As the aggressor nation, we have the responsibility to take care of the people of Iraq.

Pre-emptive war is not aggressive by definition. Even if this war were aggressive, we owe our foe nothing. If we were wrong, some repairs should be made, not some outrageous set of claims or demands such as you posted, but the obvious. In fact, we have tried hard to rebuild Iraq and make it better than it was before.

We are not responsible for conduct by terrorists, who choose to commit their crimes; we are not forcing them to commit their crimes and damage and destroy things. This is particularly true about those who come to Iraq from elsewhere.

We are not responsible for disastrous conduct by Iraqis themselves.

We are not obliged to be a “global” welfare or service agency, much less to admit into this country any and all people who demand it or for whom activists demand it.

What are you talking about? Have you ever been to Detroit and Dearborn and driven down Michigan Avenue or Miller Road? Prior to Yugoslavia breakup, ethnic Albainians, Serbs and Croatians moved to the Detroit area. For the most part they get along(except for Ethnic Festivals). Maybe you should Google Mike Ilitch.

Michael “Mike” Ilitch (born Michael Iliev or Ilievski[1] on July 20, 1929, in Bitola, Kingdom of Yugoslavia) is a Macedonian-American entrepreneur and owner of the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers.

The Hmong have a community in Wisconsin, I guess Laos and the Northern Midwest share the same climate.

I’m aware of that as well as the Somalis in Minnesota. (Somali and Hmong are two of the four languages on the signs and literature in the downtown Minneapolis library, if I remember from my two trips there.)

The people in Iraq are not from the same climate and some of them would probably prefer to be in the Coachella Valley (of California — there’s even a “Bagdad” there, date farms, and camel races) or other desert areas. That’s as far as that goes. But if you noticed, I also mentioned Dearborn, where Iraqis are now. I.e., in Michigan, not exactly Iraq climatically.

Also, there’s a Balkan presence in St. Louis and no civil warfare has yet to erupt there, not during my four years there, not on my frequent return visits, and probably not if I move back there someday.

The lack of discussion among the presidential candidates shows that there is no good answer.

Superdestroyer, maybe the get-out crowd has simply not thought about this any more than the stay-put crowd has.

Granted that Vietnam was then and now is now, the U.S. had an expensive resettlement program for Vietnamese refugees and their families who were American loyalists.

Including my best friend where I worked years ago in LA — she learned to swim when her boat ran aground off Malaysia, and those aboard the boat feared Thai pirates — who with her sister and their families and spouses who are great Americans.

My guess is that would love for the Bush Administration to propose some huge program of letting refuges come to the U.S. so that they can attack him for it.

Are you certain. Yes, the inevitable attacks are to be expected (and another three or four anti-Bush threads started by Shaun on here), but I ask that question because the interpreters and other collaborators could become part of a new immigration bill. What if the Democrats make the “adoption” of our collaborators in Iraq part of their own bill and dare Bush to veto it? (Bush won’t if the bill also includes things the Democrats want for Hispanics, so long as it also serves the business community in the right way.)

I say all this because we have a deep moral obligation to do it much better this time. The situation faced by those associated with U.S. troops in Iraq will be even more dangerous than the reeducation camps and beatings that faced the Vietnamese that were associated with us. They won’t live long enough to access a refugee program unless we build it into the withdrawal as an integral part from the very beginning.

Granted that Vietnam was then and now is now, the U.S. had an expensive resettlement program for Vietnamese refugees and their families who were American loyalists.

I worked a couple of these cases while I was interning in a congressional district office in 2001.

The mere fact that the applicants were still fighting the INS in 2001 shows some of the flaws with this program. Basically, the program had three major flaws:

1) It was added on ad hoc later, not planned into the withdrawal from the beginning. That means that people who worked for us had to survive and get themselves free of North Vietnamese retribution before they could even hope to access the program.

2) Applicants had to prove that they worked directly for U.S. forces. Those who were indirectly associated with the Americans were still guilty in the eyes of the North Vietnamese who sent them to “reeeducation camps”, but they had great difficulty accessing U.S. aid programs.

3) The families provisions were disastrously undermined by the fact that the applicants had to demonstrate that they could support their family members at a middle class level before those family members would even be allowed to go to the U.S. embassy/consulate to apply. Then they would have to have to money in hand to bribe the Vietnamese guards to let them in. Then they had to have sufficient English skills to talk to the American consulate officer OR the good fortune to have a translator available that day.

The combination of these difficulties was so severe that one of my applicants had been trying to get his kids over for 16 YEARS and kept getting rejected for different reasons. He was eventually forced to give up when the INS ruled against him because his children were now too old to qualify.

I say all this because we have a deep moral obligation to do it much better this time. The situation faced by those associated with U.S. troops in Iraq will be even more dangerous than the reeducation camps and beatings that faced the Vietnamese that were associated with us. They won’t live long enough to access a refugee program unless we build it into the withdrawal as an integral part from the very beginning.

Michael “Mike” Ilitch (born Michael Iliev or Ilievski[1] on July 20, 1929, in Bitola, Kingdom of Yugoslavia) is a Macedonian-American entrepreneur and owner of the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers.

The Hmong have a community in Wisconsin, I guess Laos and the Northern Midwest share the same climate.

A) We have to respect the wishes of the occupied and being withdrawal

B) We have to pay reparations for the damage we’ve done to their infrastructure, as well as for all the people we’ve killed

C) For people who can no longer call Iraq their home, we have to find them places to live, either with us or with our allies

We were at fault, and now we have to take responsibility.

Notice both words above:

secretly airlifted

We currently should be saying nothing about a similar act by the USA. In fact, how was this learned and more importantly, why was this reported?

Where to take them here in the USA? Dearborn (MI) is the first thought. It would be interesting to see how well they not adapted to a much colder and more humid climate but how they lived with those Iraqis who are already here.

Chris:

I think we have a moral obligation to let as many Iraqi refugees as we can into our country.

You are incorrect. We have no obligation whatsoever. We do have an obligation to protect those who work with us from harm from the terrorists, however, and an evacuation of those who were US-friendly and West-friendly to the West is a sort of immigrant screening process if we chose to take them here. As far as any or all Iraqis, obviously not. (You’re just engaging in war-bashing and irrational fake “blame” and “guilt” about the war as well as possibly hinting at the standard lefty demand that the USA and West host and provide for the rest of the planet.) The same is true for any other foreign nation, incidentally, so don’t make any broader claim next.

Helping the interpreters is a gift, something that should be considered, and we have precedent (the Bosnian war refugees, such as in St. Louis). But it is stupid to demand that if another nation does this, we “should” [sic] do it, too. And we certainly should not be advertising our intent and more importantly, the details!

Superdestroyer:

I think the Iraqis have a moral obligation to fight for their own country and stay there to make it better. When the U.S. helps a country, there should be an understanding from the first minute that we will never take any refugees and that they only way to solve the problems is to win the conflict.

(This is true of Mexico and other US-immigrant source nations, everyone should realize.)

In a more sane world, it would be obvious that not only do we not need to accept refugees from a combatant nation (which is ridiculous!), but also that we are in no way obliged to repair, much less improve (which is normally easy), other nations that we have defeated militarily. Cleanup and rebuilding and repair and recovery in fact are our enemies’ own problem! Obviously we are last among those who “should” [sic] provide assistance. Just because we do (because we have been the most beneficial and most generous nation on earth) and even taken in refugees in no way constitutes any obligation to do so.

If only they had known what U.S. “help” meant…

I think the Iraqis have a moral obligation to fight for their own country and stay there to make it better. When the U.S. helps a country, there should be an understanding from the first minute that we will never take any refugees and that they only way to solve the problems is to win the conflict.

You speak as if we did the Iraqis this great favor. When the US HELPS a country? Uhm, we destroyed that country, the least we can do is try to help out those who, at great risk to their own personal safety, collaborated with us. It’s not just the decent thing to do, it’s strategically sound, the US could do without a reputation for leaving collaborators behind. Iraq will not be, sadly, our last conflict. People will take not of whether or not people who help the Americans are rewarded or left to die.

I think the Iraqis have a moral obligation to fight for their own country and stay there to make it better. When the U.S. helps a country, there should be an understanding from the first minute that we will never take any refugees and that they only way to solve the problems is to win the conflict.

The few people who still support the war do not need to discuss refuges. However, it is very important for all of the get out immediately crowd to discuss what they want to do about the refugees. The lack of discussion among the presidential candidates shows that there is no good answer. No one wants a Little Baghdad to spring up somewhere in the U.S. No one wants a couple of million Islamic refugees in the U.S.

Thus, the politicians will ignore the issue until they absolutely have to deal with it and the first thing they will do is blame someone else.

We also forget the Hmong and Christian Vietnamese who also collaborated and fled. What do you think happened to the children of Vietnamese women/working girls and US soldiers? What is the ugly history of people of mixed blood(India and South Africa). If somebody supported this war, you must accept the hidden costs. I don’t recall Republicans discussing the refuges either, just more and bigger GITMO’s or Jack Bauer as an American hero(TV?? Walker Texas Ranger LOL). Did W talk about this, or just al-Qaeda under every rug.

If the left really wants to discuss this issue, maybe they should be asking the Democratic candidates for President about it instead of worrying about bust sizes or great grand fathers. Somehow, I doubt that any of the leading presidential candidates in the Democratic Primary will say a word about Iraqi refugees.