Baghdad "Wall": $12 Mil (Plus Bribes)

Half of Iraq seems to be flipping out over the walls that the U.S. military are building to divvy up Baghdad. But U.S. Central Command chief Admiral "Fox" Fallon says the "short term" "barriers" are a smooth move. Matt Armstrong, the brains behind the relentlessly-smart MountainRunner national security blog, would beg to differ. In his first DANGER ROOM post, Armstrong says, "Neither political nor military doctrine or logic can justify this folly."

These "gated communities" may provide a tactical reprieve against violence, but they do not satisfy any strategic requirements of creating confidence and legitimacy. And they're a waste of money, besides. A friend (RS) threw together some numbers on what this wall might cost:

1 T-wall = approx. $1500 Transportation for 1 T-wall (from Irbil to Baghdad) $800 Labor/Equip. to install one T-wall = approx. $800 Total for 1 T-wall = $3100 T-wall dimensions = approx. 1.2m wide 3 miles = 4830 meters = 4025 T-walls 4025 X $3100 = $12,477,500

This doesn't include security, project management, administration, transportation, fuel, Iraqi tribal bribes, and miscellaneous other expenses.

Using GoogleEarth, I drew what amounted to exactly 13 miles of perimeter around this first community for a good visual (kmz here).

I've often wondered that if instead of spending bricks of Benjamin's on whatever the CPA spent money on and instead created well-paying legal, judicial, and police positions with transparent oversight (including local media) would we better off? In the case of the wall, what $12.5 million dollars buy? If kids get $150 to fire an RPG -- which they take because their parents don't have a job -- what do you think this cash could buy? Probably more than the temporary security of yet another Sunni enclave.

At best, this is an attempt to recreate the strategic hamlet program from Vietnam, and even British fortresses in the Sudan and Afghanistan a century and a half ago. But this isn't the countryside and these are not autonomous units to be caged. To say there are "serious problems" with the gated communities, as Anthony Cordesman puts it, is an understatement. Cordesman notes partitioning in Ulster and the Balkans brought security but at a significant cost. Sadly, Ambassador Crocker defended the plan as a means "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." Al-Hayat quoted several Iraqi officials who defended the strategy, claiming that building such walls will "give security forces a bigger chance of executing their military missions."

This is nonsense. Iraq is not, at its core, a military mission, after all. It's political -- and it's nearly always been political, even before Saddam's statue was toppled four years ago this month. In the struggle for legitimacy, from the point of view of the various insurgent and criminal groups, war is politics and our role in war is political at every step of the way. How then does the wall further the political aims of moral legitimacy over the population?

Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus and counterinsurgency adviser Australian Army Lt. Col. David Kilcullen are both know this. Which makes the chatter -- that the Iraqi reaction to the wall somehow caught American and Iraq authorities "off guard" -- even more maddening. How could they not have anticipated visceral linkage with Israel's wall in the West Bank by the audience in the Middle East or the Berlin Wall by Europeans or even the peacelines in Ireland to our most important coalition partner? There are three possible reasons: it was not their call, they really didn't expect the brouhaha, or they weren't paying attention. Options one, two, and three are all bad. I eliminated a fourth option -- they didn't know about it -- because that just paints a terrible picture of the command structure (let's not talk about the war "czar", the simple suggestion of which indicates a far deeper systemic problem).