Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled Muslims .. yearning to breathe free
It seems the United States will accept a small number of Iraqi refugees after all ..7,000. A very small number, because since we invaded Iraq, 3.8 million Iraqis have been displaced .. have taken their families and fled their country. There are almost 2,000,000 Iraq refugees in Syria .. which is why it closed its borders last week.
From CNN:
"The Bush administration hopes to resettle about 7,000 Iraqi refugees to the United States this year, the State Department said Wednesday.
....[U.S. Undersecretary of State Paula] Dobriansky said the United States also is working to develop special provisions for resettlement of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq and are still there, but face increased threat because of their cooperation with the coalition.[..]"
Well .. we should do something for all the Iraqis who have risked their lives, and their family's lives, to act as guides and translators for us. Staying in Baghdad after we leave would be like signing their death warrants.
We whine and complain about defending ourselves from terrorism .. but we don't deal with one iota of what the Iraqis have had to deal with on a daily basis. Not only the violence, but their children still drink from mud puddles .. can't attend school.
I hope the refugees feel welcome .. but they don't know that for a lot of people here, just being Muslim is an overt act of war against our country.
Rush Limbaugh and the Righties (good name for a rock band?) don't like this policy one bit. Bringing scary brown people into this country means importing terrorists. These Iraqis need to stay home .. put on the Iraqi uniforms and help the Blossoming Democracy in their own country.
Rush, you never know, they might be guys from the oil industry and friends of Chalabi .. they could come here, get citizenship and vote Republican.
And we have flack from the other side as well. Lookee here how a Democrat reacted -- Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said any plan to relocate thousands of refugees uprooted by the Iraq war to the US better not include Ohio .. that Ohioans cannot be expected to have open arms for Iraqis because more than 100 Ohioans have been killed since the war began.
Hey Ted .. I thought Democrats were supposed to be humanitarians?
Well, we have hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the US already .. a lot are in Michigan I think .. these expat communities will help to welcome and settle the new refugees.
But there must be caution -- maybe Sunnis and Shi'ites still won't like each other over here. Will we have to put ourselves in the middle of a civil war over here to keep from being in the middle of a civil war over there? Just kidding...sort of...
I sure hope Iraq has a tasty cuisine .. because Iraqi restaurants might be all we're going to get out of Bush's Excellent Mesopotamian Misadventure.
