King Abdullah's Iraqi Wall, America's Mexican Wall, and The Chines Yuan

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Some people in the United States have been demanding a security fence across the border with Mexico, one that they hope will stop illegal immigration from the south and stem the tide of their company CEOs speaking only Spanish and their neighborhoods turning dusky. There probably is a lot of illegal immigration from Canada as well, mainly from Asians and Europeans who can fly into Canada without a visa. Now a security fence, or wall, may work if you have an efficient policing and enforcing mechanism. Just building a fence/wall and turning on a switch will not do, unless you can refer back to the old East German manuals. Besides, it will most likely have more a negative impact on the environment, the fauna of the southwest than a positive one on the flow of illegals.

Now it looks like this good-fence-makes-good-neighbor idea is spreading across the world. Arab media report that Saudi King Abdullah is planning a long fence, perhaps the mother of all fences, across his country's long, some say too long, border with Iraq. The fence will consist of electric wires, berms, trenches, bricks, crotch-cupping rappers and other assorted things that might annoy and deter incoming traffic. A veritable Arabian Maginot Line. Of course the Iraqis can bypass that by swinging wide across Belgium, always the soft....crotch, or underbelly if you will, of its neighborhood (What else is under a belly?).

King Abdullah, whatever one thinks of the regime that he heads, is a simple but level-headed and intelligent man- he has what is called bedu or badiya smarts. He is not quite the modern day Claudius, Plato and Ataturk all wrapped in one the way the sycophants in the Saudi-owned media make him out to be these days. But that is ok, Arab media in general is full of sychophants kissing all the rulers'...err....noses.
Now if this calm elderly monarch is so worried about Iraq, if the reports of this Saudi fence are true, that has ominous implications for the future of Iraq and the region. It means the Saudis, and other Arab oil states, the moneybags and real powers in this post-nationalist and quasi-fun-damentalist Arab World, are ready to give up on their northern neighbor. If the rports are true, which is a big 'if'.

Some time back Kuwait was also thinking of a fence along the Iraqi border, but that was when Saddam, formerly admired across the region as Abu Uday, was still in power. Now, with the uncertainty of the terror and counter-terror campaign across Iraq, perhaps the idea will be revived.

A wall, or a static line cannot in itself keep away determined invaders, as Les Francaises discovered at least once. The Saudi worry seems to be more of refugees in case Iraq either moves to a full scale civil war or breaks up into several states, some of whom maybe turn out to be nasty neighbors.

Then there is the other fence/wall, the one we have been screaming about, before we started planning our own. The nascent Israeli wall across the West Bank, part of which is already finished.

Of course the Chinese started this whole dependence of walls when they built their own many centuries ago, perhaps with an eye to the future explosion of American and European middle class tourism....with the yuan kept at such a low exchange rate, shyly shadowing the dollar at an annoyingly fixed distance.

Cheers
Mohammed