On Nov. 21, the first U.S. soldier in two months was killed by hostile fire in Iraq. For all of 2010, the death toll for American troops there has been 59, by far the lowest fatality rate since the Cheney-Bush administration invaded the country on false pretenses nearly eight years ago. We've yet to see the last American to die for the U.S. "mistake" in Iraq, as Sen. John Kerry would have it. That death could easily still be a year away. But clearly the chances of an American soldier getting killed in Iraq are far smaller than they were a year ago, much less in 2007 when more than 900 American military personnel died in the occupation.
For Iraqis, too, the level of violence has declined since its peak three years ago. But the situation remains volatile and exceedingly dangerous. This is reflected in the failure of most Iraqi exiles to return home. At least 2 million fled the country, but only about 100,000 have returned, just 5 percent. And now many who have returned are leaving again because of violence and the wretched state of the economy. John Leland writes:
A second exodus has begun here, of Iraqis who returned after fleeing the carnage of the height of the war, but now find that violence and the nation’s severe lack of jobs are pulling them away from home once again.
Since the American invasion in 2003, refugees have been a measure of the country’s precarious condition, flooding outward during periods of violence and trickling back as Iraq seemed to stabilize. This new migration shows how far the nation remains from being stable and secure. ...
In a recent survey by the United Nations refugee office, 61 percent of those who returned to Baghdad said they regretted coming back, most saying they did not feel safe. The majority, 87 percent, said they could not make enough money here to support their families. Applications for asylum in Syria have risen more than 50 percent since May. ...
“There’s no security here,” [Amar al-Obeidi] said, ticking off his close encounters with guns and bombs. “I was near a female suicide bomber a couple months ago. Then I was in my brother’s truck when insurgents opened fire on a bridge. My friend was killed in front of me with a knife. I’ve been destroyed. My mother needs an operation for her eyes, and I don’t have money. We need someone to help us.”
“Feel my stomach,” he said. “It’s like a rock. It’s going to blow out.”
When the Cheney-Bush administration began its campaign of blood and torture in Iraq, there were millions of Iraqis living in places where they don't live now. By 2008, one estimate put the number of exiles at 4.7 million, 2 million of them scattered abroad in 10 countries, mostly Syria and Jordan and nearly 2.8 million internally displaced persons, IDPs. Some analysts quibble about the numbers, alway a difficult count in wartime, but everybody agrees it was the largest human displacement in the Middle East since 1948, another ideological slap in the face of the schemers who said the invasion would stabilize the region. Of course, they actually didn't get even a slap on the wrist.
Today, with Iraq practically invisible in the U.S. media, the exiles face not only an unstable security situation but also continued poverty, assault, kidnapping, renewed ethnic cleansing and murder if they try to go back where they came from. Therefore, few do. According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees:
The number of refugees who return permanently to Iraq has been very low with UNHCR having supported 163 to return to Iraq from Syria since the beginning of 2010. According to Iraqi government statistics, only 18,240 Iraqi refugees returned from exile from January 2010 to August.
And few others are likely to do so given the stories trickling out from returnees who have gone back into exile because of money troubles and continued ethnic and other cleansing. Most have a hard row to hoe. The vast majority have chosen not to register themselves with the UNHCR, cutting them off from legal protections and a small bit of financial assistance. While some exiles with a good education and professional credentials have managed to build a new, more or less comfortable life for themselves, at least economically, most are just surviving and waiting, doing unauthorized work if they can find something, living in constant fear of deportation.
As Steve Hynd points out:
If the Surge did anything more than paper over the cracks, these people haven't noticed. Their lives would be just as terrible if the Surge had never happened and the US had withdrawn all its troops in 2007 or if the US now stayed in Iraq forever. The only difference would be that billions of dollars and hundreds of other lives would not have been wasted providing a figleaf of cover to politicians and careerist generals, so that they never had to use the word "defeat".
And now, as Hynd says, we're being asked to stay the course in Afghanistan.