I was granted an interview with two [American embassy] officials, who refused to be named. One of them consulted talking points that catalogued what the Embassy had done for Iraqi employees: a Thanksgiving dinner, a recent thirty-five-per-cent salary increase. Housing in the Green Zone could be made available for a week at a time in critical cases, I was told, though most Iraqis didn’t want to be apart from their families. When I asked about contingency plans for evacuation, the second official refused to discuss it on security grounds, but he said, “If we reach that point and have people in danger, the Ambassador would go to the Secretary of State and ask that they be evacuated, and I think they would do it.” The department was reviewing the possibility of issuing special immigrant visas.
To receive this briefing, I had passed through three security doors into the Embassy’s classified section, where there were no Iraqis and no natural light; it seemed as if every molecule of Baghdad air had been sealed off behind the last security door. The Embassy officials struck me as decent, overworked people, yet I left the interview with a feeling of shame. The problem lay not with the individuals but with the institution and, beyond that, with the politics of the American project in Iraq, which from the beginning has been conducted under the illusion that controlling the message mattered more than the reality. A former official at the Embassy told me, “When we say that the corridors of power are insulated, is it that the officials aren’t receiving the information, or is it because the construct under which they’re operating doesn’t even allow them to absorb it?” To admit that Iraqis who work with Americans need to be evacuated would blow a hole in the Administration’s version of the war.
Several days after the interview at the Embassy, I had a more frank conversation with an official there. “I don’t know if it’s fair to say, ‘You work at an embassy of a foreign country, so that country has to evacuate you,’ ” he said. “Do the Australians have a plan? Do the Romanians? The Turks? The British?” He added, “If I worked at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, would the Hungarians evacuate me from the United States?”
When I mentioned these remarks to Othman, he asked, “Would the Americans behead an American working at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington?”
Packer explains why what we did for (far too few) South Vietnamese who helped us as we departed is not likely to happen in the case of Iraq. From that passage:
Richard Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell during the first years of the Iraq war, served as a naval officer in Vietnam. In the last days of that war, he returned as a civilian, on a mission to destroy military assets before they fell into North Vietnamese hands. He arrived too late, and instead turned his energy to the evacuation of South Vietnamese sailors and their families. Armitage led a convoy of barely seaworthy boats, carrying twenty thousand people, a thousand miles across the South China Sea to Manila—the first stop on their journey to the United States.
When I met Armitage recently, at his office in Arlington, Virginia, he was not confident that Iraqis would be similarly resettled. “I guarantee you no one’s thinking about it now, because it’s so fatalistic and you’d be considered sort of a traitor to the President’s policy,” he said. “I don’t see us taking them in this time, because, notwithstanding what we may owe people, you’re not going to bring in large numbers of Arabs to the United States, given the fact that for the last six years the President has scared the pants off the American public with fears of Islamic terrorism.”
Even at this stage of the war, Armitage said, officials at the White House retain an “agnosticism about the size of the problem.” He added, “The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful.”
Despite my fear of Islamist terrorism, I strongly believe the US has a moral obligation to resettle these poor souls here.
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Did you ever think we would not have the obilgation to resettle these poor souls if we (including you Mr. Dreher) actually supported them from the beginning? The result of cutting and running.
You honestly think that someone can more easily cope with the death of a child because they have a few more? My sister has five children. This doesn't mean that the loss of one would be ANY easier to bear. Secondly, you didn't just say they bred more. You said they bred more because the women were less educated, and this would be why they would win. So, again, how do you plan on addressing this birth discrepancy, even not counting the fact that, person for person, we FAR outnumber the population of Iraq, birthrate or no.
US- over 300 million. Iraq- Around 26 million (which is, of course, an estimate). Birth rate. US- 2.09 children per couple Iraq- 4 children per couple. But we must add in, infant mortality rate. US- 6.03 per 1000 live births. Iraq- 46 deaths per 1000 live births. In all reality, given the almost 10 times infant mortality rate, adding in immigration, and the increased lifespan, the US, educated women and all, somehow 'gets by'.
Kannbrown65: You honestly think that someone can more easily cope with the death of a child because they have a few more? I never said this. Coping? Who cares? The point is that with more children, parents are more willing to let one die for the cause and not pass on the family name. And yes, this is true. You can look it up. This correlation even works for letting kids go into the priesthood. You said they bred more because the women were less educated, and this would be why they would win. It is certainly a very important reason. We can be sure if Iraq was full of educated, working women, we would not even be over there, let alone be losing the war. It would be like Bosnia, easy money. So, again, how do you plan on addressing this birth discrepancy, even not counting the fact that, person for person, we FAR outnumber the population of Iraq, birthrate or no. You sound like Bush, and are making the foolish mistake the British made in the Revolutionary War. Just because you have a large population and are politically powerful does not mean that you can win a war. What you need is the will to sacrifice your boys to the cause. We don't have the surplus kids in which to do this. Think: Sheehan. They do. Think: suicide bomber with proud mother. adding in immigration, and the increased lifespan, the US, educated women and all, somehow 'gets by'. Some problems here. First, we are not 'getting by'. We are tucking our tails and running. Next, well educated American women don't have 2.1 kids, they have about 1. Your extra 1 kid comes from the undereducated American women, with Hispanics being 2.7. The US TFR is propped up by these undereducated women, and yet you use them to try to claim a country with educated women can keep their population up. So far, it's never been done. Only by importing undereducated women. If they get educated, they stop dropping calves. All this would be fine if we had unlimited immigration potential, but we don't. We get most our fresh bodies from South America, and their TFR is dropping fast as they become modern. So we can't import forever. World population starts to drop somewhere mid-century. Mexico only tolerates their loss of population to the US for the money sent back; that will change as their population starts to drop. In another 50 years countries will be fighting over bodies, and good breeders will be hard to come by. Muslims, or anyone who continues to keep their women uneducated and breeding, are going to have massive political power. Wa already see political power in Iraq, with the corresponding lack of political will America has about losing boys. PS: America had a TFR=8 during the Revolutionary war.
You were the one equating the number of people they could breed with their success in winning the war. I only pointed out that if population mattered, that we WOULD be easy winners. We aren't, so your theory isn't exactly working out.
Secondly, ironically, Iraq, during the era of Saddam, HAD one of the more educated pool of women in the Middle East. We keep forgetting, it seems. Saddam was a secular dictator, and what mattered to him wasn't religious law, but profit. And taking half your population out of the workforce wasn't good for profits. Saddam got rid of requirements for hijab, mandatory separation of the sexes, and provided for both primary and university educations for females.
They are willing to 'give up their boys' not because they're breeding like rabbits.
They're willing because they are fighting an invading force, who is occupying their country and bombing their homes. Not some military misadventure for causes that have, one by one, been disproven and was, at best, for some possible, future threat.
And THAT would be the big difference.
By the way, none of the above (always have to include this in, because someone is going to say I think Saddam was a saint) means that Saddam wasn't a vicious dictator. He just was a pragmatic, greedy vicious dictator, and one of the biggest groups he ticked off WERE the more conservative religious among his peoples, who were upset at the removal of those very policies.
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