You can be very critical about what President Bush does and says and stands for, and still see considerable merit in the walls that are finally being erected in Baghdad. They separate Shia and Sunni neighborhoods, protecting each from the other's car bombs and death squads. True, these walls do not stop the bloodshed.
Nothing does. However, given the rank anarchy and violence that prevails the area, any peaceful measure that enhances security should be welcomed.
Walls, experience shows, may not always make good neighbors, but they do curb the killing. Over the course of 11 years -- beginning with the first "Green Line" of 1963 that separated Turks from Greek Cypriots in Nicosia -- Cyprus became de facto partitioned along ethnic lines. Following years of intermittent bloodshed, mass refugee exoduses, and massacres perpetrated by both sides, a barrier (part wall, part fence) was formed, that separates the two groups. It is guarded to this day by the United Nations Force in Cyprus. It served to drastically reduce the violence. And nearly four decades later, signs of reconciliation can readily be found: a third crossing point has recently opened in the Nicosia wall, and over the past year, several sections of the wall have been removed.
Walls also separated the neighbors of Belfast, slowing the slaughter, and ultimately helped bring about the cessation of hostilities. Particularly controversial are the barriers Israel erected. They are correctly said to cut some Arab villages into halves, and to intrude into land considered as belonging to a future Palestinian state (lands to the east of the so-called green line). However, no one can deny that these barriers play a major role in reducing terrorist attacks on civilians in Israel proper and thus also the retaliatory measures that Israel launches in return.
The American press has been nearly unanimous is denouncing the new walls in Baghdad, for reasons that are hard to follow.
Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, called on President Bush (paraphrasing President Reagan) "Mr. Bush, tear down those Baghdad walls!" He declared that, "walls divide people; they don't unite them, a la Berlin and Belfast, Northern Ireland, before Baghdad." The Berlin Wall locked those in East Germany into a totalitarian state, and has no relevance here. The Belfast walls had the desired effect. Neuharth adds that a free flow of people is needed to bring about democracy to Iraq. Well put, but it applies only once Iraq's basic security is assured. In the unwalled parts of Baghdad, people fear going out to work, sending their kids to schools, or shopping, let alone going to political meetings or participating in democratic give and take.
The New York Times reports that some Iraqis feel that the U.S. is trying to divide them along sectarian lines. This might be news to the millions of Shias who have long been lorded over by Sunni, merely because they are Shia, or the Kurds who have been gassed, in their separate ethnic enclaves. Still other Iraqis state that they do not want to live in a ghetto. Also, some complain about the additional traffic jams the walls are causing.
These and other such criticisms would have more merit if the city were not being overrun by ethnic and confessional militias who kidnap, torture and rape people before they are shot, and drag people out of hospitals and schools to be slaughtered. Dead people do not benefit from open spaces and smooth traffic flows. Walls, if they save lives, should be erected. If and when the separated parties come to their senses and work out their differences in a civil manner, these walls can be removed even more quickly than they are being erected.
(Also posted at the Huffington Post)
Amitai Etzioni is the author of Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, to be published June 2007 by Yale University Press.
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