Blessings of freedom
On the question of which was worse, America’s involvement in the Vietnam war or the subsequent North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam, the late ambassador Vernon Walters, a great and staunch Cold Warrior, once said (the following is from memory):
When there was fighting in every hamlet in South Vietnam, when war consumed the country, there were no refugees. It took a North Vietnamese victory to send a million people onto the sea in open boats.
Memorable words. But they make me think bitterly of the very different situation we are in today, which, paraphrasing Walters, could be described as follows:
When Saddam Hussein and his demented sons controlled Iraq with an iron fist, when the entire nation writhed under a regime of fear and torture, there were no refugees. It took an American occupation and the establishment of democracy to send a million Iraqis fleeing the country for their lives.
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Bill A. writes:
Your comments are well-intentioned:
When Saddam Hussein and his demented sons controlled Iraq with an iron fist, when the entire nation writhed under a regime of fear and torture, there were no refugees. It took an American occupation and the establishment of democracy to send a million Iraqis fleeing the country for their lives.
However, the facts are otherwise. In the year 2000, for example, there were almost two million Iraqis living outside the country because of fear of Saddam. The two countries which together accounted for originating the largest share of the world’s refugees were Afghanistan and Iraq. There were almost four million Afghan refugees and almost two million Iraqi refugees.
Almost all of those nearly six million refugees returned home after U.S. military power toppled the vicious regimes that they had escaped. That was an unprecedented phenomenon, and a resounding vote of confidence in the future.
Those Iraqis who are now fleeing the country are not fleeing American occupation or the establishment of democracy. They are fleeing terrorists. In many cases, directed by the same Ba’athist monsters who directed Saddam’s daily terrors.
LA replies:
Of course I knew there were Iraqi exiles during the reign of Hussein. Naturally there were, because the Iraqi National Congress, with people like Chalabi, were exiles. Yet the exiles were people who had mostly been living outside Iraq for many years. There was not an ongoing stream of people fleeing or seeking to flee the country, which is now the case.
Also, of course, I was not suggesting that people are fleeing American occupation and democracy as such. That was a shorthand way of stating that it was the American occupation with its cult of creating democracy first instead of security first that destroyed the existing “order” in Iraq (put in scare quotes because the “order” was that of a fear regime), and did not replace it by order but by a Hobbesian jungle liberating the most evil people on the planet sending large parts of the Iraqi population including its more skilled and educated people fleeing from the country. I don’t have the figures at hand, but obviously there are more Iraqis living outside Iraq now than there were in February 2003.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 17, 2007 12:42 AM | Send