Tethered Swimming

Our Mesopotamian adventure reached two milestones this week, four thousand dead Americans and five years duration.  Neither is to be celebrated but both provide useful excuses for a sprinkling of news coverage and the usual back and forth over whether or not the war is working, was worth it, etcetera.  It amounts to little more than padding; last fall the Democratic Congress and Bush the Younger reached a stalemate over the war and more or less conspired to postpone a reckoning until after the election.  All debate about Iraq since has been a sideshow.  The next truly meaningful exchanges about the war will occur this fall and will be between Senators Obama and McCain (plus their various proxies and subordinates).

Regardless of the outcome of the war, or of the election on which it hangs, there have been countless Iraqis who have in good faith aided our efforts in their country.  This includes interpreters who’ve gone out with our military units, stringers and locals who’ve worked with our journalists, and various staff who keep American bases, as well as the Green Zone, up and running.  (George Packer wrote a brutal article about some of these people a year ago in The New Yorker.)   These people and their families took the United States of America up on an offer to help their country and yet all but a lucky few have been left to twist in the wind should they need to escape the flaming remains of Iraq.

It should come as no surprise that we’ve shit all over these people, shitting on brown people is one of the defining characteristics of the US Government going all the way back to its inception, but that doesn’t make it any less shameful.  Refugees International has a page set up at their website where you can see just how screwed up the Iraqi refugee situation is.  Near the bottom is this:

The U.S. fell far short of its promise to permanently resettle 7,000 vulnerable Iraqis in the 2007 fiscal year.

The U.S. promised to resettle 12,000 Iraqis in the 2008 fiscal year, but the program is off to a slow start.

That is beyond pathetic, beyond embarrassing.  We took in 1,608 Iraqis between October 2006 and September 2007?  Words fail.  We ought to be throwing the doors open to these people, for their benefit and ours.

There are three main objections to that policy.  The first is that some of them may be terrorists in hiding trying to get over here to hurt us.  The second is that resettling large numbers of Iraqis in the US is tantamount to admitting that our Iraq policy has failed.  The third is the old NIMBY objection.  None of those three excuses amounts to a hill of beans.

Whether we’re talking about people who’ve worked for our government in Iraq or ordinary civilians who found their lives in danger and had to flee, the idea that some of them might be terrorists in hiding is the stuff of bad fiction.  It’s not an ideal situation, it’s not the striving and yearning to breathe free of immigrant lore, but these are people who’ve had their lives thrown into utter chaos and disorder by our actions.  Extending our hospitality to as many of them as possible is the least we can do.

As for admitting that our policies have failed, well c’mon we do that every day.  Even by the Bush Administration’s own reckoning things are fragile and progress is slow.  What’s one more euphemism?  Call it “temporary”, call them “guests”, use whatever bland meaningless terms you need to use to convince the press and the public that they aren’t coming here permanently and get them on an airplane.

Then there’s good old NIMBY.  Refugees are not something ordinary people generally want around them and their homes, but this is a big country and according to the 2000 census there were already 1.2 million Americans of Arab descent.  Most of those aren’t Iraqis of course, but there is already large population here (which has almost certainly grown since 2000) that can be used to help resettle Iraqis who can no longer live in Iraq.

There would be obvious benefits to the new arrivals, but we would benefit as well.  This is a war which most Americans don’t like thinking about, even now when we’re in the midst of it, and the day it ends we’ll do our best to forget it as quickly as possible.  By coming to America and settling here Iraqis would serve as a living reminder of the war, and the more of them who stay, who become Americans just like the rest of us, the better off we’ll all be.  Home grown Americans would benefit by seeing that Arabs really are just people; the new Americans might understand this country as more than a far off place that sends troops all over the world.

We owe these people a debt of honor, the ones who’ve worked for us and the regular refugees.  A simple enough starting point ought to be the former group.  We asked for their assistance and they gave it, sometimes at personal risk that would shrivel the guts of people who’ve never had to face such choices.  Of all the failures of our policies in that miserable country, this one is unambiguously indefensible.