Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Comparing The Iraq War with World War II and Saddam with Hitler

Staying with this week’s theme of idiotic historical analogies inaptly made by our feckless and incompetent leaders, BNB readers should take note of Frank Rich’s column from last Sunday’s New York Times. Regarding WWII, the same questions are always raised: Why didn’t the Jews resist the Nazis? Why didn’t they run away? The analogy to the Iraqis is now being drawn by the Bushies: Why aren’t they doing more to “defend their own democracy” and defeat the insurgency?” The truth is, many Jews did successfully escape from Germany and Europe and many more attempted to flee. Frank Rich talks about the US’s shameful refusal to admit Iraqi refugees, refugees that we created.

“The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War, told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees setup beyond Vietnam’s borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American treatment of Iraqi refugees isn’t that war in any case, but World War II. That’s when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard Sachar’s “History of the Jews in America.” See, New York Times, May 27, 2007

While the people of Iraq brave terror and violence at every turn to survive in a collapsing society, the American foreign policy elites who designed the Iraq war have taken quite well to blaming its civilians for the catastrophe, Frank Rich writes in his Sunday column for the New York Times. Speaking about the increasing exodus of Iraqis from their home country, and the established US policy of ignoring their plight, Rich writes, “To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A ‘secure’ Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.”

Beyond simply ignoring the plight of Iraqis out of sheer incompetence, Rich notes, the Bush administration’s policy towards Iraq’s refugees fits within a grander political strategy of attempting to control and even eliminate the bad news by neutralizing it. Increasingly, adds Rich, war supporters believe they can avoid blame for the mess in Iraq by putting blame upon the residents of the country. Writes Rich, “It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last fall, when Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might ‘have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.’ By January, Bush was saying that ‘the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude’ and wondering aloud ‘whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.’” See, RawStory.com.

Comparing the US government’s denial of large numbers of Iraqis entrance into the country to the pre-World War II treatment of Jews fleeing Europe, Rich notices quite a few parallels. “Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats,” he writes, adding, “Though the war’s godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.”

Words are inadequate to describe the moral culpability of the Bush regime. One can only hope that there will someday be a reckoning. Beyond that, we can only pray and hope that the world recognizes the plight of millions of Iraqi refugees.

Ashamed for my country, I remain

Savant