Editorial: Building walls in Iraq won’t fix the problem

The U.S. military has made many mistakes in Iraq, but never
before has it attempted something so disturbingly desperate and
stupid.

The military’s new strategy for Baghdad is “gated
communities,” and it would go a little like this: The
military would wall off different areas of the city, force out
insurgents, and declare the area safe and harmonious.

Defense officials are trying to convince you that once Baghdad
is walled off they can ““ poof! ““ convert it into the
bustling, slightly more peaceful city of Los Angeles.

“Think of L.A.,” said a Defense Department official
to the Los Angeles Times on condition of anonymity.
“Let’s say we take West Hollywood and gate it off. Or
Anaheim. Or central Los Angeles. You control that area first and
work out from there.”

That’s right. Once we build a few walls, we’ll have
soccer moms practicing yogalates while drinking cappuccinos. There
will be a Starbucks on every corner, and the only sectarian
violence will be the gang wars of South Central Baghdad.

The idea that we can turn Baghdad into the O.C. is just another
shining example of how little the U.S. military understands Iraqi
culture.

Similarly, the military plans to issue identification cards to
control who can enter the areas. But the problem with this is that
Iraqis have resisted using ID cards in the past, according to Kalev
Sepp, counterinsurgency expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, in
an interview with the Times.

So the Defense Department plans a full census of the Iraqis in
Baghdad, checkpoints to keep some in and others out, requiring
people to carry ID cards, and logging where everyone goes.

Is this democracy or tyranny? Is this a gated community or a
ghetto? Baghdad is far more likely to start looking like Warsaw
than Laguna Beach.

On top of that, the gated community strategy has been tried
before under a slightly less contrived name ““ and it
failed.

In Vietnam, they were called “strategic
hamlets.”

In this case, the Vietnamese were transported to villages that
the military thought it could better defend.

“It didn’t work,” said Conrad Crane, who
helped author the military’s manual on counterinsurgency, to
the Times. “They ended up locking up the insurgents with the
population in these new hamlets. … It actually helped the Viet
Cong with recruiting.”

It isn’t difficult to envision something similar happening
in Iraq. After all, one of the main problems in Vietnam involved
soldiers being unable to tell the difference between Viet Cong and
South Vietnamese supporters.

Soldiers in Iraq have voiced similar concerns about being unable
to tell who is an insurgent and who is not (or, more importantly,
who’s a Shiite and who’s a Sunni).

Tossing a bunch of people together in a “gated
community” is seemingly a spiritual successor to redrawing
borders in colonial territories regardless of long-term tribal
strife.

And we all know how that’s turned out for the world.

Though it does have a couple similarities, the sectarian
violence in Iraq is not the same as two children fighting. You
cannot simply split Sunnis and Shiites up into different
neighborhoods and expect that to solve their differences.
Unfortunately, the quagmire we’re in is much stickier than
that.