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.

on another apartheid wall (p. cockburn):
Residents of a Sunni enclave of Baghdad demonstrated and shouted slogans yesterday against a newly built wall sealing off their neighborhood from the rest of the city. About 2,000 people marched through al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad carrying banners saying that their district was being turned into "a big prison". "Adhamiyah will be isolated from all other areas," said one man in a cafe in the district. "We'll be like the Palestinians and we will not accept that." The US military in Baghdad says it is constructing the 12ft high walls to create so-called "gated communities" in five different districts in Baghdad to protect them from sectarian attack.
(...) But the Sunni see the walls as being primarily directed against insurgents, just as the French army walled off the Casbah in Algiers during the Algerian war in the 1950s and early 1960s to prevent anti-French fighters moving through the city. Sunnis in Baghdad are worried that the soldiers or police at the entrances to sealed off districts will be Shia soldiers and police who may detain anybody.
(...) Banners carried by demonstrators yesterday proclaimed, "Separation is a big prison for al-Adhamiyah citizens" and "Children in al-Adhamiyah want a Baghdad without walls".
(...) People in al-Adhamiyah say they fear that, contrary to US and Iraqi army expectations, their district will become a fortress ruled by al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Extreme Sunni groups are allegedly already killing men who wear shorts or smoke or listen to music in public. A wall is also useless in preventing rockets or mortars being fired into the area.

iraqi reactions to the surge:
Some Iraqi legislators declared the U.S.-led plan to secure Baghdad a failure after an unprecedented suicide bomb attack on parliament Thursday capped a violent week in the capital.
(...) "The plan is 100% a failure. It's a complete flop," said Khalaf al-Ilyan, one of the three leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, which holds 44 seats in parliament. "The explosion means that instability and lack of security has reached the Green Zone."


(...) "If you add it all up, I don't see how you can conclude the surge is working," said Kenneth Katzman, an Iraq expert at the Congressional Research Service. "The confluence of evidence is that things are falling apart rather than coming together."
(...) Attacks in the Green Zone are rare. Visitors must pass through multiple checkpoints, usually manned by Iraqi troops, U.S. military personnel or private security contractors. The area is usually so secure that U.S. soldiers jokingly refer to it as "the ultimate gated community."