Frank Rich on the Iraqi humanitarian disaster.
Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave "God’s gift of freedom."
It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A "secure" Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
The Bush Administration, the stingiest administration in history, has only allowed 466 Iraqi refugees to settle here. Sweden will admit 25,000. Sweden is dealing with our shit now.
The humanitarian disaster unfolding in the exodus of the Iraqi middle class en mass is made worse by the fact that the story can’t get any more traction than Sanjaya or a dead titty dancer’s post mortem court battle.
Perhaps a robust media might be the best way to end the war. But good luck with that. You can’t even see a casket of dead soldier because the cowardly Bush Administration is afraid that somehow the vast majority of Americans actually buy this narrative. But what we have is an insulated inside the beltway culture that rules he country, and owns the media, and comfortably hides from the pictures, the stories or the horror of refugee camps.
There is no sense among Americans in general that not only did we destroy a country, we displaced millions of men women and children and they are either on the road or living in another country in a tent.
The Bush Administration has been the worst news for refugees since Caesar Augustus. At least the Lebanese and Syrians are getting the tents to the Iraqis.
"Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war."
-Former UN Ambassador Jon Bolton.
I mean folks 2 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes or towns or country and these Republican neocon asshats feel no remorse, no sympathy, and worse, no responsibility for this. How do the hardships of war have nothing to do with a war we started? I don’t understand the audacity to just say black is white. To state the obvious opposite, to deny the Pinochio noses on their lying faces, it’s beyond chutzpah. It’s delusional. It’s the kind of arrogance that grows out of deeply feeling a different truth, one so hard to face that it’s easier just to deny it.
A total of 131,000 Vietnamese were settled in the US after Vietnam. Rich talks about the history of the tired huddled masses and refugees in particular. We have not always been so kind. Still, US Republican officials and wingnut media outlets still decry the goddamned Iraqis themselves who refuse to step up and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But look at who is saying this and most of them have never been in a uniform higher than Cub Scouts. So not only is the liberal left to blame for this clusterfuck, the Iraqis themselves are to blame for the violence we started.
There are a dearth of places for the wingnuts to point your fingers.
... By January, Mr. Bush was saying that "the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude" and wondering aloud "whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq." In February, one of the war’s leading neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the boom. "Iraq is their country," Charles Krauthammer wrote. "We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war." Bill O’Reilly and others now echo this cry.
The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything that’s coming to them...That we are slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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