Maybe They Should Run An Ad

(I mean, that seems to be the best way to get the attention of our U.S. Senators these days - and make it a full page in the New York Times…).

This "old gray lady" editorial yesterday brought up an important point about people who have been impacted more directly than we could ever know by the Iraq war, and they the 2.35 million refugees of that accursed enterprise (according to our best estimates). In particular, the editorial focused on the importance of helping those who have assisted this country during the war.

As the Times notes (and as I posted about here a little while ago)…

Their admission to the United States…is being delayed by a tortuous application process and lumbering bureaucratic reviews.

This latest failure was detailed in a cable sent to the State Department earlier this month by America’s ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and first published Monday in The Washington Post. (Mr. Crocker did not mention the problem in his happy-talk presentations on Capitol Hill last week.) And it is only part of a much larger refugee crisis that is already threatening to spread Iraq’s chaos throughout the region — and one the Bush administration refuses to accept as its responsibility.

Even for those Iraqis lucky enough to be tapped by the United Nations, the process of applying for refugee status is expensive, risky and has no guarantee of success. In an irony obvious to all but the Bush administration, it has decided that it is too dangerous for Department of Homeland Security officials to conduct refugee interviews inside Iraq.

The editorial notes that Ambassador Crocker (despite his reluctance to say anything during his testimony) has encouraged the State Department to speed up processing for those Iraqis who have helped us and want to come here, but you can just guess how Bushco has responded (if you think that they welcomed Crocker’s input – well, see, there’s this bridge in the New York City area that I’d like to sell to you…).

And I shouldn’t blame Crocker exclusively for not addressing this at his hearing last week with Gen. Petraeus (or at least, not much). It turns out that (based on a bit of Googling on my part) our elected representatives were so busy working themselves into a tizzy over a certain left-wing advocacy group that performs political fundraising and organizing that they neglected to say anything as well.

Welcoming Iraqis into the United States as refugees is not cost-free. It draws skilled people out of a country that desperately needs their talents and makes it increasingly likely that they will never return home. Washington, however, has a profound moral obligation, especially to those Iraqis who have risked their lives on America’s behalf. If America abandons them now, it will mean even more suffering and more shame for the United States from this shameful and disastrous war.

And speaking of Gen. Petraeus, this takes you to a good article on his performance in front of Congress (and I mean that literally) by Steve Coll in this week’s issue of The New Yorker (there’s a portion I want to excerpt, but I have a lot of trouble with their web site for some reason – I’ll try again later).

Update 9/23: I finally was able to include the Coll excerpt here...

Petraeus' recent strategy of playing for time through the application of spin politics is straining the health and vitality of the Army to which he has devoted his life. It is also deepening mistrust between civilian politicians and the military. Surely, for example, the General is conscious of the partisan Republican campaign to promote him as "Bush's Grant," and is aware of the cause: the Party expects to lose the next Presidential election because of the war, but Petraeus offers hope, however faint, that a Republican nominee might find something in Iraq to embrace. Petraeus' ambition is legendary; his pride and his professional devotion to counterinsurgency have now become entangled in an exploitative electoral machine.

Petraeus also apparently clings to the belief that Iraq’s sectarian leaders might reconcile if American forces stay the course. That opinion, shared by many in the Bush Administration, has encouraged yet another generation of unconvincing strategic plans that assume that a unified Iraq governed from Baghdad is attainable and that thousands of American troops might help patrol the capital's streets for years. A more plausible strategy, devoted to managing as successfully as possible the informal sectarian partition of Iraq which is already well under way, has again been postponed, along with substantial troop reductions.

American majorities repudiated the Vietnam War and have repudiated the invasion of Iraq. They did not lack guts then or now; they saw past the false promises and manipulations of their leaders, and called time. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden appear to share the belief that the United States is chronically afflicted with a cut-and-run syndrome, but they are both wrong: the most striking aspect of America's democracy during the catastrophe in Iraq today is not the public's inconstancy but, rather, its capacity to absorb thousands of casualties on behalf of a war that is widely understood as a mistake and has no foreseeable end.

And once more, this is just a word about Iraq from a Gold Star mom – whatever it takes, people.