Acknowledging the grim reality - Iraq’s growing refugee emergency

In the last six months many experts ranging from arch realists to members of the Iraq Study Group have stressed the need to engage with neighbouring countries to assist in addressing the conflict. These calls have been ignored by the Bush administration because such a rapprochement with Syria and Iran would be seen as a declaration of weakness and as a fundamental compromise to its foreign policy values.

However, greatly increasing funds to allow international and local organisations to provide humanitarian assistance to both refugees outside the country and those displaced within Iraq would serve as a valuable trust-building exercise. It would demonstrate to many Syrians, Saudi Arabians and Iranians that the Coalition of the Willing has no immediate intention of changing the balance of power in the region.

It would also send a positive message to Iraqis that the occupying forces are genuinely concerned for their welfare and that they are capable of providing them with protection. Helping Iraqi refugees would do more for the country’s security and for America’s international public diplomacy efforts than bringing down a thousand statues of Saddam Hussein.

Such a humanitarian surge would also help build domestic support in Coalition of the Willing nations where people from broad ideological backgrounds have become sceptical about the motives behind the invasion and continuing war.

In February President Bush announced that the US will resettle 7,000 Iraqi refugees in 2007. This is been criticised as a paltry number given Sweden’s pledge to take in 9,000. To advance their humanitarian image and public diplomacy efforts, particularly in Muslim regions of the world, it is important for Western nations to increase the number of settlement places open to Iraqis who are assessed as having no prospect of safely returning to their country in the near or intermediate future.

However, the political and humanitarian situation is not so dire that hundreds of thousands of resettlement places are necessary as was the case in the late 1970s with respect to the Indochinese refugee crisis. The Iraq War is not like the Vietnam War, at least not yet.

Die-hard advocates of a “stay the course” war plan might argue that the best thing that we can do for Iraqi refugees is to direct all of our efforts to killing the insurgents who have overrun the country.

This view which concentrates on decapitating the enemy is not at odds with the assistance of refugees and displaced people. However, the current obsession with the evil face of terror fails to address the broader structural reasons that will perpetuate the conflict and produce insurgents and terrorists for many years to come.

An Iraqi war strategy that is focused more on assisting displaced people would not necessarily lead to immediate large-scale troop reductions. It would mean redeploying troops to Iraq’s borders to set up safe havens or buffer zones where displaced people can be protected and processed, thereby containing the spillover.

These zones would serve the additional purpose of keeping out foreign insurgents. The troops would by no means be safe, but they would not act as a cause célèbre and be as frequently attacked as many Coalition forces today.

Addressing Iraqi’s growing refugee emergency is not a cure-all for a complicated and multi-faceted international problem. It would however, ensure that things don’t get any worse and provide the prospect for things to get better.