On top of everything else in Iraq, the prospect of refugees
A reader writes:
As I have said, the main result of this war will be a flood of Iraqis to this country. If we pulled out tomorrow, many will flee to avoid being killed by the new rulers. We will be “morally obligated” to take them in. However, I think most of the war supporters are satisfied with a permanent American military presence in Iraq. You might call this their “strategy.” Of course, a steady stream of Iraqis will be coming here in this situation.
While this is going on, our Southern border is a sieve as usual. The Iraq war takes away from what (little) effort is made to control it.
My reply:
Though I do not support our present policy in Iraq, I have never advocated simply pulling out. Any pull-out has to have a strategic context, not merely be a mindless reaction of “enough”! At present there is no strategic context.
But you are bringing a new and disturbing dimension into the issue. A precipitate pull-out means chaos and killings, and lots of refugees. Tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have cooperated with us infidels could be killed if the infidels pulled out. So we’re in an even deeper fix than we thought.
And this leads to the importance of the idea, recently advanced by William Lind and David Brooks, and in an article in Foreign Affairs, that we replicate what Creighton Abrams successfully did in Vietnam under President Nixon—the step by step securing of discrete towns, cities, and regions, and keeping them secure from the enemy, so that the secure part of the country keeps gradually expanding; rather than, Westermoreland-like, going out on missions that kill enemy in various places and then allow the enemy to return to those same places. For two years I’ve been arguing that security must precede democratic government; yet mainstream opinion-makers such as Brooks are only arriving at this self-evident proposition now. This is an indication of the disappearance of meaningful public discourse—or, should I say, of any serious thought at all—in this country since 9/11.
But a further problem, as I’ve said many times, is that even if our forces made Iraq relatively secure for the time being, they will still have to leave at some point, and then the government will most likely fall and there will be murders of U.S. “collaborators” or all-out civil war, and we’ll still have a massive refugee problem.
As a result of our liberal approach to the war, in which we removed the regime while failing truly to conquer the country and defeat the remaining regime elements, and in which we then embarked on the long-term democratization of the country which implicated hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with us infidels and thus placed them all at risk of death, we have now got a wolf by the ears.
The lesson should be absolutely clear. If we attempt to democratize a Muslim country, we automatically turn all the people in that country who support our democratization effort into apostates and infidels in the eyes of the jihadists, thus dooming our allies to violent death if the jihadists ever return to power, and thus requiring us to take in all our allies as refugees.
That lesson provides further support for Lawrence Auster’s First Principle of Western-Islamic Relations: Any intimate involvement between Islam and the West must harm the West. And that is why I propose, not the reform or transformation of Islam, but its isolation and containment.
In an e-mail list, a couple of readers offer creative and reasonable suggestions to get us out of the Iraq refugee trap:
First correspondent:
We don’t need to set them all up with liquor stores in California like we did with Air Marshal Ky, but we do need to find someplace that’ll take them in. One of the North African Arab countries might do it for the right price. Nobody who worked for us in any capacity is going to be safe in Iraq after we leave.
Second correspondent:
Why don’t we create a protected zone on the border with Kurdistan? If that’s going to be off-limits to the Baghdad regime, it can’t be that hard to extend the safe zone a bit more. Isn’t there some city we could give them?
We’ve got to get the principle into action that we don’t leave people to die, but that doesn’t mean they start sleeping on our couch.
First correspondent:
Another reason to park them in a neutral country is that our collaborators are thoroughly infiltrated by the other side. In some areas like translation or Sunni triangle police, the estimates run as high as one out of two. Most of those are old Baathist intelligence but some are jihadis. If we couldn’t screen them when we hired them, we’re not going to be able to screen them now.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 30, 2005 01:17 PM | Send