Whitewashing the wall

Re “Erecting safety in Iraq,” Opinion, April 25

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno has proved himself a master of the rhetorical bait-and-switch. His use of the execrable term “gated community” is pure saccharine, worse even than the Vietnam War’s “strategic hamlets,” which were claimed by the Army to be South Vietnamese government initiatives designed, as in Odierno’s words, to protect “specific communities” with “checkpoints ... which prevent would-be attackers” from entering.

Like Odierno, the communist leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, denied in 1961 that he was building a wall. What came to be known as the Berlin Wall, Ulbricht argued, was not a “wall” but an “anti-fascist protective rampart.”

In defending the Baghdad wall, Odierno does little more than recycle multinational forces’ press releases designed to shift the onus of responsibility onto the government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

Like the Berlin Wall, the Baghdad wall is an admission of defeat and of our fundamental inability to provide even a day’s security for ordinary Iraqis. Instead of defending the wall, or blaming Iraqis for it, Odierno ought to be apologizing for the fact that it’s needed at all.

RUSSELL A. BURGOS

Thousand Oaks