Divide and conquer: Baghdad's separation wall. posted by Richard Seymour

What can you say? Ostensibly, it is being built to protect the citizens of Adhamiya from sectarian war, but the citizens don't want it, their representatives don't want it, and even the spineless Maliki is saying don't build it - construction has already began without consultation or permission from anyone because, of course, Iraq is now a democratic society with a free government.

This carve-up, the Yugoslavian Solution, was recommended by Harry Reid, reflects a strategy long advocated by Democrats like Biden, but also Chalabi groupies like Nibras Kasimi of the Hudson Institute and also the De-Baathification Committee, who recommended a 'closed canton model':

The ‘Fallouja Model’ and the ‘Kadhimiya Canton’: After the November 2004 offensive to take-back Fallouja from the insurgents, the U.S. military embarked on a drastically new experiment of controlling the turbulent town of 200,000 souls: fence the population in. Instead of bringing back old Ba’athists like the failed ‘Fallouja Brigade’ experiment of April 2004 to police the town, which only ended-up emboldening the insurgents, the Americans opted to turn Fallouja into a vast interment camp. But for a few incidents here and there, the plan worked very well.

All residents of Fallouja were issued special localized IDs, and unknown vehicles were barred from entering the town. The US forces set-up a perimeter around the dense urban center. However, this chokehold did not completely surround Fallouja’s ‘rural suburbs’ on the western back of the Euphrates River—hence, there is room for improvement on this particular model.

A ‘closed canton’ model was voluntarily imposed on the Kadhimiya suburb in northern Baghdad. This Shi'a center with a population of 500,000 is now virtually closed off: entry points have been bottle-necked to a handful, and no unfamiliar cars are allowed to pass through. The levels of violence in Kadhimiya have been drastically reduced over the past year since this model was put in place. In lieu of car bombs and suicide bombers, the insurgents now resort to lobbing mortar attacks to get the residents of Kadhimiya. But there is a feeling among the resident that their town is safe—a spectacular feat considering that it borders some major hotbeds of insurgent activity.

Certainly, if you were to turn Iraq into a vast prison camp with walls, concrete perimiters and barbed wire fences dividing the place up, it would be much easier to control. On the other hand, that doesn't look like much fun for Iraqis, and it does tend to reinforce the 'civil war' dynamic.

Labels: iraq, sectarianism, separation wall, US imperialism