A bad sign for Iraq

From Reuters:

More than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing what the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) describes as a "very bleak future" after the agency's budget for offices across the region was halved for the coming year.

"Iraq has seen the largest and most recent displacement of any UNHCR project in the world, yet even as more Iraqis are displaced and as their needs increase, the funds to help them are decreasing," said [Andrew] Harper [coordinator for the Iraq unit at UNHCR]. "This growing humanitarian crisis has simply gone under the radar screen of most donors."

UNHCR estimates that more than 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, including some 800,000 who fled their homes prior to 2003 and 750,000 who have fled since. A further 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.

This extreme dislocation of Iraqis is a sign not only of a failure of the Rumsfeld Doctrine (of minimum troop involvement) and a general failure of the US policy in Iraq, but it is an ominous sign of things to come. Right now, Iraq is in a violence driven chaos. Government is rendered ineffective (except at massive fraud, apparently). Ethnically, the people of Iraq are angry and frightened.

Eventually, these displaced individuals will return. That will, at best, produce a humanitarian crisis that the new Iraqi government will not be able to handle. At worst, it will produce a new wave of sectarian violence.

This crisis is yet another failure for which the US government is responsible.

GP