Adjusting to the reality of Iraq’s sectarian violence, the US military has decided to build a concrete barrier in order to stem the barbarism that has raged in certain areas of Baghdad these past few years.
As the Guardian observes:
“The highly symbolic wall has evoked comparisons to the barriers dividing Protestants and Catholics in Belfast and Israelis and Palestinians along the length of the West Bank.”
[The comparison is a bit off the mark, due to the different situations that drove the building of the structures. Israel’s defencive security fence is meant to keep terrorism out, the other two (Belfast and Iraq) were/are being built to keep both sides from massacring the other.]
But while this recent development reflects the deep split between Iraq’s Shi’ia and Sunni populations, it does however offer an important respite in the escalation of the massacres, and perhaps marks a turning point in stamping out the carnage altogether.
The Guardian is an extreme leftist rag, so writing from its own biased perspective, the journalist, Ewen MacAskill can’t depict the Israel security fence as the success story that it is, if he wants to get his article approved for publication. So he writes:
“Walls are controversial. The Israeli government insists its wall is effective in reducing suicide bombers but Palestinians, many of whose lives it has seriously disrupted, as well as some Israelis argue that it consolidates divisions.”
So instead of factually reporting that the drastic reduction in the success rate of Palestinian terrorist suicide/homicide bombings –as a direct result of its security fence– that fact is then reduced to being; “Israel ‘insists’ its wall is effective”, when concrete evidence shows it to be a matter of fact.
If the “Wall of Baghdad” is run effectively, the Iraqi capital should soon see some measure of success within the next few months. It’ll come with the price of restricted mobility, but what is more important to Iraqis at this stage, mobility or stability? More here. *L* KGS
