George C. Wilson
05/07/2007

Below is an excerpt from the Congress Daily:

The U. S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has already created 4 million refugees. Yet neither Congress nor President Bush has done much of anything to address this Made-in-America human disaster even though it is getting worse by the day.

Kenneth Bacon, former Pentagon spokesman who is now president of Refugees International, told Congress/Daily that the plight of the millions of Iraqi men, women and children who have been pushed out of their homes and schools by Bush’s war has stayed out of the spotlight because of its unusual nature.

“This is a peculiar refugee crisis because it’s mainly urban refugees,” Bacon said. "Approximately 2 million people have left the country. Most of them are in Syria and Jordan. And most of them are living in cities like Damascus and Amman. There is an increasing number [of Iraqi refugees] living in Egypt in the cities of Cairo and Alexandria. It is not a traditional refugee crisis where the people are living in camps. You don’t have the haunting images of people crowded into camps, living in tents, lining up for water and food. This is a much less visible refuges crisis than say Darfur."

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So, despite the lack of television pictures, why – given these hard facts - haven’t Congress and the Bush administration done more to keep this Katrina of human suffering from escalating into a Tsunami? Refugees International president Bacon, who lives the problem, had this answer to that question:

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"The primary reason is that this [refugee crisis in Iraq] has not been acknowledged as a problem by the President of the United States. I don’t believe he’s ever said anything about Iraqi refugees. There’s no indication that he sees this as an urgent problem. Without that concern from the top, it’s going to be very difficult for us to craft a reasonable solution to this problem."

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Given the blind eye Bush and Company have turned to the refugee crisis, Refugees International and like minded advocacy groups are pinging on Congress to act. Bacon said Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., of the House International Relations Committee and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-OR, are at the forefront of lawmakers moving to address the ever worsening refugee crisis.

In 1975, the year Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, the United States welcomed 134,000 South Vietnamese into our country, Bacon recalled. “So far this year, we have resettled 68 Iraqis. Sixty-eight!” he repeated with understandable shock in his voice.

It will be nothing short of criminal if the United States, the richest country on the planet, continues to doom 4 million Iraqis to a life of misery. Particularly vulnerable to being killed are the 22,000 Iraqis who have been directly working for the Americans in hopes of saving their country from disaster. We owe them and their families protection and asylum. Bush should issue to his deputies the same order regarding Iraqi refugees that he issued to the commission he named to investigate conditions at the Army’s Walter Reed hospital: “Find out what the problem is and fix it.”