The Green Zone Becomes the Mean Zone

No longer a safe haven -- Picture courtesy Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
The Green Zone is a highly secured area in central Baghdad, fortified with heavy cement walls around the perimeter. Access points are highly restricted and secure. The Green Zone occupies a few square blocks which were once a tourist area; Saddam's palaces, state buildings, nice hotels and affluent housing filled the space. Since the US invasion of 2003, the area is now occupied by @ 10,000 people -- 5,000 government employees and contractors share the space with roughly the same number of homeless Iraqi squatters. The Green Zone has been thought of as an ultimate safe haven although that illusion was disturbed 3 years ago when rocket bombs destroyed both the Green Zone Bazaar and the Green Zone Cafe.

Now Brian Bennet writes in this week's Newsweek about further declines in the Green Zone area. Living there was never that easy to begin with; inhabitants have to go thru weapon's checkpoints just to enter a store or restaurant. It would be like going thru airport security six times a day. The American presence will soon be shrinking (in a physical sense) because all 1500 embassy officials will be moving to the new cement-fortified embassy structure. Much of the Green Zone territory will be ceded over to the Coalition Government; one shudders to think how "secure" the ceded area will remain. The "Red Zone" (anything outside the Green Zone) is a terrorists' shooting gallery so embassy officials will essentially be imprisoned in their new building.

Iraqi employees who set foot in the Green Zone are blacklisted on the outside. They can't return to the outside world. Even if they lose their employment they must stay put and live as squatters. Some receive regular death threats on their cellular phones. Now it seems the squatters may be evicted anyhow, facing certain and extreme danger. The eviction is because a suicide bomb went off in the Parliament Cafeteria on April 12th, killing an Iraqi politician. Since this event, the Coalition Government has ruled that anyone in the Green Zone not employed by the government or contract agency is a security risk.

American advisors have sought to create a secular, Democratic safe haven in the Green Zone (if nowhere else in Iraq). But it's still no Disney World. A well-regarded Sunni imam who opens his mosque to Shiites has been shunned by Sunnis even within the walls of the Green Zone. He has also received death threats. How well does it bode for the US that we can't even create harmony on a small-scale, trial basis? What is wrong with this picture? Many of these people are the highly educated Iraqis in leadership -- people that we would hope set a standard for other Iraqis. Even as we surge our troops, we seem to be shrinking, nay recoiling in the Green Zone.

Let me digress for just a moment now. It may seem like I'm straying miles from the topic at hand, but bear with. In Lilies of the Field, Sidney Poitier plays Homer Smith, an unemployed construction worker who by happenstance, ends up helping 5 immigrant nuns build a church. With his protestant background and spiritual songs, he shows the nuns an alternate path to spiritual awareness; they ultimately see him as an angel. He helps them to let go of their Eastern European rigidity and open their hearts. Now, let's come back to the topic of Iraq. Iraq doesn't need a military surge so much as it needs a change of heart. Threats of violence mostly serve to solidify whatever prejudices exist in peoples' hearts. Where is Homer Smith when you need him most? Iraq could use him at this very moment.

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