Angelina Jolie is a filmmaker, special envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and co-founder of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative.
Movie stars occupy a curious space in our culture. While they are held up as popular icons, talked, written, gossiped and scrutinized to death (and sometimes after), the minute one chances to express her thoughts on a topic of some import or seriousness, the same worshipful culture can turn accusatory and dismissive on a dime. Perhaps because she feels that a society which rewarded her acting talent and stunning looks would be disinclined to take her seriously for anything remotely political, and perhaps because she actually has something very important to say, Angelina Jolie shies away from pointing fingers in her
January 27 Op-Ed for the
New York Times, describing the wretched plight of Syrian and Iraqi refugees. That doesn't mean the rest of us have to.
What do you say to a mother with tears streaming down her face who says her daughter is in the hands of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and that she wishes she were there, too? Even if she had to be raped and tortured, she says, it would be better than not being with her daughter.
While hordes of fat and happy Americans are content to channel their emotional investment in war through the self-serving propaganda of
American Sniper, it seems that very few are equally willing to face up to the real-world consequences of what war
actually means. Americans have gradually disengaged their thoughts from Iraq, preferring to focus on their own everyday lives. But like an infected wound, the consequences of that war continue to mount, and they are getting worse. Perhaps Jolie recognizes that in a society that revels in awestruck stupefaction at its film icons, she may be one of the few people Americans will actually pay attention to. Whatever her reasons, she exposes--wittingly or not--the real, continuing tragedy of the colossal fraud hatched by Jeb Bush's brother and Richard Bruce Cheney in lying us into that pointless and unnecessary war.
What do you say to the 13-year-old girl who describes the warehouses where she and the others lived and would be pulled out, three at a time, to be raped by the men? When her brother found out, he killed himself.
How can you speak when a woman your own age looks you in the eye and tells you that her whole family was killed in front of her, and that she now lives alone in a tent and has minimal food rations?
Indeed, what do we say in the face of this? What can we say? Most Americans have no concept of "minimal food rations," and fewer still have any experience of being forcibly uprooted and having their children terrorized, raped and tortured by bands of roaming militants with little or no regard for human life. This is not the American experience in the 21st century. One of the scenes in
American Sniper depicts an Iraqi insurgent leader as torturing a child victim with a power drill. Americans recoil in horror from this brutality, never comprehending the irony that they, through the acts of Bush and Cheney, are more or less responsible for it.
What do we say?
In almost four years of war, nearly half of Syria’s population of 23 million people has been uprooted. Within Iraq itself, more than two million people have fled conflict and the terror unleashed by extremist groups. These refugees and displaced people have witnessed unspeakable brutality. Their children are out of school, they are struggling to survive, and they are surrounded on all sides by violence.
Syria took in 1.2 million refugees from the Iraq war, approximately half of which are children. Only 200,000 remain, having been forced to flee again as a result of the Syrian civil war and the rise of Islamic State.
Thousands of Iraqi women were forced into prostitution and tens of thousands of children were forced into child labor to help sustain their families.
Half of the 50,000 Iraqi refugees who fled the Iraq war to Lebanon are children. While the American invasion of Iraq is not a direct cause of Syria's civil war, it is the cause of the horrific fate refugees are facing at the hands of ISIS, as the Islamic State
would not exist absent the war in Iraq. As
reported last month by Martin Chulov for the
Guardian, the foundation for the terrorist group ISIS was forged in American Iraqi prisons during the war:
The single most interesting quote from the ISIS leader, whom Chulov refers to as Abu Ahmed, is quite disturbing: he credits the group's rise, in large part, to American prison camps during the Iraq war, which he says gave him and other jihadist leaders an invaluable forum to meet one another and to plan their later rise.
Seventeen of the 25 jihadists who form the core leadership of ISIS spent time in U.S. prisons in Iraq. They were imprisoned in close proximity to adherents of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, the infamous leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who dominated television screens during the darker days of the American occupation. According to the ISIS leader interviewed by Chulov, the exposure of these former Sunni militia leaders to Al Qaeda spawned what we now call ISIS.
"We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else," Abu Ahmed says, sounding almost grateful to the Americans. "It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred meters away from the entire al-Qaeda leadership."
Later, after Zarqawi was killed, and AQI's near-total defeat at the hands of a Sunni uprising and the American surge, Baghdadi and his compatriots rebuilt the group under the ISIS banner.
None of this could have occurred were it not for the invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion Al Qaeda was a non-presence in Iraq, a fact George Bush famously acknowledged by saying
"So What?"). There would have been no impetus or opportunity for someone like al Zarqawi to flourish there. There would have been no ability for al Zarqawi's spawn of Islamic State fanatics to breed into an army that now terrorizes millions of refugees, and in fact there would be no refugees, at least out of Iraq.
This is what war means. Not the ability to put a bullet in someone from 2500 yards.
The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, says it received only 53% of the $337 million required to fund its response to internal displacement in Iraq and Syria for 2014. Meanwhile, American Sniper has earned $200 million in ticket sales since its opening, two weeks ago.
Jolie ends with a plea for help:
Much more assistance must be found to help Syria’s neighbors bear the unsustainable burden of millions of refugees. The United Nations’ humanitarian appeals are significantly underfunded. Countries outside the region should offer sanctuary to the most vulnerable refugees in need of resettlement — for example, those who have experienced rape or torture. And above all, the international community as a whole has to find a path to a peace settlement. It is not enough to defend our values at home, in our newspapers and in our institutions. We also have to defend them in the refugee camps of the Middle East, and the ruined ghost towns of Syria.
To learn about ways to help Iraqi and Syrian refugees, please go to the UNHCR's
website.