A recurring theme among die-hard defenders of the Iraq occupation is that even if we’re seeing no progress and the Iraqi government failed to meet its benchmarks, we have to stay and fight because if we leave it will be chaos! Genocide! Civil war!
In a recent speech, Bush compared what might happen to what happened in South Vietnam when the war ended: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people.’”
The trouble with this argument is that the refugee crisis has already happened: Two million Iraqis have fled the country since the war started and 2.2 million have been “displaced internally.”
Syria has taken in 1.5 million Iraqi refugees and Syria only had 20 million people to start with; since 2002, we’ve averaged 191 Iraqi refugees a year (these figures courtesy of the Obsidian Wings blog).
Bush is quite right that when we pull out, there will be a lot of bloodletting and much of it will be directed at people who worked with our military or the CPA. A lot of violence is already directed at these people.
His solution: Increase Iraqi immigration to 10,000 - 12,000 a year.
At that rate we could take in all the refugees in oh, 200 years or so.
Given our responsibility for the current state of affairs, I’d think we could do better.
Then again, Bush claims we’re still on the way to victory so maybe he sincerely believes all those refugees will be able to return home in a few years. Just like he may have sincerely believed there was no need for extra troops to maintain control during the occupation, because we were going to be welcomed as liberators.
We all know how that turned out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.