Cementing the picture on Iraq

By Libby

Sully posts a letter from the dad of an army officer who notes that Baghdad is now a city of walled-in neighborhoods and the government is a joke from the clueless national ministers to the local warlords who are bleeding the reconstruction funds to line their own pockets and consolidate their tribal power. Picture your own city looking like this.

I later had the opportunity to discuss this with my son and he fleshed out the point about the neighborhoods being walled off. He told me that there are 17 feet high cement barriers at the end of every street separating manageable neighborhoods. There are checkpoints to control ingress and egress to each neighborhood. Citizens are not able to lead ordinary lives. The joke among officers over there is that in order to show further "progress" the troops will have to circle EVERY house.

Shamanic already covered this story at Newshoggers and comes up with a plan to solve the violence in Iraq permanently. Refugee camps on the moon. Brilliant, and it would fit right in with Bush's stated desire to ramp up the NASA lunar explorations.

On a different note, a commenter at Jim Henley's place is waiting for a "map of walled and fenced Baghdad in any major corp-media outlet." I'm wondering why some tech savvy blogger doesn't create one. I would think it would be fairly easy to do using the google satellite map widget and would surely be a picture worth the proverbial thousand words.