more on the wall:
But let’s assume that if U.S. forces build enough walls and make it hard enough for Iraqis to move around their own capital, the violence in Baghdad may decline somewhat. In that event, the Shiite death squads and Sunni suicide bombers will simply do their killing elsewhere in Iraq. There’s considerable evidence that this already is happening. Both the president and his many critics say that the real problem in Iraq is political-that there will be no genuine prospects for peace until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite-dominated government reach a negotiated accommodation with the Sunni insurgency. The barriers going up right now-The Washington Post reported that at least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods will be isolated behind walls-likely will make Sunni-Shiite reconciliation a more distant goal. If anything, walls will accelerate the sectarian cleansing that has been purifying formerly mixed neighborhoods.
(...)Walls divide; they do not unite. Walls give concrete expression to hatreds and prejudices, establishing them as artifacts not of the mind but of the landscape. When I was the Post’s London correspondent in the early 1990s, I covered the Northern Ireland conflict. The first thing I went to see in Belfast was the notorious “peace line” between the Falls Road, a Catholic stronghold, and Shankill Road, a Protestant redoubt. Everything looked the same on both sides-the houses, the shops, the people-yet it was as if they were two different countries. Animosities had been passed down through generations. Even now, 15 years later, a civil exchange between two of the leading antagonists-Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams-is big news.
(...) Bush has enmeshed the United States in a civil conflict that will take years, probably decades, to resolve. The building of walls mocks the administration’s happy-talk rhetoric about how much political progress the Iraqis are making. If the Iraqi government really is the exercise in inclusive democracy that Bush claims, walls would be coming down. Putting up new walls only makes sense if the White House foresees a substantial U.S. military presence in Iraq for many years to come.