Knowing When to Fold 'Em

Amnesty International called some months ago "for the US, UK and other states contributing troops to the Multi-National Force (MNF) in Iraq to follow the lead of the Danish government and provide for the resettlement of Iraqis whose lives are now at risk because they are seen to have assisted the foreign forces, as interpreters, drivers and in other roles." It's a topic that I've mentioned here before and that's been treated in The New Yorker and elsewhere to seemingly little avail.

Daniel Davies brings people up to date with the state of play in the UK. I think it's becoming increasingly clear that the main impediment to doing something sensible and humane about this is simply that organizing it correctly would require the organizing governments to concede that their mission in Iraq has basically failed. In the alternate reality where the surge is working (or we need to wait and see) and all the country needs is strategic patience or a renewed emphasis on bipartisanship, there's no room for something like a refugee crisis and, therefore, no possibility of special concern for those Iraqis we owe the most and who we've done the most to endanger.

Comments

I always thought that the main argument in opposition to letting Iraqis emigrate was that they would pose a security threat if they settled in the US/UK. That may not apply to just translators and their families but I think the countries that have invaded Iraq have a moral obligation to accept all exile-seekers, not just those who directly worked for the coalition.

Posted by Diogenes | August 13, 2007 6:25 PM

"I think the countries that have invaded Iraq have a moral obligation to accept all exile-seekers, not just those who directly worked for the coalition"

Why? They knew the risk they were taking, probably better than the people who hired them.

Remember it was Iraqi exiles who helped get us into this disaster in the first place. I can not see how a large population of Iraqi exiles continuously advocating for the U.S. to go back and 'finish the job' will do us any good.

Posted by RickDFL | August 13, 2007 6:41 PM

Amnesty and other Leftist NGO's declarations on the need for the West to take in millions of refugees, or just the people and extended clans who "helped" by accepting American money - are predicated on America fleeing and the terrorists taking over. Or somehow believing that infidel Christian nations are obligated to take in Sunni victims of Muslim religious cleansing instead of "Brother Arabs".

Or somehow obligated to take in a large contingent of people that were an economic elite (like the Vietnamese connected political class, and land-owning, business, merchant class) who either fence-straddled for 5 years or flat out refused to have their sons fight for a better country...

I don't think Americans really want a new mass wave of immigrants, particularly from the ME, especially from tribes & families that treated America as the enemy. Or packs of wheeler-dealers inside the Green Zone that became multimillionaires off US taxpayer money and failed to deliver on their promises. And especially those that killed and maimed Americans and our allies, or helped the militias and AQ that did..

Many who took the money were simply helping themselves, then gunning for our soldiers at night. A few hundred the troops whacked turned out to be US camp employees or cops in their daytime jobs.

Right now, 1.2 million Sunnis fled to Syria. 750,000 to Jordan. A ticket to the USA with 10 years of generous refugee benefits and free college and a head of the line pass to US citizenship sounds lots better - as it does for 50 million other refugees in cruddy situations - than staying and fighting for a better native country...Same with those ethnically cleansed in a future civil war that somehow find Dearborn Michigan and Londonistan preferable to life with their fellow Sunni Arabs in Mesopotamia.

But if the Danish liberals could use a few million Sunni Arabs, as well as hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites that will be on losing political factions if the US is forced to run - Bless 'em!

Posted by Chris Ford | August 13, 2007 7:00 PM

A ticket to the USA with 10 years of generous refugee benefits and free college and a head of the line pass to US citizenship sounds lots better - as it does for 50 million other refugees

Where do you come up with this stuff? I mean, really.

Posted by UN Plaza | August 13, 2007 7:22 PM

UN Plaza: Yes, he is priceless. "Free college".

I thought we were liberators in Iraq.....just Not In My Back Yard, evidently.

Posted by Andruw | August 13, 2007 7:30 PM

I don't think the primary reason for not helping the translators is either "security" or "denial of failure".

I think it's simply primate racism. Pure and simple.

The countries that invaded Iraq didn't give a damn about Iraqis when they were starving and dying of illnesses due to the sanctions. Why should they care now when the Iraqis are killing their soldiers in bleeding batches? They don't care about the 300,000 civilians the US occupation killed, or the millions who were displaced as a result of the war.

Personally, I tend to agree with those who say the translators were traitors to the Iraqi people by helping the US occupation. Like the guy who (supposedly) ratted out Saddam's sons. Doesn't matter that Saddam's sons were cretins who deserved to die many times over. Whatever the translator's motivations - money or a genuine desire to help Iraq get better - the bottom line in the real world is that they aided "the enemy" - an enemy that killed as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilians for no good reasons, and whose actions resulted in millions more being displaced.

If the situations were reversed, US citizens would be bellowing to string up any US citizen who helped an occupying army. Look at how they want to string up anybody who even thinks about having anything to do with "Al Qaeda" or Islam.

It might be wrong, but it's perfectly understandable. Which is why I don't care about it, either.

Welcome to the reality of human primate hierarchical behavior.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 13, 2007 7:31 PM

Amnesty and other Leftist NGO's declarations on the need for the West to take in millions of refugees, or just the people and extended clans who "helped" by accepting American money - are predicated on America fleeing and the terrorists taking over.

Ooh...sorry, you don't win the dinette set; that is the wrong answer. The correct answer is "there is already an Iraqi refugee crisis, what with the 2 million Iraqis already having fled the country".

Also: any wingnut who opposes taking in much larger numbers of Iraqi refugees should be laughed out of the room if he/she ever tries to pretend to give a rat's ass about the welfare of Iraqis--e.g., warning about 'genocide' if the U.S. leaves

Posted by Tom Hilton | August 13, 2007 7:38 PM

"Personally, I tend to agree with those who say the translators were traitors to the Iraqi people by helping the US occupation. Like the guy who (supposedly) ratted out Saddam's sons. Doesn't matter that Saddam's sons were cretins who deserved to die many times over...

If the situations were reversed, US citizens would be bellowing to string up any US citizen who helped an occupying army. Look at how they want to string up anybody who even thinks about having anything to do with "Al Qaeda" or Islam.

It might be wrong, but it's perfectly understandable. Which is why I don't care about it, either."

That's an interesting perspective. So in your view, if some self-admittedly wrong behavior is "perfectly understandable," that then gives you the moral justification not to care about it.

It's not clear to me why the Iraqis who aided the occupation should all die for some abstract concept of treason, especially when the invading nations have a direct responsibility towards the fate of those who aided them. Of course, the failure of those nations in this respect is also "perfectly understandable," for a variety of reasons, which I suppose makes it okay...

Posted by Korha | August 13, 2007 8:19 PM

"especially when the invading nations have a direct responsibility towards the fate of those who aided them"

Why? Says Who? Countries have been invading each other since the start of time. Those who aide them do well if they do well. If they do badly, their local allies do badly. The Iraqis knew this and made their bet. There is no implicit promise that they would be taken care of no matter what.

Posted by RickDFL | August 13, 2007 8:40 PM

It's worth pointing out that the people who aided U.S. forces in Iraq were probably mostly Shia. It's far from clear to me that the Iraqi Shia owed any duty of loyalty to the Sunni-supremacist Baathist regime run by Saddam.

Posted by Josh G. | August 13, 2007 8:51 PM

And I see that Chris Ford is still posting from a bizarre alternative universe. You can argue with someone who is wrong about certain specific facts, but how can you argue with someone whose statements have only a tangential relationship with reality?

Posted by Josh G. | August 13, 2007 8:52 PM

Yes, this is an ideal time to let more refugees into the country because, you know, the USA is in such stellar financial shape that we can afford to take care of everybody! Just ask the Fed, which can just print more money, or the Chinese, who can just lend us more money!

Posted by kafka | August 13, 2007 9:13 PM

I think it's becoming increasingly clear that the main impediment to doing something sensible and humane about this is simply that organizing it correctly would require the organizing governments to concede that their mission in Iraq has basically failed.

I think it has more to do with plain old anti-immigrant sentiment. After all, one could ostensibly make the case that a "successful" Iraq war would nonetheless create a class of people who would want and indeed deserve a new life abroad. The Second World War was a success from the perspective of the western allies, but still managed to create millions of refugees -- some of whom ultimately made it to the US (and Canada, Australia, Britain, etc.).

I don't know too much about the situation in the United Kingdom, but if American politicians don't deem it politically possible to allow the already-fairly-assimilated illegal Latino underclass to permanently settle, what are the chances they'll give green cards to another group of brown people who happen to be Muslim? Good heavens. And, by the way, as big a fan of generous immigration levels as I am (I get the "open borders" epitaph thrown at my all the time on the internets), even I would (shamefully) admit to a bit of trepidation about allowing several hundred thousand displaced Iraqis to settle in the US (but nonetheless, I would support it in the end because it's the right thing to do).

Posted by Jasper | August 13, 2007 9:16 PM

Here is a quite disgusting opinion piece from Matt's fellow Guardian contributor on the subject

http://users.guardian.co.uk/signin/status/tr

Posted by Dave | August 13, 2007 11:04 PM

When Hong Kong reverted to China some years ago, The Economist had a sharp and apt remark about stupid Lady Thatcher's refusal to give out England-valid passports to all and sundry:

"Doesn't she realise that we must give them passports and visas so that they will never need to use them?"

No established hot-dog vendor in Hong Kong ever wanted to relocate to England's dark Satanic mills -- but the opportunity to do so would have given them insurance against being pushed around by the thug-dolt segment of the incoming government.

Same goes for Iraq: I don't really think there are a lot of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, or anybody else sitting around saying "Hey, let's wait for the Americans to get lost so we can get down to some *real* killing." Things don't work so.

My view, in opposition, as always, to the fools in the Bushlet crew, is that people who have worked for democracy and secularism under the US invasion (or in the interstices between where the American invasion were trying to establish the theocracy du jour,) will be very necessary to Iraq's recovery from the Bush smash-up.

But obviously if such people think they are at the mercy of an incoming sectarian and theocratic government, they will be on the next plane for Jordan, Caracas, Havana, wherever.

Only by promising these valuable people the possibility of safety in America, or Britain, or one of the other NATO countries, can it possibly be rational for them to stay and rebuild.

-dlj.

Posted by David Lloyd-Jones | August 13, 2007 11:22 PM

We are fighting them there so we don't have to fight 'em here. If we resettle Iraqis in Minnesota the terrorists win. Now if they were any good at stoop labor it might make sense as long as we could pay them less than mexicans.

Posted by central valley republican | August 14, 2007 4:23 AM

My original statement:

"It might be wrong, but it's perfectly understandable. Which is why I don't care about it, either."

A response:

"That's an interesting perspective. So in your view, if some self-admittedly wrong behavior is "perfectly understandable," that then gives you the moral justification not to care about it."

No, you completely miss my points.

1) "It might be wrong" only if you take some "moral" viewpoint about it. I don't.

It also "might be wrong" if you take a practical viewpoint of it. It might be better to leave people alone who may have helped the occupation, but who didn't actually kill any Iraqis themselves. However, a translator accompanying US troops on patrols which result in arrests and torture of innocent Iraqis in Abu Ghraib certainly bears some responsibility for those results. And that's how a lot of Iraqis see it. If you consider their attitude wrong, then move on to my other point below.

2) I don't use "moral" justifications for anything, because I don't believe in "morality" - which is just a catch-word for "I'm better than you because I said so."

3) "It might be wrong" isn't "self-admission." It's a hypothetical.

4) My main was that if the roles were reversed, US citizens would be stringing up "traitors" here. If it's wrong there, it's wrong here - and any number of people in this country have already denounced anybody against the war as "traitors" and some have requested such people be imprisoned.

5) Many of the people who helped the occupation can be argued to be "traitors" to the Iraqi people. Why should we be helping them - to prove it?

The bottom line: if you think the war was "right" in some sense, then you think we should those Iraqis who helped us.

If you think the war was completely illegal and that any rational person would see our actions there as criminal, then it is reasonable to believe that anyone who helped us was, if not criminal in THEIR intentions, at least naive and therefore not someone we really should care about if we intend to reverse course on this issue.

My bottom line: I don't care because I don't care about a lot of things and a lot of humans - and this is one set I don't care about.

Personally I think every single US soldier who served in Iraq - and all their officers and commanders up to the President - should be arrested, tried for war crimes and sent to Leavenworth.

"I was only following orders" is no excuse.

Of course, by that logic, I should be arrested for having enlisted in the US Army in 1967 (to avoid the draft which would have meant I was infantry) and being sent to Vietnam.

OTOH, I would be willing to excuse those soldiers who didn't actually do anything directly to harm Iraqi civilians or Iraqi insurgents. Which lets me off the hook for Vietnam.

Iraq IS a war crime - let there be no mistake. Every single soldier or airman who dropped bombs on or shot Iraqi civilians or insurgents is a war criminal.

You can make a political decision not to prosecute everybody if you want to. But those who organized and prosecuted this war are war criminals and need to be at the very least removed from their offices.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 14, 2007 8:44 PM