind for the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. Artist rendering courtesy U.S. Army.}

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad's Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

A $5bn (£2.5bn) tourism and development scheme for the Green Zone being hatched by the Pentagon and an international investment consortium would give the heavily fortified area on the banks of the Tigris a "dream" makeover that will become a magnet for Iraqis, tourists, business people and investors. About half of the area is now occupied by coalition forces, the US state department or private foreign companies.

And, because $5 billion investments don't grow on trees, you won't be seeing anything like it in, say, New Orleans.

But they're not going to stop with soothing massages and post-prandial walks along the Tigris (where nowadays dead bodies bob to the surface with their hands tied behind their backs). Disneyfication is also on the way, as reported by the Times (of London) two weeks ago:

^{Skateboarding the perimeter}

Last week, a Los Angeles-based holding company for equity firms, C3, confirmed it was starting a $500 million project to build an amusement park on the outskirts of the Green Zone in an area encompassing the Baghdad Zoo. The first phase, a skateboard park, is scheduled to open this summer.

But any Green Zone project is literally starting from the ground up.

"There is no sewer system, no working power system. Everything here is done on generators. No road system repair work. There are no city services other than the minimal amount we provide to get by," Karnowski said.

Dr. iRack over at abu muqawam invites everyone to "nominate the carnival games and rides you'd like to see in this stunning new symbol of post-surge Iraq."

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^{See Magnifico's Diary from last night on this subject.}