| The mainstream US media will sidestep this point, but al-Maliki pretty explicitly said that the reason he called off the wall building is that he doesn't want his government compared to that of Israel. That is, the Adhamiya wall is being likened in the Arab world to the Apartheid Wall being built by the Israelis in the West Bank. Al-Maliki made the statement in Cairo, and when he referred to the "other walls" he didn't want the one in Adhamiya compared to, he pointed toward Israel. The Western press is bringing up the Berlin Wall as part of his meaning, but the videotape makes it absolutely clear that his referent was Israel's project. On the other hand, Nassar al-Rubaie, a Sadrist member of the Iraqi parliament, did warn that the US is building a series of Berlin Walls in Baghdad. |
(It's not worth dabbling in tube stuff for, Mr. Bones, but how do you think the WGAS, World's Greatest Area Student, could know for sure which direction poor M. al-Málikí was waving his arm at, either inside a studio or even out on the street at Cairo?)
Himself goes on to express a more serious deficiency in Ann Arbour othodoxy, namely the omnia ad Palaestinam referenda syndrome:
| The politics of the wall points to the ways in which the Israeli-Palestinian issue is absolutely central to the difficulties the United States is having in being accepted in Iraq. Many Iraqis perceive the US presence as just an extension of Israeli occupation of Arabs and Arab land, and routinely refer to US troops as "the Jews." The Israeli government has grossly mistreated the Palestinian people, the current condition of which is grave. The wall the Israelis are building is built on Palestinian land and has stolen more land from Palestinians and has in some instances run through Palestinian villages, cutting them in two and separating families. The Apartheid Wall has provoked demonstrations. So being a foreign military force in an Arab country and looking like they are building security walls similar to that of the Israelis just puts the US and its ally, al-Maliki, in a very difficult position. |
Taken together with the previous scrap, I don't believe that quite parses and construes. If the MSM are kind enough to suppress all mention of the analogy for the sake of invasionism, the militant GOP will not be "looking like" much of anything except to a few of us eccentrics (and the hordes of AIPAC)., people who do not need any resemblance so obvious pointed out at all. On the other hands, if JC expects that Televisionland and the electorate will now see lots of video clips from the east bank of the Tigris that look very like videoclips from the west bank of the Jordan, well, in that case, why pick on the poor persecuted MSM, when it seems they can't effectively "sidestep" after all?
But let us press on with Don Juan from superficial TV appearances to Pol. Sci. profundities:
| Not to mention that walling people up is intrinsically unappealing as a governing strategy. Mahmud Osman, a member of parliament in the Kurdistan Alliance and a former member of Paul Bremer's Interim Governing Council, told al-Zaman that the Adhamiya wall is "the peak of failure" for the new security plan and "a violation of human rights." He added that the wall "is a clear sign of the failure of the American and government policy for safeguarding security." Other MPs complained that the policy would create and reinforce sectarian divisions in the capital. |
M. Osmán from Free Kurdistan is as much a foreigner at New Bagdad as Mr. Wong from Manhattan is, and probably he is a good deal less influential a foreigner. But there is no reason why he should not kibitz too. The trouble is that his sound bite betrays confusion of mind. It may be shameful, or otherwise inadvisable on non-security grounds, that a neo-régime should be reduced to ghettoizing its own subjects, but purely as a plan to secure the ground, it seems an excellent idea, and "peak of failure" is ludicrous. I believe, Mr. Bones, that we have pointed out before that this scheme is basically how the Brits won the Boer War, except it seems even more promising from a technical point of view, for Republicans and Greenzonians have only to put up barbed wire or whatever around places where the potentially hostile population is concentrated already. M. Osmán is presumably not a military gentleman himself. Perhaps he is an attorney? It would be mildly interesting to learn whether the plan violates international law. Since the whole spectacle is aggression-based, such a detail would not really matter, to be sure. At a guess, though, I suspect the Occupyin' Power may probably resort to measures of this sort as long as there is a reasonable primâ facie prospect that the measures will make the subjects more secure too, not the occupiers alone. But God knows best.
Finally,
| The US military had planned to build 5 such walls around Sunni Arab districts in Baghdad. It is not now clear if any will be built. Another corner of this story is the unpredictability of the political environment for the US military. It is inconceivable that al-Maliki did not earlier sign off on the Adhamiya wall, but then he changed his mind. The US officer corps in Iraq must be fit to be tied. |
A mixed bag. It is nice that the WGAS has finally noticed that the Green Zone Officers Club might possibly be playing a hand of its own that is not altogether that of the Rancho Crawford chickenhawks. It is not so nice that he insists on reading other peoples' minds as he does in that paragraph, not only the mind of poor M. al-Málikí, but the collective sentiments of the GZOC as well. Isn't it in fact pretty darn conceivable that Dr. Gen. Petraeus of West Point and Princeton might have just gone ahead and done the wall thing without troubling even to pretend to ask permission from the "sovereign," "independent," "democratic" and "constitutional" neo-régime? So bright a bulb as Dr. Gen. P. is alleged to be ought, I should think, to have known that poor M. al-Málikí would detect the regrettable Palestine parallel in a flash and probably make difficulties precisely on that account. Whereas if you don't ask 'em, they can't tell you not to!
That analysis still leaves Gen. Braniac making a miscalculation, but so what?, he does not have to win all his wagers to come out with a satisfactory bottom line for The Surge of '07™ overall. If he bet that the wall shtik would not attract so much attention as to require poor M. al-Málikí to officially notice and repudiate it, Neocomrade D. Petraeus was mistaken, but not outrageously so, especially considering the probable limits of his Levantine expertise. Prof. Cole would have known better -- even thee and I would have known better, Mr. Bones! -- but consider that the likes of us don't know beans about violence profession technicalities.
Ars longa, vita brevis, we can't all be up on everything. Perhaps Dr. Gen Petraeus does tempt fate a bit when he conceptualizes counterinsurgency so globally that he seems to be demanding omniscience as well as omnicompetence of himself. Still, if he wants to judge himself more strictly than others have any right to, that is his business and not ours. But God knows best.
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