CT Blue

Someone in the Pentagon has a past, or a promising future, on Madison Avenue. The euphemistic heights have been reached, perhaps someday to be equalled, but never to be surmounted. As someone who dabbles in writing I can only doff my hat to the person who came up with the idea of calling the walled ghettos we are creating in Iraq “gated communities”. Both the Courant and the Times report on the use of the term, though in the Times the Defense Department, for some mysterious reason, appears to back away from the policy, but not the term. From the Courant:

Biometric scanning devices that can record residents’ fingerprints and eye patterns are among the technology the U.S. military is counting on – along with the more usual concrete barriers – in a plan to wall off at least 10 of Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods, creating what officers call “gated communities” in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city.

From the Times:

The military does not have a new strategy of building walls or creating “gated communities,” the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said in a written statement. He described it as a tactic being used in only a handful of neighborhoods and not an effort to divide the city, much less the country.

Even Orwell would be in awe of a person who could use such a term to describe a policy of totalitarian ghettoization. Here’s the translation of the term for those who have still not learned to expect the worst from Bush and all it touches:

…American military officials said last week in a statement that the Adhamiya wall was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy.” They also said that the wall was aimed at separating Sunni Arabs in Adhamiya from Shiites to the east.

Apartheid, anyone?

For myself, this all brings to mind the words of Robert Frost, who in a dim and distant age, by way of drawing a no longer existing contrast between this nation and its adversaries, read these words at another Wall:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 
That wants it down!”