In a day when a major party Senate candidate advocates a return to a barter economy and a state legislature hears serious testimony from a woman who believes the government implanted a microchip in her body, the bar has been set very high for outright denial of reality. Sentiments like these used to be confined to the less respectable tabloids and the occasional syndicated conspiracy show. Now they’ve gone mainstream. But they all fall short of the lunacy of Iraq War revisionism.
Not that any was needed, or that those inclined to think things turned out alright between the rivers will listen, but further proof of this folly recently appeared in the obscure pages of The New York Review of Books in the form of a damning article about the continued marginalization of Iraq’s massive refugee population. That refugees are rarely a part of the discussion is nothing new. Like most of the post-invasion problems, this one was completely ignored by the geniuses who started the war. Once the war was going, the Bush Administration actively ignored it because the mere existence of refugees clashed with their officially rosy view of the war. And now that it’s winding down, those same people are an unpleasant reminder of how out of hand things got.
Now that the wrongs have been done, the only decent thing left is to make sure that they are not compounded. As much as the Bush Administration failed to plan for post-invasion Iraq, the Obama Administration must plan for post-withdrawal Iraq, and that includes helping the people whose homes and lives we destroyed. It does not seem to be happening, and this does no augur well:
With US government resources stretched by the economic crisis and the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has provided only a fraction of the $2 billion in refugee aid promised to host governments in the Middle East. Iraq itself has been far less generous, despite sizable revenues from oil. For their part, humanitarian groups worry that when US troops begin to go home this summer, there will be even less reason to devote political capital to helping refugees. What was once a middle-class society without democracy may, for some time to come, be a democracy without a middle class. For talented Iraqis now scattered around the world, this would amount to a double betrayal: abandoned in their own country by the American and other forces that were supposed to give them a central place in a new Iraq, they now risk being abandoned again outside it.
$2 billion? That’s it? $2 billion is a rounding error on the War Department’s budget. It is a number so pitifully small that there needn’t even be a debate about it. And if Obama is serious about improving America’s image, this would be an extremely cheap way to buy a motherlode of global good will.
But there is no glory in respecting the dispossessed; there is no rah-rah in comforting those we wronged. So we’ll abandon them to the wind, and should the subject ever come up in diplomatic conversation, we’ll throw our weight around and make it disappear. However little attention it gets, it is still real. Lives destroyed by us are as destroyed as those by anyone else.
Acknowledging them, it’s – literally – the least we can do.
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 