We broke Iraq, and we have a moral responsibility to those whose lives have been shattered by our actions. Helping them is also in our national interest, for we’ll regret our myopia if we allow young Iraqi refugees to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies.Kristof writes about a family languishing in Amman, Jordan, where up to 8 percent of the population is Iraqi exiles. The exile community, two million strong, is spread around the Middle East; in 2007, the United States accepted just 1,600 Iraqi aliens. We are on the verge of creating, in the author's words, the "new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability," though in this case the group in question has a much more direct grievance against the United States. Unless there is a shift toward more aggressively relocating Iraqi exiles in stable situations, our abandonment of this group to whom we owe so much more is going to serve as a fitting footnote to W's Iraq adventure: incompetence from beginning to end.
The most consistent work on this subject comes from George Packer; examples are here, here, here, and here.
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