In or Out?

Ich bin ein Berliner
--John F. Kennedy

“The common people will let it go. Oh yes, they’ll sell liberty for a quieter life.
That is why they must be led, sir,driven, pushed!”
--Mr. Alexander, A Clockwork Orange
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Kennedy was voicing John Donne's metaphysical no man is an island. Bill Clinton gave voice to the same idea, if some what less elegantly with his statement, I feel your pain. This compassion is notoriously absent from the aggressive stance of this administration.

The proposed or actual concrete walls to be constructed in Iraq are 12 feet tall and called Texas Walls since they have been employed with such stellar success in protecting the U.S. Southern borders.

The walls that the U.S. builds are of course not even remotely comparable to the Iron Curtain of yore. That piece of nastiness was designed to keep people in, and ours of course are humanistic and democratic, since they keep people out. But then again, the Iraq wall keeps them in, too. Out or in, depending upon our mood.

Wall conceptualist Lt. Col. Jeff Peterson sees them as ''homogenous, gated communities,'' each two-blocks square, ''built around a market, a mosque and a generator'' (''In Iraq, and Officer's Answer to Violence: Build a Wall.'') These are placed in the ''epicenter of Iraq's civil war,'' presumably to keep the sects from killing each other. Picture it as a kind of more challenging Celebration, Florida, the communitarian Disney development. At least the homogeneity part.

According to Peterson and other commanders, they are clearly no longer fighting an insurgency, but are in the semi-policing business of trying to stop a civil war. Local policing is not a job for the U.S. Army. ''I felt as though I had been coopted into their sectarian agenda.'' Indeed, he had.

So now the best he and his squadron can do is build more walls, knowing that the Sunnis in these enclaves will now be targets not only for the national police and Shiite affiliates, but also their own Sunni militias, for cooperating with the Americans.

So which is it really--in or out, to borrow Alex's phrase from his game of ultraviolence in A Clockwork Orange? And of course, U.S. soldiers and Iraqis are dying at an alarming rate.

Unfortunately, the walls around our cemeteries are not keeping them out.

The Wolves at the Gates

'But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!' she said.
'All the better to see you with, my dear.'
'Oh! but, grandmother, what big teeth you have!'
'All the better to eat you with!'
--Little Red Riding Hood
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The U.S. is now walling off neighborhoods in Baghdad, building seven so-called ''gated communities,'' using the terminology of some U.S. official's idea of a bad joke.

Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., noted ''Both Ulster and the Balkans have shown such an approach can bring added security, but that it can also polarize and freeze divisions within the population.''

Also from Cordesman's report:

"[I]t is unclear that any degree of local success will matter without [political solutions and conciliation as every other military activity]. Unlike the British or the forces in the Balkans, the US simply cannot stay long enough to wait out the tensions of a divided city or act as a long-term peace keeping force.''

"It is all too easy for those providing security to become occupiers, jailers, or the enemy unless they have the trust of the local population. . . the US cannot afford to tie down troops for long periods in given neighborhoods, the better combat units in the Iraqi Army also should not be tied down (and present ethnic and sectarian problems), and much depends on the very uncertain quality of the Iraqi police. . ."

Ranger has previously compared the fighting in Baghdad to the fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto (recognizing the obvious disparities in availability of weapons and other provisions.) The U.S. forces are now reinforcing this estimate by creating a Sunni Ghetto. All the better to see you, my dear.

Now imagine this marvelous plan: Channelize the Sunnis into a ghetto and force them to enter and exit through portals controlled by Shia army units. If I were a cynical man, I'd say it sounds like a great method to facilitate Sunni murders at the clotted checkpoints.

When the U.S. leaves the country, then a full-blown ethnic cleansing scenario can play out. And it will happen.

One must wonder when this insanity will stop. . .will it be when we run out of bodies, or money?