Our Responsibility for the Iraqi Exodus

Anna Husarka gets it tragically right:

"At the moment, given the level of violence in Iraq, every single Iraqi should be considered a refugee [because they are] victims of violence," says Stéphane Jaquemet, UNHCR's regional representative in the Middle East. So, currently, repatriation is out of the question. Neither Syria nor Jordan is offering local integration to the refugees, and the difficult economic, political, and social situation in those countries doesn't favor local absorption. This makes the option of resettlement the most compelling. But it is not happening yet. In the first nine months of 2006, a total of 404 Iraqis were resettled worldwide, 151 of them in the United States. (In other words, in six months, the American government offers a chance to start a new life to as many Iraqis as are killed each day in the civil war that has followed the U.S.-led intervention in their country.)

It makes the skin crawl to assess a raging humanitarian nightmare according to the rules of historical equivalence. But we compare Saddam to Hitler and Stalin, so World War II, like it not, obtrudes once more into the debate. The United States has a poor to mixed record on opening its borders to war-ravaged and bedraggled masses when the chaos they're fleeing from was not of the United State's own making. How will posterity judge us if turn our backs on Iraqis escaping a civil war for which we're responsible? (You can argue its inevitability with or without regime change, but you can't argue that we've become the stewards of failed state and thus accountable to its citizens.)

Neoconservatives like Bill Kristol have said they little about immigration, perhaps having shrewdly anticipated that they'd need an updated Ellis Island homily to save the day in Mesopotamia. But I'd very much like to hear Lou Dobbs' nativist take on the Iraqi exodus. Or any yellow dog Democrat's, for that matter.

Iraqi refugees in Jordan. – By Anna Husarska – Slate Magazine