Big Thread O' Iraq (with bonus Iran!)

[Tydeus]

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

Naw you're cool. I mean as far as this thread I actually think we probably agree on a lot of this, more than may be readily apparent.

Anyway I'm the last person to say anything about people being long winded. I don't think anyone's gonna stress it too hard as long as you're not being long winded and getting pissed off at people at the same time.

Cool. Just wanted to make sure.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

In all honesty yeah, that's probably about what I do think America owes the Iraqi people.

Minus the part about us piping in American culture, I mean, I don't think we're doing anybody any favors there.

Yeah, Iraq could probably do without Paris Hilton. We could do what my parents did with me when I was younger -- tell them they only get PBS. If I'm any measure, we could keep 'em fooled for, like, at least ten years.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

But mainly it's just that all that is politically and logistically impossible, for a lot of reasons. And - and this part's pretty important - even if we were capable of bestowing such largess, I think by this point things might just be so far gone that the Iraqis as a whole would never accept such an offer from us.

Yeah, I wonder about that, too. At some point, you've just destroyed people's hope to an extent where there's really no way of repairing it, as an outsider. I mean, just look at Africa. You wonder if we really can do anything to improve people's lives in most of those nations. I mean, in Darfur, obviously we could be doing more, but in most places, there needs to be a more organic solution, one supposes.

And, yes, of course it's all politically impossible. I think in part because most people are kidding themselves one way or the other: "Just a few more years, 20,000 more troops, and everyone will suddenly stop fighting," or, on the other side of the aisle: "This is just like Vietnam, and and soon as we leave, they'll stop fighting. Definitely we're just undermining a legitimate government which fought for freedom and is politically motivated, as opposed to ethnically and religiously. Totally just like Vietnam. Yup."

No one's got the balls necessary to discuss what really we need to do, because it'd be political suicide. A draft? Massive tax hikes? All to benefit other people? Whaaaaaaaaa? This is America, you commie hippie/fascist corporate (depends who's yelling at you) bastard!

[Fifthfiend]

Iraqi exodus could test Bush policy
Total expected to exceed quota for refugees
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | December 11, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled their homeland are likely to seek refugee status in the United States, humanitarian groups said, putting intense pressure on the Bush administration to reexamine a policy that authorizes only 500 Iraqis to be resettled here next year.

The official US policy has been that the refugee situation is temporary and that most of the estimated 1.5 million who have fled to Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere will eventually return to Iraq. But US and international officials now acknowledge that the instability in Iraq has made it too dangerous for many refugees, especially Iraqi Christians, to return any time soon.

Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for refugees and migration, said that while the Bush administration does not think resettlement is needed for most refugees, its policy could rapidly change.

"It is quite possible that we will in time decide that because of vulnerabilities of certain populations that resettlement is the right option," Sauerbrey said. While acknowledging that the administration originally set a quota of no more than 500 Iraqi refugees, she said the president has the legal authority to admit 20,000 additional refugees.

Eventually, specialists said, the number of Iraqi refugees settling in the United States could be vastly higher.

But few Iraqi refugees have yet to be allowed to resettle here, due partly to finger-pointing between the State Department and the United Nations over who is responsible for determining which Iraqis need to be resettled. Sauerbrey said she has been pleading with the United Nations to do its job of surveying refugees.

"We have not been getting referrals from [the United Nations]," she said, pointing to the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees. "They have got to do a better job."

Judy Cheng-Hopkins, the United Nations assistant high commissioner for refugees, responded to such criticism by saying that the UN needs more funding from the international community to identify possible refugees. But she predicted that the numbers would be large because most refugees now see little chance of returning to Iraq.

She said many want to settle in the West, including in the United States, because their life in Iraq "is pretty much gone."

"A great majority would be dreaming of resettlement elsewhere, in the West," said Cheng-Hopkins, who recently returned from a trip to Jordan and Syria to assess the extent of the refugee problem.

In particular, more than 120,000 Christians who have fled Iraq are unlikely to go home and about 100,000 of them want to come to the United States, where many have relatives, according to a group representing the Christians. A great many of the estimated 1.4 million Iraqi Muslims also are expected to try to resettle, many in the West, according to UN officials.

An effort by hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to resettle in the United States would put the Bush administration in an extraordinarily awkward position. Having waged war to liberate Iraqis, the United States would in effect be admitting failure if it allowed a substantial number of Iraqis to be classified as refugees who could seek asylum here.

Arthur E. "Gene" Dewey, who was President Bush's assistant secretary of state for refugee affairs until last year, said that "for political reasons the administration will discourage" the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the United States "because of the psychological message it would send, that it is a losing cause."

But Dewey said a tipping point has been reached that is bound to change US policy because so many refugees are convinced that they will not be able to return to Iraq. That tipping point was further weighted by Wednesday's report by the Iraq Study Group that called for the eventual withdrawal of most US forces.

"I think there will increasingly be a moral obligation on the part of the United States" to allow resettlement by Iraqis here, Dewey said. "That is the price for intervention. Similar to Vietnam, that obligation is just going to have to be fulfilled."

The US government has allowed about 900,000 Vietnamese to resettle here since the end of the Vietnam War.

But in recent years, the process of resettling refugees in the United States has moved very slowly. Last year, for example, the Bush administration requested funding for 70,000 refugees from around the world to be resettled here.

Of those, the administration wound up admitting only 42,000, due to lack of funding and inability to obtain security clearances. There were slots last year for only 200 Iraqis, nearly all of whom had applied for admission before the Iraq war.

Asked whether the United States has resettled any Iraqi who has applied for admission since the war began, Sauerbrey said, "If there have been any, it has been a handful."

She said more Iraqis probably would be admitted, but she cautioned: "Our refugee resettlement program will only be able to take a small number. Whether it is 500 or 20,000, it is a very small portion of the overall problem."

An association representing Iraqi Christians, the Michigan-based Chaldean Federation of America, estimates that about 100,000 of the 120,000 Christians who have fled Iraq have relatives in America and want to immigrate here. Amid growing sectarian violence in largely Muslim Iraq, Christians have faced killings, torture, destruction of churches, assassination of priests, and confiscation of property.

The group's executive director, Joseph Kassab, noted that after the 1991 Gulf War, the United States allowed a large group of Iraqi Shi'ites -- 12,000 by some estimates -- to immigrate here because they faced persecution from Saddam Hussein.

"Why can't they do the same thing for Iraqi Christians?" Kassab asked. "We are the byproduct of the action that was taken in Iraq, the bad part of it."

A supporter of the Iraqi Christian effort is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has long helped Jews resettle in America and views the plight of Iraqi Christians as similar to that faced by Jews during the Holocaust.

"There are few religious minorities in the world today as persecuted as the Iraqi Christian population, so we naturally identify with them based on our own history," said Mark Hetfield, a senior vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Officials at the State Department and the United Nations said they understand the danger facing Iraqi Christians but said they don't want to give the impression that they would favor Christians over Muslims in a resettlement program. Any decisions regarding admission will be based on a family's vulnerability, not religion, officials said.

"The one thing we have to be very clear about is, if we were to admit only Christians, or at least a big majority of Christians and not other groups, this would just fuel the whole debate" about the West favoring Christians, said Cheng-Hopkins.

Kassab met on Wednesday with White House officials and said he received assurances that the plight of Iraqi Christian refugees will be reviewed.

Not something that gets mentioned a whole lot, for all that you'd think one and a half million displaced people would be sort of a big deal.

Just from the highlighted bits - it pretty strongly indicates that the reason our leadership won't help these people is because that'd mean said leadership at least in part owning up to the situation it's created.

Which isn't to say there aren't actual, practical concerns in regard to opening our national doors to a million and a half Iraqis. But surely our government can do better than they have.

The issue of Iraqi Christians is particularly ghastly, and another matter not frequently a part of the conversation.

[Darth SS]

I understand why they're upset that the UN isn't helping them, but...really...

The UN said the US shouldn't go to war. They did anyways.

They made their bed, and now politicians are getting upset because they have to lie in it?

[Mannix]

Originally Posted by Darth SS

I understand why they're upset that the UN isn't helping them, but...really...

The UN said the US shouldn't go to war. They did anyways.

They made their bed, and now politicians are getting upset because they have to lie in it?

The thing about that is, is that it's not the politicians in the bed. It's the Iraqis. It's the UN's job to help refugees, regardless of who created them and for what reasons. Spitefullness just makes the UN look bad and puts a lot of other innocent people in danger.

[Fifthfiend]

Merged a couple threads. Seems pointless to do 'em up separate.

Anyway, here's the tale of one of our Iraqi detainees:

Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment
By MICHAEL MOSS

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

That total lack of due process, that's working out for us real well.

[Mirai Gen]

It's like Iraq is just shaping itself into a really big gun, and that gun is pointing at America's theoretical foot.

That total lack of due process, that's working out for us real well.

I concur.

Do you think they'll react accordingly now that that article has been published, or are we going to wait for some ugly army smoking bitch to point at a naked detainee while her picture is taken years later?

* Use our military as their police/military, since theirs is nothing more than a roving Shia militia.
* While using our soldiers to maintain security (as much as can be had), invest billions into rebuilding their nation. Start with basic services, expand immediately after to oil, to help ease financial burden.
* Stream American culture into their nation through every TV, computer, and print source they've got.
* Very slowly, and starting at the most local levels, institute a republican political systems. Gradually, and I mean graaaaaduuuuuuuaaaaalllllyyyyyyyy expand the republican political system to larger areas. Again, start at neighborhood levels, before even thinking about city-wide politics. Ease them in.
* Provide massive incentives to get Americans to live in Iraq. Promote teaching of English to Iraqis, Arabic to American settlers. Do not confiscate Iraqi land or resources. Settlers/the government must buy land and homes at full market value. Provide soldiers with extra incentives as reward for their service.
* In tandem with the above step, provide incentives, or hell, practically force corporations to get involved in Iraq. Get them to run the telecommunication networks that will be possible once you finish laying all this fiber-optic cable, which is being done by Iraqis to employ them, New-Deal-style.
* Build and teach Iraqis to run more advanced services. Transportation, communications, sanitation, other "-ations." :P
* Employ people as much as possible. Especially angry young men.
* Slowly bring the nation together, until finally, maybe a decade or fifteen years later, national elections are possible.

So, how much of this are we actually doing over there?

[Flarecobra]

* Use our military as their police/military, since theirs is nothing more than a roving Shia militia. <---Been doing that, and working on shaping up the IA
* While using our soldiers to maintain security (as much as can be had), invest billions into rebuilding their nation. Start with basic services, expand immediately after to oil, to help ease financial burden. <---Working on that, though WAY behind
* Stream American culture into their nation through every TV, computer, and print source they've got. <---Nope.
* Very slowly, and starting at the most local levels, institute a republican political systems. Gradually, and I mean graaaaaduuuuuuuaaaaalllllyyyyyyyy expand the republican political system to larger areas. Again, start at neighborhood levels, before even thinking about city-wide politics. Ease them in. <---Never heard of that.
* Provide massive incentives to get Americans to live in Iraq. Promote teaching of English to Iraqis, Arabic to American settlers. Do not confiscate Iraqi land or resources. Settlers/the government must buy land and homes at full market value. Provide soldiers with extra incentives as reward for their service. <--- Never heard of that.
* In tandem with the above step, provide incentives, or hell, practically force corporations to get involved in Iraq. Get them to run the telecommunication networks that will be possible once you finish laying all this fiber-optic cable, which is being done by Iraqis to employ them, New-Deal-style. <--- Never heard of that
* Build and teach Iraqis to run more advanced services. Transportation, communications, sanitation, other "-ations." :P <--- Kinda working on that, but not much progress is being made.
* Employ people as much as possible. Especially angry young men. <-- Well, if a bomber that tries to destroy a recruitment center only causes more people to show up to join the Iraqi Army....
* Slowly bring the nation together, until finally, maybe a decade or fifteen years later, national elections are possible. <--- They've already had National Elections. I was there for them. Happoned about a year ago.

[Mirai Gen]

So we're like 3/10 so far. Yippee.

[Sky Warrior Bob]

For the record, I dislike starting posts in the Discussion forum. I always feel that I either tend to put out too little information, or because of this tendency, I go overboard and do the opposite.

But since this is a topic that merits discussion, and nobody else has bothered to do anything so far, I thought I'd bring it to the table.

Let's get things started with Bush's initial address to the nation, in which he ignores the suggestions of the Iraq Study Group and their recommendations. Furthermore, he calls for a troop surge, and expect us to believe that a government that doesn't even want the surge, will somehow work with the US troops to bring an end to the current violence.

He also outlined prospects for increasing the scope of the mission in Iraq, to include Iran. Here are a few articles 1 2 that show an increased pressence in the area, plus with the raid on the Iran Consulate in Iraq, the pieces seem to be falling into place.

Of course, this is despite the fact that Ahmadinejad's government is on shakey ground with his own people (I know recent elections went against him as well, but I don't have an article link). Plus, the current Iraq government is more politically aligned w/ Iran, and if it ever came to blows, Iraq could always abandon the US & join forces w/ Iran.

Personally, I don't see Bush's plan to be based on any good intel, and seems to either be an attempt to run the clock until the next presidency, or even worse make the situation so bad that its impossible to resolve, in order to solidify the fight against Terrorism as some sort of replacement for the Cold War.

And just because I think its a damn good statement on the subject, here's a link to Keith's recent commentary on the matter.

[Flarecobra]

Well, after hearing the Commondant of the Marine Corps speak the other day, I found out a few things.

1. The Corps is increasing in size by at least 23000 people.
2. More troops on the ground in Iraq, right now we're just acting like a boat through water. Shove out the baddies, and then when we're gone, they come right back in.
3. Better focus on anti-sniper and counter-IED tactics.