Well, we could buy us a bunch of young refugees as this article by Rand researcher Kristin Cordell recommends…
June 20 was World Refugee Day, designated by the United Nations to raise awareness of the plight of refugees. According to UN estimates, about 2.2 million Iraqis — close to half of them children — have fled their country since the US invasion in 2003. Unfortunately, the United States is missing a critical opportunity to build a positive long-term relationship with this younger generation.
Better relations with these young people and the rest of the Arab world’s “youth bulge” should be a high priority for American foreign policy and assistance. Without a greater US effort, young Arabs will remain a ripe and malleable target for recruitment by radical Muslim groups.
… or we could look squarely at the horror we have visited on these people and begin to repair the damage, pay reparations, lay down our arms, and beg forgiveness.
The war is in its fifth year, and still, Bush has not produced anything even vaguely resembling a political solution. He is utterly clueless.
The world’s oldest civilization is being destroyed before our eyes — its cities laid to waste, its people slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Saddam never could have dreamed of devastation on this scale. We’ve ruined everything. Truckloads of dead men are delivered to the Baghdad morgue every morning where they are processed and then dumped in mass graves in abandoned soccer fields or schoolyards. 20 percent of the population has either been internally displaced or forced to flee into Jordan and Syria. In Falluja alone, 65 percent of the buildings have been destroyed and tens of thousands of its citizens are left living in tent cities scattered across the desert — exposed to the elements, living on crusts of bread and foul water. The number of refugees has risen rapidly; 2 million in Amman, Damascus and Cairo. They go wherever they can to avoid the bombing and find safety or shelter.
Mike Golby’s observation goes to the heart of it…
[Mike says] What intrigues me, despite Lara Logan’s insight above and the rescue of these children, is the egregious mendacity with which CBS portrays naive agents of an occupying power that has had five years to secure the Iraqi capital and protect its people and infrastructure — in accordance with Article 32 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as heroes.
In short, throughout its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, it was and remains the United States’s responsibility to ensure that such atrocities do not occur.
There’s no evading it. The U.S. military, its commander-in-chief, and all U.S. public and private institutions and persons supporting the Iraqi puppet regime, are responsible for the conditions in which these kids find themselves. And by deception through distortion, the U.S. media is as guilty of perpetrating this small war crime — redolent of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s Romania — as their political masters.
Every day that Bush and Cheney remain in office is another day that the crimes of the American corporate state are compounded by the nonchalant, careless neglect of the duties as citizens borne by “We the people of the United States of America,” another day that adds to our burden of guilt.
[tags]war crimes, mutual guilt, USA compared to Romania, Bush family and the Ceausescu regime[/tags]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
