After forty-six people were killed throughout Iraq today, the day closes on an equally somber note: the proposed solution. The wall that the U.S. military is building around Azamiyah is continuing to be built despite orders from the Prime Minister to halt construction. The wall is being built to protect the Sunni minority in a Baghdad neighborhood but protests by hundreds of citizens showed that the residents felt like they were being walled in and not that the terrorists were being walled out. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said that the purpose of the wall was “to try and identify where the fault lines are and where avenues of attack lie and set up the barriers literally to prevent those attacks.” I don't know too much about suicide bombers but I am pretty sure that they are in no way related to earthquakes. Violence due to suicide bombing doesn't have "fault lines". You cannot simply build walls to keep out the suicide bombers. They are mobile people who have penetrated even the Green Zone within Baghdad. All a wall will do is represent a target of U.S. occupation to be blown up. Building a wall to thwart suicide bombers from attacking civilians is like building a dam out of coffee filters.
Also, I understand that in politics there is a certain gift from...well, somewhere...called a nonbinding resolution. The only question I have is: what is that term doing in a bill that can not only fund our troops abroad but bring them back home thus ending our occupation in a country which despises our presence in the middle of their civil war. By having the timetable for troop withdrawal as a goal and not a deadline, Bush could sign the bill into law and then ignore the pullout date. The beauty of a nonbinding resolution is that in addition to being an oxymoron, it is a way of achieving political success without really accomplishing anything. The republicans get to have their war and the democrats can say they tried to end it. The only people suffering are our soldiers and the Iraqi civilians unable to move forward.
With politics getting in the way of diplomacy, everyone is worried about their images and the legacies they will leave behind. This war is about politics and power and if you believe anything else, you have been misled along the way by the propaganda forged by the politicians. The only way real progress is going to come about if politicians do the unthinkable and put aside their own agendas and focus on the people. Nonbinding resolutions and 3-mile long walls are merely illusions in the political theater meant to misdirect the public while the real trick is played on us. The sad truth: in a democracy who is to be blamed for those ignoring the will of the people but the people themselves who ignore their responsibilities to that democracy.
