IHT article 04/07:
Four years of war have exacted a terrible toll on Iraqis, with no
end in sight. Car bombings and other violence now kill an average
of 100 people a day. Two out of three Iraqis have no regular access
to clean water. Children are malnourished and too many are dying
from preventable diseases and the near collapse of the health care
system.
And an incredible total of four million people - one out of every
seven Iraqis - have been forced to flee their homes. If Iraq
continues this descent, the refugee tide could turn into a regional
tsunami, with potentially convulsive political consequences.
Yet, as with so much about this war, the Bush administration is
refusing to acknowledge the human cost of its horrendous errors and
pretending that the problem will be contained within Iraq's
borders. It will not.
Half of Iraq's displaced people have already fled. Jordan, a
country of six million people, is now sheltering 750,000 Iraqis.
Syria, with a population of 19 million, has about 1.2 million Iraqi
refugees. Their governments say they are unable to keep coping with
such large inflows. Jordan has already moved to limit new arrivals
- barring Iraqi men between the ages of 17 and 35.
Others have been less welcoming. Kuwait has completely shut its
doors. Saudi Arabia is building a $7 billion border fence to keep
Iraqis out.
And then there is the United States. Washington has taken in only
some 500 Iraqi refugees since the war began. The Bush
administration promises to do much better this year, and officials
are floating hypothetical numbers as high as 25,000. That would
help. But the bumbling track record of this administration's
refugee bureaucracy makes it seem unlikely. And under current
policy, some of Iraq's most desperate refugees could be deemed
ineligible under provisions of the Patriot and Real ID Acts that
treat ransom paid to free relatives from kidnappers as "material
support" for terrorism.
The administration needs to be doing a lot more. It needs to ensure
that the most threatened refugees - usually those who have worked
with American forces - can find safe haven here. It should provide
generous assistance, well beyond the $18 million it has now
pledged, to the United Nations refugee agency, to help poor
countries like Jordan and Syria cope with the large numbers already
there. Washington also needs to begin serious and detailed
discussions with all of Iraq's neighbors - including Syria and Iran
- on how to lessen the violence inside Iraq and help those who try
to escape it.