Embassy of mass destruction?

The Washington Post has a nice story this morning looking into one of the recent phantoms haunting America’s foreign-policy ninnies: Iran’s alleged plans for a monstrously large embassy in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua.

As with so many such stories, no one is quite sure how the idea of a nefarious Iranian base in Daniel Ortega’s capital first made its way into circulation:

In the past two years, it has made its way into congressional testimony, think tank reports, press accounts, and diplomatic events in the United States and elsewhere.

“Iran recently established a huge embassy in Managua,” Nancy Menges of the Center for Security Policy told a House committee last year. “Iran’s embassy in Managua is now the largest diplomatic mission in the city,” wrote Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.

And in May, the Secretary of State, who had presumably learned her lesson about accepting AEI’s version of reality, got into the act as well.

“The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. “And you can only imagine what that’s for.”

Against that backdrop, reporters Anne-Marie O’Connor and Mary Beth Sheridan went looking for an alleged meda-Embassy in pokey old Managua. The result: Not much.

Here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy. Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing.

Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: “It doesn’t exist.” Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only “mega-embassy” in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: “There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell.”

…

Bayardo Arce, a senior economic adviser to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, likened the elusive “mega-embassy” to the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “It doesn’t exist. They deceived the secretary of state,” Arce said. “We don’t have an Iranian mega-embassy. We have an ambassador in a rented house with his wife.”

If anything, Arce said, Iranian investment in Nicaragua has fallen far short of the expectations of the cash-strapped government. Nicaragua can’t even persuade Iran to pardon its $160 million debt, he said. “They haven’t invested anything. They haven’t built anything,” Arce said. “We haven’t even been able to renegotiate the debt. They say the Koran doesn’t permit them to. We’ll have to study the Koran to see if we can find something that condones it.”

…

“Who told Hillary that? Someone misinformed her,” said Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a leader of the opposition Constitutionalist Liberal Party and head of a legislative foreign affairs committee. “I never cease to be astonished that a country with such intelligence-gathering capacities could fall for such a canard. What now? Is Obama going to start talking about the Axis of Evil?”

In fact, the Case of the Missing Mega-Mission–the Iran-consular affair?–appears to be yet another case of Washington, prodded by intellectually slippery ideologues, falling for the hype of a Middle Eastern blusterer. Iranian president Mahmoud Admadinejad helped out, spending his first term travelling to Latin countries with no obvious strategic or cultural connection to Iran, and promising their residents all sorts of ports and trade deals and loan guarantees in the name of anti-Yankee solidarity. But according to those who’ve been watching, Admadinejad, perhaps because folks at home had other ideas about how to spend their dwindling oil wealth, never really delivered.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “can go around and sign all these things, but ultimately it’s the Iranian parliament that has to decide whether it’s going to give Managua $350 million to develop its port, and they haven’t done so,” said Farideh Farhi, an expert on Iran’s foreign policy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

But I somehow think this isn’t the last we’ll hear about Iran’s Secret Sandinista Staging Area. In fact, I understand the Iranian mission is located right next door to Managua’s brand-new Embassy of Niger.