Welcome to Beautiful Downtown Baghdad

It sounds like a joke. Granted, pretty much anything that comes out of the White House these days sounds like a joke, but this really sounds like a joke. It's not a joke, though - it's real.

In an apparent attempt to make Baghdad look less deadly, we now have A Visitor's Guide to Baghdad's International Zone, posted on an official Pentagon website and supposedly "written by tourists for the tourist" in 2006. To no one's surprise, the authors are not casual visitors at all but are actually a GOP think tank staffer and a "confirmed war tourist."

This guidebook renames the much-hated Green Zone into the less sinister-sounding "International Zone" (IZ) and offers some helpful hints for interested tourists, including:

• "Moving about the IZ is a fairly easy venture. Unless you crash through a very visible and well marked gate, you should have no concern about accidentally venturing into the red zone."
• "Probably one of the oddest named parts of the IZ, Little Venice is the neighborhood between the former US Embassy complex and the U.S. Chancellery building. It is believed to be nick-named Little Venice because of the many cement waterways, bridges and fountains that adorn its streets and park."
• "FOB Honor is the site of one of the most recognizable buildings from the "shock and awe" campaign waged in March 2003."
• "A number of buildings dot the horizon as seen from the International Zone. While tantalizingly close, the current security situation dictates that most IZ occupants will probably never to do more than view them from afar."

And so on.

An American officer serving in Iraq begs to differ:

The mentality associated with walking around this nation like it's your own little sight-seeing trip stuns me. You look at the backgrounds of the authors - a CA [civil affairs] guy and an NGO [non-governmental organization] guy - and you just expect better of them. Instead, every local they saw on their sight-seeing wound up seeing the ultimate in ugly American tourists. How can we claim any credibility in anything we do when they see that this is how seriously we take the responsibility we have assumed by doing what we as a nation have done here, and are claiming to do now... Thanks for the efforts you so very clearly expended in your time here, guys. There's nothing like a little understanding.

This one is mind-boggling. I know the Bush Administration is desperately trying to put lipstick on this particular pig, but this is just mind-boggling. What on earth were these people thinking? Do they really believe that people can be fooled into mistaking the shooting-gallery Green Zone for poolside at a resort somewhere?

Where are professionals when you really need them?