Shelf Life: The Invisible Iraqis

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Never mind that nobody else—not the United States, the United Nations, or any respectable humanitarian-aid group—agrees that Iraq is safe for returning families. The Iraqi embassy in Damascus displays “big black banners,” writes Deborah Amos at Huffington Post (Dec. 4, 2008), that read, “We will help you go back to your houses and you’ll find out how much money you’ll get when you register!” (It’s 1 million Iraqi dinars, or $850, reports Al-Jazeera [Nov. 2, 2008], plus free airfare. Only 322 people from Syria accepted the offer during the first month.)

What’s the alternative? For starters, we could step up our country’s commitment by accepting more Iraqis here and contributing more help to their hosts in the Middle East. The United States has resettled around 15,000 Iraqi refugees since 2003—and more than 12,000 of them arrived last year after pressure from the media, the international community, and Angelina Jolie (yes, Angelina Jolie).

The State Department plans to accept 17,000 more Iraqis in 2009. It’s still an embarrassingly low number, but we ought to at least be ready for them. Most of those who have arrived thus far went to Southern California and metro Detroit, where established Arab American communities are doing most of the work to get them on their feet. Small numbers of them wound up in relative isolation in other cities where services are often scarce.

Philadelphia’s City Paper (May 29, 2008) ran a lengthy profile of Bassam, a young Iraqi who can’t wrap his head around Americans’ lack of engagement with the war he narrowly escaped: “There’s culture shock, and then there’s the culture shock of moving to a country that started a war in your home.”

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