Some of the blog-specific talk out there in the past couple weeks has related to the well-known Iraqi blogger who went by the name of Riverbend. I discovered this recent “where’s Riverbend?” theme after I, too, remembered her blog today and wondered if she had written anything new. She had not. Her last post was three months ago, and began with the ominious line: “Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city.” It ended with these anxious remarks:
I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know just how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left the country this bleak summer. I wonder how many of them will actually return. Where will they go? What will they do with themselves? Is it time to follow? Is it time to wash our hands of the country and try to find a stable life somewhere else?
Let us hope that she and all those fleeing Iraqis have found some safe refuge. Let us hope that the reason she no longer writes of Baghdad is that she has long since gotten out of that city and out of the country all together.
These people cannot find basic security in their own country, which this war has ruined, perhaps irremediably.
Update: I have previously linked to Riverbend a few times here, here and here.
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October 7th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Grumpy Old Man
Good point. If we follow your advice and leave, how many Riverbends will be be morally obligated to take in?
October 7th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Daniel Larison
Unfortunately, we would likely be obliged to take in a great many, probably many hundreds of thousands or a million at least. It could be much higher than that, depending on how many ultimately flee the country. Yet another reason why I don’t like interventionism and imperial adventures: if you fail, you are obliged to take in the people who openly took your side.
I am not enthusiastic at such a prospect for all kinds of reasons, and there would obviously need to be some close scrutiny of asylum-seekers so that jihadis and nationalist fanatics can’t get into the country to launch attacks here, but if done wisely and scrupulously it seems to me that this would be the least that we should do for the Iraqis when we finally do withdraw.
October 7th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Grumpy Old Man
I agree on both points–if we withdraw we will have to take many in, and taking in Iraqis has both security risks and potential social costs. In particular, we may have to take in many Iraqi Christians whose safety cannot be assured in an Islamized state.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the Vietnamese have integrated fairly well, the Cambodians less so, and the Hmong least well of all.
How many Goths did Rome take in before it fell?
This set of issues must be carefully considered by those who would put early withdrawal on the table.
October 7th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Daniel Larison
I certainly agree about the failed integration of the Hmong. The difference with the Romans is that they did not keep invading Germany and the northern coast of the Black Sea to get their influx of refugees; we can avoid more of these kinds of “Goth” problems if we did much more to both secure the borders and conducted a less interventionist foreign policy.
I would be glad to consider problems such as this if we could come to a consensus that withdrawing from Iraq is most in the national interest. There won’t be any other kind of withdrawal but “early withdrawal”–if it is wise the next administration, no matter the party affiliation, will withdraw the bulk of our forces long before Iraq has been made secure or stable.
The “political solution” there is failing, and I don’t think anyone thinks that the security situation has seriously improved (Warner observed unsurprisingly that it was worse than the last time he was there) and I don’t see how it is going to be saved by the shedding of more American blood. Getting our people out of Iraq remains the priority for me, but justice does demand that we take the asylum seekers in as well. Priority would need to be given to the smaller minority groups, who likely have no future in the new Iraq. Even Sunnis have more of a fighting chance in the new order than Assyrians and Turkomen.
No one is going to be excited at the prospect of taking in Sunni refugees, and here the scrutiny of asylum-seekers will have to be particularly intense. In cases such as this, perhaps allied states in the region could pick up some of the slack and take in those refugees more likely to adapt to their societies than they would to ours; convincing them/bribing them to do this would take some doing, but it might be a way to provide asylum for those who need to escape Iraq as it collapses without unduly threatening the U.S. Jordan has already taken in a great many refugees, so they will be a hard sell, so the Saudis would likely be the obvious candidate, and they will not be terribly enthusiastic about this, either. Perhaps the Gulf states…But there will have to be some kind of arbitrary limit established. Accommodating the movement of more than a tenth of the Iraqi population, which would be the top limit, would probably be politically impossible for any administration to sell to the public, and beyond that level I would have a hard time justifying it. You could also expect many of the people who talk about immigration in terms of being humanitarian to suddenly discover the wisdom of keeping out the foreigners when they are confronted with some of these asylum-seekers.