The Iraqi Elephant in the room

There is one huge topic concerning the Iraq War that nobody in America seems to want to talk about.  Oh, the occasional short piece might turn up on NPR or in Atlantic magazine.  The lefty blogs do a little bit better on writing about it, but most of these diaries sit largely unread and unrecommended.  Politicians on both sides of the aisle are reluctant to bring this up.  Ted Kennedy talks about it an eensy weensy bit.

All of this miniscule dialogue about something that is a huge problem for America...

What to do about Iraqi refugees?

copyright John S. Pritchett - www.pritchettcartoons.com

First the facts:

1 - The U.N. estimated back in October that there were over 1.6 million refugees who have left the country out of concerns for their safety.  They have fled to the countries bordering Iraq and these nations can hardly absorb such huge numbers of immigrants into their economies.

2 - As an opening gesture of dealing with this problem, the U.S. agreed to take in 600 refugees in 2006.  In actual numbers we only let in 200.

3 - Senator Ted Kennedy, who probably represents the most liberal position within Congress, wants to take in a mere 1,000 per annum.

So in looking at the elephant square on, the first question that perhaps we should ask as Americans is...

Do we have an obligation to open our doors to many of these refugees?

[crickets chirp]

Do we really want to let 10,000 or 50,000 or even 100,000 refugees into the U.S. to provide these people with safety from the violence in their own country?  As a good citizen of the World, do we want America to take on less than 10% of the refugee population to do our part?  So that we don't throw the burden onto the Middle East and Europe, regions which already harbor some doubt or anger about US foreign policy.

As a point of comparison, we let in approximately 150,000 refugees from the Vietnam War into the U.S. during the mid-70's.  Gerald Ford showed a compassionate touch when it came to providing sanctuary for those fleeing an ugly war that the U.S. abandoned.

In an interesting interview on NPR, a woman who was a government official in charge of some of the Vietnamese refugee program had some pointed remarks about the comparison between the two situations.  In her estimation they are completely different.  To abandon the Vietnamese was to abandon people to a horrible communist dictatorship, something that was anathema to Americans of the 70's.  So according to this woman that justified over 100,000 refugees while the Iraq situation doesn't.  Tellingly, she didn't not say what type of life we would be abandoning the Iraqis to.  She didn't exactly mention that it would be a rosy democracy with a plethora of civil rights and freedom of religion.

But even more significantly, this interviewee was blind to a more important distinction.  The U.S. didn't start the Vietnam War in some pre-emptive strike.  Or to put it in Colin Powell's language, we weren't the first to break the clay pot.  Sure we crushed it into tiny pieces after we found the original broken shards, but we didn't own it because we didn't break it originally.  The Vietnamese Civil War started before we got there.  Contrast this to the Iraq War that we own lock, stock and barrel.  Perhaps 100,000 refugees isn't even enough to honor our true obligation.

We know the position of those on the far right, politically.  They talk a good game about wanting freedom and democracy for Iraqi's.  It's just that they don't want that freedom and democracy for people of Islamic faith in our backyard.  One Muslim American wishing to respect his book of worship, the Quran, by using it upon his swearing into Congress caused an uproar on the right.  Can you imagine how the right will feel about 100,000 more Muslims in the U.S.?  No, the right feels the Iraqi's are not grateful enough, and Bush, our self-proclaimed Educator-in-Chief leads with these feelings...

PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?

BUSH: That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?

PELLEY: Well, that the United States did not do a better job in providing security after the invasion.

BUSH: Not at all. I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude, and I believe most Iraqis express that. I mean, the people understand that we've endured great sacrifice to help them. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.

So perhaps a better question is...

As liberals, progressives, and/or democrats, what do we do about this Iraqi Refugee problem?

How we deal with Iraqi refugees will be a test of our principles.  Do we abandon these people to a life of extreme violence, to a nation with a war torn infrastructure, to a nation with an economy in the tank with no near term economic prospects?

My own opinion is we have to open our doors to a significant number of these refugees.  Kennedy's 1,000 is orders of magnitude smaller than what is needed.  We simply must spend some political capital here.  Political capital is very similar to economic capital.  You spend it in the hope for a good return on investment in the future.  Taking in many, many thousands of Iraqi's will hopefully return some goodwill amongst the other Middle East nations, as well as Europe.  Or at least, stem the bleeding on some of the bad will that will inevitably come once we pull our military out of Iraq, for good.

By the way, Lorraine, over on My Left Wing, highlighted an article in her excellent diary on why people in the media stay away from this elephant as if it had leprosy.

UPDATE: I just discovered that Macabee has a diary on this topic also posted today: http://www.dailykos.com/...

Cross-posted on My Left Wing