Is this a wise idea? Walling off Baghdad neighborhoods? What, the contractors for fences and walls weren't getting enough orders for the Mexican-U.S. border wall?
Chime in. Seems crazy to me, but hey, I'm just a dumb taxpayer.
And does the right hand know what the left is doing here? Read the statement of Gen. Caldwell:
U.S. soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods in a Baghdad area "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said.When the wall is finished, the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, will be gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the military said.
"Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," said Capt. Scott McLearn, of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, which began the project April 10 and is working "almost nightly until the wall is complete," the statement said.
It said the concrete wall, including barriers as tall as 12 feet, "is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence" in Baghdad.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have long erected cement barriers around marketplaces and coalition bases and outposts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities such as Ramadi in an effort to prevent attacks, including suicide car bombs.
American forces also have constructed huge sand barriers around towns such as Tal Afar, an insurgent stronghold near the Syrian border.
There has been little sign of the U.S. military using concrete barriers to divide Baghdad neighborhoods by sect, but at least one similar construction has been reported in the capital.
Currently, the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq involves getting Iraqis to reconcile and support the democratically elected Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, and a security plan in the capital that calls for 28,000 additional American troops and thousands of Iraqi soldiers.
U.S. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq, was quoted as saying Wednesday that he was unaware of any effort to build a wall dividing Shiite and Sunni enclaves in Baghdad and that such a tactic was not a policy of the Baghdad security plan.
"We have no intent to build gated communities in Baghdad," Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper, quoted Caldwell as saying. "Our goal is to unify Baghdad, not subdivide it into separate (enclaves)."
I don't know how effective a wall is going to be. But I also don't have the expertise of our people on the ground over there.
I don't have expertise either. But it is so odd that the general doesn't seem to know about the wall building.
It also reminded me of walking along the path of the Berlin Wall, now almost totally removed. A few remnants are left as a reminder, complete with graffiti and barbed wire. Next to the former Checkpoint Charlie there is a private museum that provides exhibits from Berlin Wall era--the escapes, the concealment devices, the killings, and the abrupt dismantling in November, 1989.
Now the U.S. military and well-paid U.S. contractors have conceived a plan to build a wall and create a Baghdad Ghetto.
And the White House and other U.S. contractors have conceived a plan to build a wall along the Mexican border.
Can we not recall the days when we Americans were regarded by much of the world as the good guys? Can we not recall when we set an example to be admired, rather than presented an unpredictable threat to be despised?
In "The Pianist" actor Thomas Kretschmann brilliantly plays the German captain who looks the other way, and even leaves some rations, so that Szpilman may survive. The captain is a civilized human being, and for a brief moment in the absurdity of war, he is moved and transported as Brody's character Szpilman plays Chopin's "Ballade No. 1."
At the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, one of the exhibits is a continuously repeating video of Mstislav Rostropovich, who travelled to Berlin as soon as the wall started coming down. He borrowed a chair from the nearby home of German family, sat on the street near Checkpoint Charlie by himself with his cello and bow, and played one of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites, among the great achievements of the human mind and spirit.
Two years later, when the Communist hard-liners in Moscow launched a coup against Gorbachev, Rostropovich immediately flew to Moscow to be in the Parliament building and show solidarity with Boris Yeltsin and the democrats resisting the coup. The hard-liners could not find anyone to execute their orders to storm the Parliament and shoot the demonstrators, and the coup collapsed.
Once upon a time in America we had a president, Ronald Reagan, who could stand on a street in West Berlin and say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" We could identify with that kind of cause and with that kind of sentiment. And, quite amazingly, Gorbachev himself understood the inevitability of change and in effect did tear down that wall. We actually won the Cold War, while avoiding a nuclear apocalypse. The members of the Russian intelligentsia--even those within the Communist Party--simply stopped tolerating the Communist Party's lies, which they had long before stopped believing.
Now we have a president who is able, when unscripted (as this week in Tipp City, Ohio), merely to gibber incoherently. And even when he follows the script, his speechwriters produce a bizarre mix of fear-mongering and happy talk gibberish--almost channeling the sclerotic and paranoid terminal Soviet era of Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov.
America used to stand for tearing down walls.
And now it stands for putting them up.
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Sunday that he has ordered a halt to the construction of a barrier that would separate a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad, saying there are other ways to protect the neighborhood.
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The decision drew sharp criticism from residents and Sunni leaders who complained it would isolate their community.
In his first public comments on the issue, al-Maliki said he had ordered the construction to stop.
"I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop," al-Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the Secretary-General of the Arab League Amr Moussa in Cairo, Egypt. "There are other methods to protect neighborhoods."
He did not elaborate but added "this wall reminds us of other walls," in an apparent reference to the wall that divided the German city of Berlin during the Cold War.
Isn't George Bush's batting average below .100 by now?