Hounded by Insurgents, Abandoned by Us
THE crisis over Iraq’s refugees is the first major policy issue in which Iraqi civilians are front and center. We debate how the surge looks today or how oil will be distributed tomorrow on the banks of a swelling river of human misery: two million Iraqis who couldn’t bear to live in Iraq anymore, and another two million displaced internally but too poor to flee.
This week, representatives from dozens of countries and international nongovernmental organizations have gathered in Geneva to discuss what might be done in the wake of the largest population shift in the Middle East since 1948. The world is asking what George W. Bush, who started the war in Iraq and presides over the country that historically accepts more refugees than any other, will do for these desperate people.
Many of them will most likely be denied refuge in the United States because, under the Patriot and Real ID Acts, they are tarred with having provided material support to terrorists — in the form of ransoms paid to kidnappers to secure a family member’s release. Last month, Congress tried to create a waiver for those who provided material support “under duress.” Lamentably, it was killed by Senator Jon Kyl, who said he’d respond with legislation to “provide relief from terrorism-related immigration bars to … groups that do not pose a threat to the United States.”
Are we so imprecise in our fifth year of this war that our government cannot distinguish between those who worked and ate alongside us and a member of Al Qaeda?
Consider Rita, an Iraqi Christian woman who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority and helped manage the TIPS Hotline, which Iraqis can call to share critical information about wanted terrorists or pending attacks on the United States military. Her supervisor, Bernard Kerik, wrote in a recommendation letter that her “courage to support the coalition forces has sent an irrefutable message: that terror will not rule, that liberty will triumph, and that the seeds of freedom will be planted into the great citizens of Iraq.”
But Rita’s courage was repaid by insurgents who abducted her 16-year-old son at gunpoint on his way to school one August morning. Terrorists demanded $600,000 for his release. She doesn’t know how much her husband ultimately paid the kidnappers because he divorced her, blaming her work for the American government for the calamity that had befallen the family. He took her traumatized son and daughter to Syria, and she hasn’t seen or heard from them since. When the death threats became unbearable, she fled to Jordan.
Appallingly, Rita’s family cannot be resettled in the United States because of the material support bar. Unless the secretary of homeland security himself applies a waiver for her, she’ll never reach American soil. Does this woman, who lost everything because she worked for the Americans, who had a security clearance from our government to work in its embassy, pose a threat to the United States? If she does, then who doesn’t?
After all this time, we see hearts and minds as bombs and guns. If we cannot recover such basic distinctions, then we have surely lost more than the war.
Five years before we invaded Iraq, one senator had the remarkable foresight to speak about our responsibility to any Iraqis who might help the United States: “If we would have people in Iraq, or elsewhere in the world, trust us and work with us, then we need to take care that the United States maintains a reputation for trustworthiness and for taking care of its friends.” He was even more direct about what was at stake: “The world will be watching and judging how America treats people who are seen to be on our side. We cannot afford to foster a perception of unfairness that will make it more difficult for the United States to recruit supporters in the future.” So spoke Senator Kyl in 1998.
I thought I had witnessed the depths of our government’s inability to rapidly help Iraqis during the year that I worked for the United States Agency for International Development in Baghdad and Falluja. That was until I went to Washington in February with a list of all of my former Iraqi colleagues who are now refugees because they helped us.
While the State Department bureau in charge of refugee resettlement has been trying feverishly to respond belatedly to the crisis, it is not equipped or authorized to act expeditiously. In her Jan. 16 testimony to the Senate, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, said that the plight of Iraq’s refugees was the bureau’s “very top priority.” More than two months later, she reported to the House that it could take six months (and likely longer) before our Iraqi friends might find refuge here.
What kind of superpower can’t convert its “very top priority” into a program that starts saving its allies’ lives before their visas expire and they are forced to return to Iraq? Rita is on my list, which has grown to include hundreds of former colleagues and others who endured similarly shattering fates because they believed in America enough to help us in Iraq. They wonder if they chose poorly when they signed on with us, and they are rapidly losing hope that the United States will offer them a life preserver before it’s too late. Those who paid ransoms for their lives or those of their loved ones are scared to explain in their asylum applications the chief reason they fled their country, because they worry it will disqualify them — a perverse indication of the extent to which our government has lost its way since we invaded.
This is not an issue President Bush can delegate anymore. His bureaucracies are moving perilously slowly. They need the leadership of an American president. How will the United States help those whose belief in us cost them their country? We need to honor the sacrifice of these Iraqis — and start recovering the moral credibility our country forfeits each day they go without our help.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
“What kind of superpower can’t convert its “very top priority” into a program that starts saving its allies’ lives before their visas expire and they are forced to return to Iraq?” A superpower that doesn’t give a damm about people that aren’t part of the ruling elite.
Hoa Binh
Does anyone really think the Bush-Cheney bunch care about the grassroots Iraqis … even those who have helped US forces?
Honorable US military and other officials probably do … but it is doubtful that Karl Rove and other administration officials care.
Many Americans seem to doubt whether the Bush-Cheney gang and their associates even care about the US troops who have been sent to their deaths and horrible injuries.
If anything honorable is to be accomplished in Iraq, many people believe this is up to the Congress and those in the US military who retain honor.
Food for thought at:
“Victory of Courage, Fellowship and Honor”
PopulistAmerica.com
December 17, 2006
http://www.populistamerica.com/victory_of_courage_fellowship_and_honor
- - -
“A serious Congressional inquiry on Iraq is necessary”
PopulistAmerica.com
December 24, 2006
http://www.populistamerica.com/a_serious_congressional_inquiry_on_iraq_is_necessary
Remember we were to be received as liberators and there would be no need for relocating anyone. However just like everything else they have told us, they were wrong. Just like the surge is working, it is only if more death and destruction was your goal. They lied and just continue to lie.
Bush-Cheney only care about appearing to do the right thing, without actually having to do it. Bush’s presidency is full of broken promises - aid to Katrina victims, rebuilding New Orleans, money for Africa’s AIDS victims, No Child Left Behind, well, the list is endless and growing daily.
What they really do care about is their true base, the haves and have-mores, as Michael Moore caught on film. The rest, they despise.
We have seen that the President and Congress can act very quickly - when they want to. Unfortunately Congress is also full of haves and have-mores.
This is another Kafkaesque event occurring in this once honorable nation to add to the long list already existing. ‘We need a true president.” Unfortunately we don’t. In fact we don’t even know who is running this nation; certainly nobody to look up to and be proud of. Instead we have a group of liars and criminals running this country over a cliff.
I am hardly surprised anymore to the twisted logic behind so much of what passes for a functioning, viable nation. To abandon those who helped us fight what was falsely claimed to be a country ready to destroy us is stupid and in he end, counterproductive. Soon enough, there will be nobody willing to help a land which doesn’t follow through on what would be considered the least they could do for those who risked their lives and the lives of their family to try to do what they thought was the right thing to do.
We are losing allies at an unprecedented rate. And as one post stated, it’s because Bush and company don’t give a damn about the soldiers, army, the country, people, cities, environment, economy, education, or anything other than their own shameless, stupid and cowardly selves. True Straussians, our hated neo cons.
Many of the Iraqis who work or have worked for the neocon puppet government or the US have been treated in similar and worse ways. The information they tried to provide has been ignored. Their security has been treated as a non-issue and they have been abandoned to their fates, often as temprary refugees in neighboring countries. Our entire policy there has been guided by hubris, ignorance and racism. Even if the invasion and occupation were legitimate, the behavior of our government there has been one gigantic criminal blunder the aftermath of which will continue for a long time to come.
“The crisis over Iraq’s refugees is the first major policy issue in which Iraqi civilians are front and center.” Really? If so, how pathetic.
Without rehashing the lies, disinformation, and rabid racist jingoism that spawned the Bush administration’s shock & awe invasion of Iraq four years ago, once Saddam’s regime was no longer effectively in power (as in, “Mission Accomplished: Major combat phase has ended”) the first, unavoidable major policy issue was always the hearts and minds of the Iraqi civilian population, emerging from 30 years of one-party military rule to suddenly find their country occupied by a foreign army.
If the White House didn’t see the issue of an insurgency and protracted urban guerilla warfare there in broad daylight - front and center - then what were they looking at? The oil? Galloping off to Tehran? Installing a compliant replacement regime of reliable cronies and exiles? Building a whole string of new military bases and prisons to run Iraq indefinitely, like some sort of ultra hi tech colony?
Maybe Kirk Johnson is right, and it’s taken four years for the welfare and fate of Iraqi civilians to finally be taken seriously by the neo-cons who conjured up this pipe dream of Middle East empire and pax Americana. They’ve been too preoccupied with other priorities, apparently, to think much about the occupation itself and the public’s reaction to it.
That’s why over half the population of Iraq now believes its moral to kill American soldiers on sight, and over 80% of the population wants the US military off their soil yesterday. By all means, it’s past time to put the Iraqi civilians front and center.
The assumption in this article that “Rita” is a great person because she worked for the occupation forces and is a christian as opposed to muslim is sickening. The Iraqi’s who “believed in America” are not the only ones who deserve to be saved.
The recouping of any moral credibility is growing beyond the grasp of these blood soaked hands. An ill Roman wind fills the sails of this ship and the lungs of its occupants.
The longer this carnage is allowed to prevail; it can only intensify the calamity with added revulsion. What were once dim bridges of possible retreat for this incursion; in its wake those bridges have now become a complete blur.
We must stop referring to this invasion of opportunity as a War. It was/is nothing more, nothing less than a congressionally sanctioned ‘Police Action’ for purposes of plunder, subjugation driven by mad desire towards empire.
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk1vEuhBuEU
Kirk W. Johnson was the regional coordinator of reconstruction in Falluja in 2005 for the United States Agency for International Development.
***********************
Okay folks, now at the end of the article we finally get the lens through which this blowviation is focused: AID the agency for international devellopment, the buddy-buddy friend of all predatory NGO’s and business robber-barrons intent on preserving their sacred privilige to skip to and fro around the world seeking plunder through the undermining of soveriegnty wherever complicit locals will allow. It’s been a pretty rough 4 years for these poor snakes since nobody much in Iraq is very intersted in taking their bribes anymore.
Still it is instructive to see that even corrupt multi-national business has just about completely written of Bushco. This must have been how Krupp, Bayer, Heinkel, Messerschmidt,& Siemans felt around 1944 over Der Feuhrer’s incoherance and unpredictability.
The U.S. Invasion of Iraq
Syria hosts 1,000,000 Iraqi refugees. Jordan hosts 700,000. But the mighty US has accepted only 692 (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041607J.shtml).
Although the author of the article cares about the small number of Iraqis who directly aided the US, apparently he doesn’t care about the millions of other Iraqis “who couldn’t bear to live in Iraq anymore.” Guess he feels these others just don’t have the grit to stick it out.
At Virginia Tech yesterday 32 people were murdered and I doubt anyone would fault students for choosing another university. Today in Baghdad over 160 Iraqis were killed by car bombs. That’s 5 times the number at Virginia Tech and just the latest in what has, conservatively, been over 60,000 civilian deaths caused by our invasion (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/). Our invasion has turned Iraq into a living hell – and not just for those who aided the US.
Clearly, the bi-partisan failure to get the US military out of Iraq has nothing to do with any sympathy for ordinary Iraqis. It has everything to do with preserving US “credibility”, namely avoiding embarrassment to the US ruling class.
Seems to me anyone helping the invading forces is a traitor to their own country. The invading force rapes and pillages your country but somehow you expect them to treat you nice cos you helped them?
Sorry but I don’t buy that.
The real horror is those who are innocent forced into being refugees, not the few who sided with the invaders.
Where are ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN-FOX, the Magnificent ‘In-Bed-Withs’ in regards to this story of misery? Perhaps it would benefit us all greatly if we were to redefine the dictionary term ‘Journalist’ by replacing it with a photograph of Joseph Goebbels.
Where have the cameras’s for this Corporate Imperium been for the last five decades of Palestinian expulsion and exile, the recent Lebanon expulsion and now the Iraqi expulsion, the cameras of: Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Feel No?
Now the corporate bleeding hearts wish to implement the ‘Bomb-Em and Feed-Em’ policy as they shed crocodile tears before those same cameras. How much more repulsive can they get with their hypocrisy?
Bush and his Neocon War Lords need to stop trashing country side and simply leave, and face the charges for what they have wrought on the world, while in their state of delirium.
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk1vEuhBuEU
Where are ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN-FOX, the Magnificent ‘In-Bed-Withs’ in regards to this story of misery? Perhaps it would benefit us all greatly if we were to redefine the dictionary term ‘Journalist’ by replacing it with a photograph of Joseph Goebbels.
Where have the cameras’s for this Corporate Imperium been for the last five decades of Palestinian expulsion and exile, the recent Lebanon expulsion and now the Iraqi expulsion, the cameras of: Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Feel No PAIN?
Now the corporate bleeding hearts wish to implement the ‘Bomb-Em and Feed-Em’ policy as they shed crocodile tears before those same cameras. How much more repulsive can they get with their hypocrisy?
Bush and his Neocon War Lords need to stop trashing country side and simply leave, and face the charges for what they have wrought on the world, while in their state of delirium.
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk1vEuhBuEU