A heavily fortified walled enclave, the Green Zone is a little America in Iraq and life outside it might as well be another country. In that country, Iraq, electricity and water supplies stutter and start, but within this colossal gated community your every need is catered to.

The United States itself is becoming a gigantic gated community (although "gate" misleads). In the name of the "war on terror", it is militarizing its borders, fortifying them; and in doing so it is using techniques it has perfected by imprisoning Iraqis.

Let us turn from Iraq and to the remote southern tip of Texas where, ringed by barbed wire, we find a futuristic tent city rising from the Rio Grande Valley.

It is the largest camp in the U.S. federal system’s archipelago of immigration detention, quietly deployed last summer between a federal prison and a county jail where, as we are told by the Washington Post, "illegal immigrants are confined 23 hours a day in windowless tents made of a Kevlar-like material, often with insufficient food, clothing, medical care and access to telephones." [Source]

Subtopia talks of "flexible urbanism of immediate captivities". It and the other detention centres throughout the United States constitute the new military urbanism; and each inmate will experience the nebulous detention which is typified by Guantánamo Bay Detention Centre.

Speaking of which the U.S. Department of Defense is building a new migrant detention centre at Guantánamo to house the expected waves of Cubans who will, we are told, attempt to migrate to Florida when Fidel Castro dies. Or, as a U.S. official put it, it is being built "to shelter interdicted migrants." [Source]

Such centres are the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security. Illegal immigrants are only one of its concerns. The "war on terror" is another. That the two have been fused is one reason borders have been militarized.

"Unlawful enemy combatants", such as those in Guantánamo, will also experience the hospitality of these regimes—and the definition of such "combatants" is wide enough to include dissenting Americans (and Canadians, as Maher Arar will testify). [Link]

No one ever expects that such a thing could happen to them. This is the fear that isn't felt.

When Time Magazine declared the Person of 2006 to be You, they really meant "Us", Americans, those on the safe side of these fortified zones. These are potential wearers of the Hug Shirt, which, let us recall from the previous post, Time nominated as one of the Inventions of 2006. The Person and the Invention are a perfect match.

Perhaps Time will acknowledge this next December and declare the Person of 2007 to be "Us".

What has been obvious for those on the outside for several years is only now creeping into the collective conscience of these "Yous": "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us". 

Colonel W. Patrick Lang Jr. puts it thus:

We, the American people—not the Bush administration, nor the hapless Iraqis, nor the meddlesome Iranians (the new scapegoat)—are the root of the problem. [Source]

Yes indeed. Read his article for an explanation.