September 17, 2005: Author Advocates US Mining 2,250 Miles of Iraqi Border

Author and journalist Melik Kaylan writes an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal advocating the mining of the entire Iraqi border—all 2,250 miles of it. Kaylan writes that if the US turned the entire Iraqi border into a minefield, the Iraqi insurrection could not be replenished with manpower and materiel from Syria and other sources. “Why has nobody publicly debated this idea?” he asks, and says the reason might be “the shock-horror-gasp factor” along with the late Princess Diana’s attempts to ban mines and bad memories of US mining efforts in Vietnam. However, he writes, “once tempers have cooled, it should become clear that of all the unpleasant products of war in Iraq, mining the border offers the least unpleasant.” The 2,250 mines can be laid out according to a strict plan, Kaylan advocates, and removed once hostilities have ended. “The point here is that a precisely ordered minefield is a weapon of peace, rather than war, a deterrent and a stabilizer,” he writes. “When done right, its aim is not to kill or maim but to take a swatch of territory out of the conflict—and to give relief to innocent border-area residents forced, at the point of a gun, to collaborate with infiltrators.” The proposal will not be given serious consideration by US or Iraqi war planners. [Wall Street Journal, 9/17/2005; Foreign Policy, 10/22/2010]