Hearts and minds and walls. James Glanz—who has been writing consistently, and impressively, about infrastructure and what can only laughably be called Iraqi reconstruction for some time now—has a nice piece today about a new feature of urban life in Baghdad: the fortified wall that's been built (by, as if you couldn't have guessed, Kellogg Brown & Root) around the Green Zone:

Sometimes likened to the Berlin Wall by those who are not happy about its presence, the structure cleanly divides the relative safety of the Green Zone that includes Saddam Hussein's old palace and ministry complex, now used by the American authorities and heavily patrolled by American troops, from the Red Zone - most of the rest of Baghdad - where security ranges from adequate to nonexistent.

" U.S. Walls Off Its Corner of Baghdad, Annoying Some Neighbors"

The "annoying" of the headline rather understates just how brilliantly our concentration on force protection is working to help win Iraqi hearts and minds:

Khalid Daoud, an employee at the Culture Ministry, still looks in disbelief at the barrier of 12-foot-high, five-ton slabs that cuts through his garden.

A few months ago, he said, the American military arrived with a crane and tore up the trees in his garden, smashed the low wall surrounding it, swung the slabs into place and topped them with concertina wire.

Later they put up a 24-hour guard tower and a brilliant floodlight on the other side. With their privacy gone, his wife and daughter must now tend the garden in their abayas, or cloaks, and the family no longer sleeps outside when electricity failures at night shut down the air conditioning.

"I feel like it's going to choke me," Mr. Daoud said of the wall.

See, how could ordinary Iraqis possibly find the American occupation of their country humiliating? Besides, the Wall seems to have had a real effect on security in the area immediately outside the Green Zone:

For all the problems faced by residents across the city, the neighborhoods within a few blocks of the wall have become a world apart. Mortar rounds and rockets fired at the Green Zone fall short and land there. Suicide bombers, unable to breach the wall, blow themselves up in shops just outside it. And the maze of checkpoints, blocked streets and American armor may be thicker here than anywhere else in Baghdad.

"We are the new Palestine," said Saman Abdel Aziz Rahman, owner of the Serawan kebab restaurant, by the northern reaches of the wall.

Nice to see how well we're doing reinforcing that Iraq = Palestine meme in the Arab mind. That's going to do us a lot of long-term good.

posted by michael  7:29:37 PM  
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