Another Brick in the Wall: Turning Baghdad into Belfast

by max blunt
Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, we’re building a wall. Actually, quite a few walls.

While we were absorbed with the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech-and before that the Don Imus affair and the Alberto Gonzales tragicomedy-the war in Iraq was pushed below the fold.

While we weren’t looking, the U.S. military started building high walls in parts of the Iraqi capital to separate Sunnis from Shiites.

Basically, we’re turning Baghdad into Belfast.

This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq’s sectarian civil war-in the capital, at least, which is the ostensible goal of George W. Bush’s fraudulent “surge” policy - by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other’s throats.

The so-called “peace lines” in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.

The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call “gated communities” is another sign-as if more evidence were needed-that Bush’s “surge” is nothing more than a maneuver intended to buy time.

His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president’s problem.

The walls that have been built so far didn’t prevent the car bombs in Baghdad last week, including at the Sadriya market, that killed nearly 200 people.

Even the heavy fortifications surrounding the Green Zone, where the American presence and the Iraqi “unity” government are headquartered, couldn’t keep a suicide bomber from detonating his explosives in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament. LINK