How democratization can lead to mass refugee influx

The below discussion points to a very troublesome likely consequence of our ideologically driven and strategically flawed attempt to democratize Iraq which I did not think of before the war, but should have. I don’t know of anyone who did. Namely, that once we began to try to reconstruct Iraq according to our own guidelines, if the effort then failed, any Iraqis who had supported us would be doomed, and we would have to admit all such people to the United States. Before the war, while I supported the war to overthrow the Hussein regime, I argued against Bush’s ideology of war for the sake of democratizing the Moslem world, but not on the specific ground laid out below:

… There is a minority of civilized, educated, and reasonable Iraqis that want a government of laws and that can impose order. But they are just a minority. You only need to read some Iraqi blogs to see that this is true and that they represent a significant portion of the population (but likely less than a majority).

Posted by: Tyrone Washington on November 12, 2004 05:45 PM

“…but likely less than a majority.”

Right. So scratch liberal democracy. And scratch the notion of a pent-up energetic liberalism willing to sacrifice itself for “freedom” as a long-term strategic consideration. Because if it comes to it they will be sacrificed, just like the ones we encouraged to depose Saddam in ‘91…. And, though it has been pointed out before I’ll point it out again: when reality hits, many of those progressive Iraqis are going to need to emigrate to somewhere just to stay out of the mass graves. Guess who is coming to dinner?

Posted by: Matt on November 12, 2004 06:03 PM

Matt writes:

“when reality hits, many of those progressive Iraqis are going to need to emigrate to somewhere just to stay out of the mass graves. Guess who is coming to dinner?”

Before the war, various people warned against the likelihood that once we took over Iraq, that would inevitably produce lots of Iraqi immigrants to the U.S. David here at VFR made that point several times. The logical answer, from a pro-war yet immigration restrictionist perspective, was that there was nothing inevitable about such immigration, and that such a demand could be dealt with when it came up.

But the specific scenario that Matt raises now was not raised before the war. To have envisioned it would have required thinking more steps into the future than anyone did at the time. The argument would have gone like this:

“If we invade Iraq and topple its regime, we will become responsible for running the country and establishing an orderly envirnment in which a new regime can survive and function. But anti-U.S. elements in Iraq will regard any regime that we help set up as a U.S. puppet, and they will fight a terror war as in Algeria to destroy such a government. We will not have the means to defeat these terrorists, and we will not have the will to stay in Iraq permanently to help prop up the new regime. Sooner or later we will inevitably withdraw from Iraq and our enemies will then take over and start killing all the Iraqis who supported us or worked with us. That could be hundreds of thousands of people. We will then have to admit all our Iraqi allies into the U.S. in order to save their lives, a vast flood of Moslem Arab refugees.”

This argument contains two key conclusions: that America would not have the long-term ability to assure a successor regime in Iraq, and that America would end up taking in a huge Iraqi refugee stream.

If this argument had been made in a persuasive way before the war, I wonder how I would have responded to it. I think I would have said that this shows that we must topple Hussein, set up some strong man in his place as quickly as possible, and leave. The war would be purely to get rid of the Hussein regime and clear out the WMDs, without any larger expectation of transforming Iraq.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on November 12, 2004 06:24 PM

Mr. Auster wrote:

“The logical answer, from a pro-war yet immigration restrictionist perspective, was that there was nothing inevitable about such immigration, and that such a demand could be dealt with when it came up.”

Exactly. The key problem here is that we are creating and isolating that future group of refugees right now, and we will have a moral obligation to them specifically because of that. If our strategy had been to set up a pro-US strongman and leave then we would not have attracted, isolated, and identified this future group of purge victims. Having done so though I don’t see how the moral duty to provide them with asylum can be denied. By the time this is all said and done we might as well have tatooed them and rounded them up.

Posted by: Matt on November 12, 2004 06:40 PM

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 13, 2004 01:15 PM | Send