According to this morning's New York Times, the puppet government of Iraq plans to seal off Baghdad, a city of seven million people, frpm the rest of the country with a sixty mile trench.

The effort is one of the most ambitious security projects this year, with cars expected to be funneled through 28 checkpoints along the main arteries snaking out from the capital. Smaller roads would be closed. The trenches would run across farmland or other open areas to prevent cars from evading checkpoints, said the ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

“We’re going to build a trench around Baghdad so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly,” he said in a telephone interview. “The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up.”

So it appears that when freedom is on the march, it'll need to use a checkpoint. No word yet on whether Dick Cheney expects people to throw flowers at any point of the barricade. Oh, and are we winning yet?