I’m not making that up. That’s what the plan is: to bulldoze buildings in the central core of Ramadi to create a “Green Zone” in the center of the city:
… In three years here the Marines and the Army have tried nearly everything to bring this provincial capital of 400,000 under control. Nothing has worked.
Now American commanders are trying something new. Instead of continuing to fight for the downtown, or rebuild it, they are going to get rid of it, or at least a very large part of it.
They say they are planning to bulldoze about three blocks in the middle of the city, part of which has been reduced to ruins by the fighting, and convert them into a Green Zone, a version of the fortified and largely stable area that houses the Iraqi and American leadership in Baghdad.
Yeah baby! Another Green Zone is just what we need in Iraq, cuz that first one has worked out so well:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Baghdad’s central morgue received 1,595 bodies last month — the highest number since the February bombing of a Shiite shrine sparked a wave of sectarian killings, a morgue official said on Wednesday.
The figures show the level of violence in Iraq has increased even after the killing on June 7 of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air strike.
How do you know when you are losing the hearts and minds of an occupied people? Whe you start repeating strategies that have already failed, because you can’t think of anything better to do. In the past week the “unity” government of Prime Minister al-Maliki has been torn apart by Sunni defections, bombs and the killings go on despite the “turning point” represented by the Death of Zarqawi, yet the only tactic we can think of to deal with the insurgency in Ramadi is to bulldoze a bunch of buildings in the center of the city and build another “Green Zone” fortress.
This reminds me very much of how the Soviets tried to deal with Afghanistan in the ’80’s: military strongholds in the center of urban settings. It’s a strategy as old as the one the Crusaders employed in the Middle Ages. They were occupiers too, occupiers of “The Holy Land”, and you know what? Eventually their fortresses proved insufficient. They were forced to abandon them.
Just like we will.
