Over at Wired, Sharon Weinberger (a one-time public diplomacy temp in the US Embassy in Doha) reflects on the ever-growing walls around American embassies:
Unlike the hulking security monstrosities that constitute the modern U.S. diplomatic presence abroad, the U.S. embassy in Doha is housed in a reasonably attractive building… But its notable feature, according to the Regional Security Officer, was “good setback.”
Setback refers to the amount of space between the outer perimeter and the main embassy building. The more the setback, the better protected the embassy is from a bomb on the street, or the more time security forces have to respond to an incident at the gate. For example, several U.S. embassies in Africa had very, very bad setback, as became evident from a briefing after the 1998 East Africa bombings. When asked what the concerns were prior to the bombing, a State Department official answered with one word: Setback. Much of the subsequent construction and security upgrades to U.S. embassies have concentrated on increasing setback…
American embassies are increasingly cut off from those very countries in which the U.S. is supposed to be fostering better relations, and worse, create caricatures of the detached diplomat more interested in tennis than work.
