The Current Crisis

Every time the call comes to withdraw from Iraq, we're told by the administration and its supporters that such a move will surely lead to a humanitarian disaster. Of course, many disasters have already occurred during our time in Iraq — the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods; 2 million refugees; hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths — all despite the assurances of these same infallible prognosticators back in the day. So we have good reason to be skeptical that they know what they are talking about now.

The one thing we do know, however, is that people are suffering now, and that this administration hasn't really done much to alleviate that suffering. Part of it has to do, I think, with an unwillingness to admit publicly that anything has really gone so terribly wrong. There's a reason why the US don't officially track civilian deaths — so we can argue that any large number reported by anyone else isn't plausible. Another factor is the unreasonable optimism displayed by war supporters that a stable, peaceful, pro-Western Iraq is just around the corner. ("Success is within reach", says John McCain.) Since we're apparently about to turn the corner and transform Iraq into the kind of place where such bad things don't happen, we can ignore the current crises as transient events that will soon be forgiven and forgotten in the new Bablyon.

Do we have a humanitarian duty to reduce the suffering of Iraqis? Of course. But it would be easier to believe that war supporters took this duty seriously if they weren't so good at turning a blind eye to the current crises. For the cost of a month of war, we could make life much easier for refugees abroad. And for a follow-up, we might decide to make it a priority to admit more refugees than a small town in Sweden. As long as Bush or McCain is in the White House, however, talk about making the lives of Iraqis better will just be empty rhetoric deployed for domestic political gain.