By
FRANK RICH
05/27/07 "New
York Times" -- - WHEN all
else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and
directed the Iraq war fall back on moral
self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and
democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch
rationalization has now become America’s sorriest
self-delusion in this tragedy.
However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific
dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the
geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the
administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle
East. From “Stuff
happens!” on, nearly every aspect of
Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the
beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this
animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald
Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the
war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis
themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as
the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming
“aliens” from Mexico.
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.
But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not
merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.;
it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The
easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after
all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so
we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of
purple fingers at State of the
Union time or to frame the president in
Rose Garden photo ops.
Since the 2003 invasion, America has given
only 466 Iraqis asylum.
Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing,
plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis
this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January
hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will
raise the number for this year
to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more
administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress
this month will add another piddling 500,
all interpreters.
In reality, more than
5,000 interpreters
worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of
drivers and security guards who also,
in Senator Kennedy’s phrase,
have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because
they served the occupying government and its contractors
over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these
Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s
most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador
John Bolton,
speaking to The Times Magazine
this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem
had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow:
“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.”
Actually, we haven’t fulfilled the obligation of
giving them functioning institutions and security. One
of the many reasons we didn’t was that L. Paul Bremer’s
provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with
unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in
some cases, were hired
after they expressed their
opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration
is nothing if not consistent in its employment
practices. The assistant secretary in charge of refugees
at the State Department now,
Ellen Sauerbrey, is a
twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of
Maryland with
no experience in humanitarian
crises but a hefty résumé in anti-abortion
politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie
was to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.
Ms. Sauerbrey’s official line on Iraqi refugees,
delivered to Scott Pelley of “60
Minutes” in March, is that most of them
“really want to go home.” The administration excuse for
keeping Iraqis out of America is national security: we
have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist
ties. But many of those with the most urgent cases for
resettlement here were vetted already, when the American
government and its various Halliburton subsidiaries
asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the
first place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be
vouched for, there is the contrasting lesson of Vietnam.
Julia Taft, the official in charge of refugees in the
Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000
Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months
of the fall of Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like
opposition at the time. In the past seven months, the
total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.
The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began
during the Vietnam War, told me that security worries
then were addressed by a vetting process carried out in
safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up
beyond Vietnam’s borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke
also
points out in the current Foreign
Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to
American treatment of Iraqi refugees isn’t that war in
any case, but World War II. That’s when an anti-Semitic
assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long,
tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews
from obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling
the available slots under existing quotas. As many as
75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans
cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to
Howard Sachar’s “History of the Jews in America.”
Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This
month Mr. Bremer declared that the real culprits for his
disastrous 2003 decision to cleanse Iraq of Baathist
officials were
unnamed Iraqi politicians
who “broadened the decree’s impact far beyond our
original design.” The Republican leader in the Senate,
Mitch McConnell, is
chastising the Iraqis
for being unable “to do anything they promised.”
The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski
has joked, is “blame
and run.” It started to take shape just
before the midterm elections last fall,
when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo
(propitiously leaked after his defenestration)
suggesting that the Iraqis might “have to pull up their
socks, step up and take responsibility for their
country.” 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. The Iraqis
hear us and are returning the compliment. Whether Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American demands for
timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is
setting its own timeline for American withdrawal even
while flaunting its vacation schedule, Iraq’s nominal
government is saying it’s fed up. The American-Iraqi
shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous
Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage
from hell.
While the world waits for the White House and
Congress to negotiate the separation agreement, the
damage to the innocent family members caught in the
cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush’s May
10 claim that “the
number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially”
since the surge began, The Washington Post
reported on Thursday
that the number of such murders is going up. For the
Americans, the cost is no less dear. Casualty figures
confirm that the past six months have been the
deadliest yet for our troops.
While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time
some Iraqis did greet the Americans as liberators.
Today, in fact, it is just such Iraqis —
not the local Iraqi insurgents the
president conflates with Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda in
Pakistan — who do
want to follow us home. 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. Though the war’s godfathers
saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler,
their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that
will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers
if lives are to be saved.
