{"id":306,"date":"2007-04-24T08:48:18","date_gmt":"2007-04-24T13:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/24\/fences-make-good-neighbors\/"},"modified":"2007-04-24T10:17:50","modified_gmt":"2007-04-24T15:17:50","slug":"fences-make-good-neighbors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=306","title":{"rendered":"Fences make good neighbors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m beginning to wonder what the Left has against walls and fences. Reading the most partisan hack in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/04\/23\/AR2007042301453.html?hpid=opinionsbox1\" target=\"_blank\">Washington Post, Eugene Robinson,<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0on the subject of the &#8220;gated communities&#8221; in Baghdad makes me think that the Left has never liked a fence or wall;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Basically, we&#8217;re turning Baghdad into Belfast.<\/p>\n<p>This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq&#8217;s sectarian civil war &#8212; in the capital, at least, the ostensible goal of George W. Bush&#8217;s fraudulent &#8220;surge&#8221; policy &#8212; by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other&#8217;s throats. The &#8220;peace lines&#8221; in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.<\/p>\n<p>The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call &#8220;gated communities&#8221; is another sign &#8212; as if more evidence were needed &#8212; that Bush&#8217;s &#8220;surge&#8221; is nothing more than a maneuver to buy time. His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president&#8217;s problem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But the Left is adamantly opposed to walls anywhere, as near as I can tell. Republicans want a wall along our southern border to keep illegal immigrants from infiltrating into our country and then dying of thirst or from bands of roving preditors.<\/p>\n<p>The Left\u00c2\u00a0also oppose the Israelis building a wall to protect themselves from Palestinian baby-killers. And it almost seems to be working.<\/p>\n<p>If the Left are\u00c2\u00a0peace-mongers, as they claim, wouldn&#8217;t building protective walls be a reasonable alternative to snipers and armed paramilitary police forces enforcing curfews at the point of\u00c2\u00a0a gun?\u00c2\u00a0It almost seems reasonable to me.<\/p>\n<p>During the 60s, 70s and 80s, the Left\u00c2\u00a0resigned themselves to the fact that the Communists had erected a deadly barrier across Europe to keep the Soviet\u00c2\u00a0population enslaved. The Left\u00c2\u00a0continues to tolerate the barrier that slashes the Korean pennisula&#8217;s two opposing ideologies.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the Left\u00c2\u00a0trembled when Ronald Reagan demanded that Soviet Premier Gorbachov tear down his wall\u00c2\u00a0from the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And they lamented <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/reference\/subject\/philosophy\/works\/us\/fukuyama.htm\" target=\"_blank\">the end of history<\/a>, and the failures of their ideology\u00c2\u00a0when that wall finally fell.<\/p>\n<p>I guess walls are only a good idea when they&#8217;re used to preserve Leftist ideology against evil capitalists instead of\u00c2\u00a0a bulwark for\u00c2\u00a0peace.<\/p>\n<p>Omar from <a href=\"http:\/\/iraqthemodel.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Iraq the Model<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/pajamasmedia.com\/2007\/04\/baghdad_dispatch_imposing_law_1.php\" target=\"_blank\">writing on Pajamas Media<\/a>) gives his thoughts on the walls from an Iraqi point of view &#8211; not from a partisan-hack-masquerading-as-a-journalist-point-of-view.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe Robinson should have taken the time to ask Iraqis what they thought of\u00c2\u00a0the walls\u00c2\u00a0instead of just going off-cocked against the Administration, specifically, and Republicans, generally,\u00c2\u00a0in his usual <em>modus operandi<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m beginning to wonder what the Left has against walls and fences. Reading the most partisan &hellip; <a title=\"Fences make good neighbors\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=306\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Fences make good neighbors<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,5,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-policy","category-historical","category-politics","category-society","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}