Baghdad a Model for Urban Oppression

The "success" of the surge in the media has been presented as a result of an increase in troop levels. In the imaginations of Americans this likely brings pictures of friendly American youths patrolling the streets, giving out candy, accepting flowers. But this isn't the reality. The picture we should be seeing is much more like Alfonso Cuarón's dystopic vision of London in Children of Men - or a more historical one from the Warsaw ghetto. Baghdad is no longer a city, it is a series of enclosed neighbourhoods with restricted access in and out. Think the "Green Zone" without golden toilets and luxury hotels. Actually don't think the Green Zone, since the only thing these areas share is large concrete walls and an occupying army - the rest of the way people live is likely much more horrific and poor. In this world the mark of success is isolation. The method is to put whole populations with solitary confinement - the epitome of American prison culture. The Iraqis, the thinking goes, are too uncivilized to live together therefore they get to live with no one.

But what kind of city would this be? What kind of people are being created? What all happens, as a result, when the Americans eventually do leave and the walls come down?

For Baghdad these are scary questions. But this is a model not just for Baghdad, but for the world. Rapid urbanization has been driven by the largest human migration in the history of this planet towards the cores of elite wealth in the global south - slums are becoming the homes of millions of new urbanites in cities like Mumbai, São Paulo, Rio de Janerio, Bogotá, Mexico City, Lagos, and the list goes on. From the movie City of God western culture has been informed of the violence in Rio's infamous favelas, reinforced by news of streetwars between gangs and the police. It is clear that the slum as a model for urbanization is failing. But as these areas erupt with violence and anger - now too close to home for elites - the Baghdad model is a possible candidate for the world's cities.

Raúl Zibechi describes this model as it spreads across the global south in his article The Militarization of the World's Urban Peripheries:

...Electoral democracy and development are necessary to prevent terrorism, but they are not objectives in and of themselves. In countries with weak states and high concentrations of urban poor, the armed forces move to take the place of the sovereign government, reconstruct the state, and in a totally vertical and authoritarian manner, initiate mechanisms to assure the continuation of domination.

In Iraq, these policies have their obverse and complement in the building of large walls to separate neighborhoods in Baghdad. According to writer and Arab expert Santiago Alba Rico, the construction of walls in 10 neighborhoods in the Iraq capital is intended to turn each into "an armored closet whose inhabitants are filed away or abandoned in locked drawers and sealed enclosures."10

The logic is simple: "Neighborhoods that have not been crushed militarily are walled, enclosed, and abandoned to their luck. Complete areas of the city have been demarcated and segregated with inhabitants confined inside, subjected to entry and exit controls so ironclad that we can speak without hesitation of a ghetto policy."

Other parts of the world are not lacking in cement walls to isolate and separate peripheral neighborhoods. Symbolic walls are fabricated according to differences in color, dress, and ways of occupying space. But the results and objectives are identical. Control mechanisms—whether dressed in military garb, or as NGOs for development, or promoting market economy and electoral democracy—are interlaced and, in extreme cases like the suburbs of Baghdad, the slums of Rio de Janeiro, or the shanty towns of Port-au-Prince, they are subordinated to military planning.

In Brazil, to give just one example, different forms of control are simultaneously applied: the "Zero Hunger" government plan is compatible with the militarization of the slums. ....

From: The Militarization of the World's Urban Peripheries

This discription brings to mind another part of the world: the Gaza Strip.

Rather than deal with sources of "trouble" rooted in inequalities and extreme poverty, governments have increasingly turned to the projection of military power onto areas of urban populations who are either unwilling to accept the unjust economic structure or have turned to criminal activities to find their way around it.

This is not only a frightening trend for what it does to people in the present but as many authors of dystopic visions have described it is putting into place a model of political-authoritarian domination to control the lower classes and restrict all of their access to protest and resistance. As the world begins to experience the coming shocks of a faltering US economic hegemony, the model of Baghdad may be the one elites turn to to protect and consolidate their power and wealth from a populace angered by century-long mismanagement and inequalities. The future we have been warned against for millions will become a reality.