Fences make good neighbors

I’m beginning to wonder what the Left has against walls and fences. Reading the most partisan hack in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, on the subject of the “gated communities” in Baghdad makes me think that the Left has never liked a fence or wall;

Basically, we’re turning Baghdad into Belfast.

This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq’s sectarian civil war — in the capital, at least, the ostensible goal of George W. Bush’s fraudulent “surge” policy — by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other’s throats. The “peace lines” in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.

The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call “gated communities” is another sign — as if more evidence were needed — that Bush’s “surge” is nothing more than a maneuver to buy time. His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president’s problem.

But the Left is adamantly opposed to walls anywhere, as near as I can tell. Republicans want a wall along our southern border to keep illegal immigrants from infiltrating into our country and then dying of thirst or from bands of roving preditors.

The Left also oppose the Israelis building a wall to protect themselves from Palestinian baby-killers. And it almost seems to be working.

If the Left are peace-mongers, as they claim, wouldn’t building protective walls be a reasonable alternative to snipers and armed paramilitary police forces enforcing curfews at the point of a gun? It almost seems reasonable to me.

During the 60s, 70s and 80s, the Left resigned themselves to the fact that the Communists had erected a deadly barrier across Europe to keep the Soviet population enslaved. The Left continues to tolerate the barrier that slashes the Korean pennisula’s two opposing ideologies. 

In fact, the Left trembled when Ronald Reagan demanded that Soviet Premier Gorbachov tear down his wall from the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.  And they lamented the end of history, and the failures of their ideology when that wall finally fell.

I guess walls are only a good idea when they’re used to preserve Leftist ideology against evil capitalists instead of a bulwark for peace.

Omar from Iraq the Model (writing on Pajamas Media) gives his thoughts on the walls from an Iraqi point of view – not from a partisan-hack-masquerading-as-a-journalist-point-of-view.

Maybe Robinson should have taken the time to ask Iraqis what they thought of the walls instead of just going off-cocked against the Administration, specifically, and Republicans, generally, in his usual modus operandi. 

Category: Foreign Policy, Historical, Politics, Society, Terror War