Our contact touched on U.S. visas for Iraqis who had worked for the American military, State Department, and contractors in the Black Land. The only requirement was that they had to have worked at least a year in order to be eligible. Unfortunately, with the visa in hand (obtained through the Embassy's Consular Section), help in the United States didn't extend very far, as our Iraqi interlocutor noted. They would be met at the airport here, given $400, and provided some basic counseling. In Sweden, by contrast, he said, Iraqi refugees get 2 years of networking assistance and support. U.S. State Department help lasts only for 60 days, then social services take over.
When asked if it were Israeli policy to destabilize Syria by influencing the U.S. government's withholding of aid to refugees, the State Department official denied that idea, adding that America wanted to help the people who had worked with its government as translators as well as those in special categories such as Chaldean Catholics. The Department of State provided $150 million per annum for Iraqi refugee aid (with USAID handling the internally displaced). The U.S. government's worldwide refugee budget, he said, totaled only $1 billion. Heretofore, the U.S. had been concerned with resettling Somalis and Burmese. Now, Iraqis have come to the fore. American policy for Iraqis, he commented, is to concentrate on helping the least likely to return home as well as the most vulnerable. But, the spokesman continued, the number of newly-required identity and security checks, along with the number of U.S. bureaucracies involved, tended to slow things down, especially in the "post 9/11 world"
The State Department's spokesman denied that the Iraqi refugee crisis could be likened to the Palestinian "problem" because it wasn't a struggle for land. He compared it to Vietnam where Malaysia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian nations allowed a flood of refugees into their territory because the U.S. had promised to eventually take them in.
Noting that Syrian has proven generous to the Iraqi refugee population, State's spokesman said that, despite past icy relations, it is getting easier to get into the country and talk to the refugees.
Finally, the State Department official told us that he expected little improvement in the number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the U.S. There is a worldwide cap of 70,000 refugee visas and to give more help to Iraqis would take refugee visas away from other nationalities. He said the burden of helping the Iraqis lies with Syria and Jordan.
In contrast, Michele Pistone, Professor of Law at Villanova University School of Law and Director of its Clinic for Asylum, Refugees, and Emigrant Services, hopes President Obama will change this situation. She said he is not lumbered by past U.S. policy mistakes, adding that refugee issues are too often tied to politics, such as in the aftermath of Vietnam, where resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees was made part of America's withdrawal from that nation, devastated by the U.S. armed forces.
Conclusion. America is a failed state. After 5 years of war that failed to benefit either the capitalists or Israel, the United States is still unable or unwilling to acknowledge defeat and withdraw its storm troopers from the Black Land within 30 days. (It took only 19 days for them to march into Baghdad.) Worse, the United States is still unable or unwilling to recognize the damage it has done to Iraq, its infrastructure, and its people. Fifteen per cent of Iraq's population are refugees and permanently displaced people. To put this in context, 15% of the American population is 45 million citizens--imagine if a group of people greater than the population of Canada, more than half the population of Germany, or two-thirds the population of France, or two-thirds the population of the United Kingdom was left homeless by war.
The State Department spokesman is entirely correct. Nothing will be done about the Iraqi refugees and internally displaced citizens (or the flood of Afghan refugees from Barack Obama's scheduled escalation of the conflict there). If only Iraqis (and not Afghanis) were given all the 70,000 U.S. refugees visas available annually, it would take 57 years to bring them to America, almost as long as the Palestinians have been held in Israeli concentration camps.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's final lines from Ozymandias are most apt:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Author's Note: Other stories to follow. The pain and suffering of the Iraqi people continue and so will our efforts to chronicle them.
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