Bring In The Refugees

I'm sitting here watching a little of President Ford's funeral, and am reminded that one of the great things he did was to overrule all his advisers and make arrangements for hundreds of thousands of refugees from South Vietnam to be patriated into this country. Those men, women and children surely would have died at the hands of the Viet Cong without this swift action. It occurs to me that if our current President is still awake, he would do right to remember this decision, and to mirror it by extending the same hand to those Iraqi citizens whose lives are in his hands.

The refugees are witnesses to the cruelty that stains our age, and they cannot be overlooked. America bears heavy responsibility for their plight. We have a clear obligation to stop ignoring it and help chart a sensible course to ease the refugee crisis. Time is not on our side. We must act quickly and effectively [...]

There is an overwhelming need for temporary relief and permanent resettlement. Last year, however, America accepted only 202 Iraqi refugees, and next year we plan to accept approximately the same number. We and other nations of the world need to do far better.

Thousands of these refugees are fleeing because they have been affiliated in some way with the United States. Cooks, drivers and translators have been called traitors for cooperating with the United States. They know all too well that the fate of those who work with U.S. civilians or military forces can be sudden death. Yet, beyond a congressionally mandated program that accepts 50 Iraqi translators from Iraq and Afghanistan each year, the administration has done nothing to resettle brave Iraqis who provided assistance in some way to our military. This lack of conscience is fundamentally unfair. We need to do much more to help Iraqi refugees, especially those who have helped our troops.

Our nation is spending $8 billion a month to wage the war in Iraq. Yet to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the refugees who have fled the war, the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the current fiscal year.

It's maybe the most despicable outcome of this war in Iraq. The Administration is intellectually incapable of bringing in those refugees because of the signal it would send that the war is a failure. But people's lives are at stake, people who are being targeted because of their relationship to the United States. They are being left to die in much the same way that the Shiites were left to die at the hands of Saddam Hussein, when we asked them to rise up and overthrow him, yet offered no support. That was the work of Bush's father. This President has a choice to make; will he take the model of his father, or of Gerald Ford, who valued the human cost over the rhetorical or perceived advantage in a political sense.

Bush may ask for an new economic plan for Iraqi citizens (you mean there WASN'T one before?), but it's far too late for any of that. Giving an Iraqi the opportunity for a job is cold comfort in a country where job recruitment centers are increasingly targets for suicide bombers.

Neoconservatives talk a lot about our moral obligation to Iraq. But they don't want to engage in any action to prove their war was a failure. If they felt TRULY obligated to the Iraqi people, they would join Ted Kennedy in calling on the President to provide relief and resettlement for those whose lives we've turned upside down.

Doing what we can to bring aid to this humanitarian crisis has a political benefit as well. Relieving the burden off of not only Iraqi civilians but the Muslim countries into which they are largely pouring, would be very important in rebuilding our shattered image in that part of the world. But none of that is really so important. What's important is a small girl who doesn't know that her heritage makes her marked for death. What's important is a baker who lives in the wrong village, who has grown up with a different view of Islam than those with guns and bombs. What's important is that we have the conviction that America helps those put into peril by our own actions. To ignore that imperative would be tragic and very nearly criminal.