I Look Forward to a News Conference Announcing U.S. Disengagement
A bit of hard-headed thinking seems to have reached the upper levels of the commentariat. Today’s New York Times has a long editorial calling for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, “The Road Home.” The writers have the courage to admit that there are no really attractive options, or at least no options without costs. The civil war is underway; withdrawal itself has costs (moving hundreds of thousands of people and millions of tons of stuff is difficult, costly, time-consuming, and dangerous); it’s impossible to control the outcome; there may be no happy ending.
A central bit of wisdom is the recognition that the prospect of indefinite U.S. military occupation makes it virtually impossible for the various warring parties to come to their own accommodation, for the simple reason that they all know that any local agreement can be upset if it’s not pleasing to the White House (or other regional players, such as Iran). Moreover, there is no way to know for sure that they will reach any stable peaceful agreement.
Americans should hang their heads in shame for the way that the U.S. government treats people from Iraq. The Times put it neatly, albeit without as much indignation as the subject deserves:
The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will â?? translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers â?? whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.
Those who eagerly supported the decision to go to war should, whether loudly or quietly, lobby Congress and the Administration to allow entry to the U.S. for translators, elected mayors, cooks, clothes washers, and others who worked with the Americans and who staked their future on the promises of the American government. It’s the least they could do.
Finaly, there is a major lesson to be learned, one that the Times editorialists did not draw: a policy of non-intervention is recommended by both morality and interest.
(When I was in Iraqi Kurdistan I was asked whether the U.S. would stand by the Kurds. I explained that American government has substantial popular input into policymaking and that it’s difficult for such systems to sustain costly military commitments — especially involving combat and death — for long. I told them to be ready for the day that the U.S. would leave. I hope that they listened.)
We Americans make great business partners but we are unreliable friends. I can not see the public reacting positively to a large-scale immigration wave from that part of the world. Luckily, there is another solution.
Door half-open immigration policy, akin to that that exist with Mexico is a suitable solution â?? make it just difficult enough so that poor, uneducated and elderly Iraqis can not make it here but younger, educated, enterprising adults can. Best of all, this option requires the least political effort or public involvement â?? lower the bar on immigration a little but mainly leave things as they are.
Civil society in Iraq is getting destroyed anyhow (whoever is to blame); why not welcome these people in? Those who will escape here from Iraq would mainly be educated and well-off people with initiative, patience and the will to succeed.
They won’t be farmers and cloth-washers; they will be learned officials, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs. I am especially looking forward to an influx of large number of medical workers willing to work in the labor-intensive, dirtier segments of our healthcare system. After all, we have aging population to take care of!
Undoubtedly some of them will carry the seeds of terrorism with them, in my opinion this is a bearable cost for bringing in thousands of professionals with skills that our economy needs and initiative to better their lives.
Sure itâ??s cynical and maybe even immoral, however, itâ??s the track that we are on right now and we might as well recognize it.
The fiasco in the Middle East is embarassing. After September 11, when Leonard Peikoff pontificated in full-page ads about the right of Americans to oil under foreign lands because ‘we’ had created the technology to extract it, I knew that all intellectual bets were off. Likewise, it was months before even stalwarts of the noninterventionist circles would dare suggest war is not an appropriate response. And when I sat there with other attorneys at the conservative National Right to Work Foundation (where I worked at the time) as they talked about how, now, after Sept. 11, ‘we’ could start with Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and Iran, and just go trample one country after another in that region, I could smell the evil seeping from their every pore. (I didn’t last long at NRTW.) I get no pleasure from being right about the war, but I gain some comfort from feeling absolutely no obligation whatsoever to pay for any of it, neither the direct costs nor the indirect future costs. Nor do I feel any obligation to make any further sacrifices to accomodate the ‘victims of war’ for whom I have no responsibility, and who I discouraged from war in the first instance. I’m not even willing to pay a minimum “fair share fee” to support a new century of ignorance in statesmanship.
I watched the Vietnamese who fled Vietnam after U.S. forces left the region were protesting the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam which now rules Vietnam with an iron fist as its leadership met with Vietnamese businessmen. The Vietnamese who protested the totalitarian ideologues who rule Vietnam are from Little Saigon based in Southern California.
The question comes, will the Iraqis and Afghanis have similar fates to the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodians? There’s a saying that states: Those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
Well, if we couldn’t get the oil perhaps we can get some quality immigrants… like they say in my native Russian,”fistful of wool from a crappy sheep”.
“Leonard Peikoff pontificated in full-page ads about the right of Americans to oil under foreign lands because ‘we’ had created the technology to extract it”
This is the old oil argument for Iraq. What about reports of Jalal Talabani resurrecting the old Saddam Era Iraq-China Oil Deal? Or perhaps Chinese weapons being used in Iraq by the insurgency?
Hmm, guess some forms of wars for oil are more equal than others.