What Has Gone Right in Iraq

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Jeff Jacoby reminds us: What has gone right in Iraq. (Hat tip: Carl in Jerusalem.)

WITH ALL the news coming out of the Middle East, here is a detail you might have missed: A few weeks ago, the United Nations shut down the Ashrafi refugee camp in southwestern Iran. For years Ashrafi had been the largest facility in the world housing displaced Iraqis, tens of thousands of whom had been driven from their homes by Saddam Hussein’s brutality. But with Saddam behind bars and his regime crushed, Iraqi exiles have been flocking home. By mid-February the camp had literally emptied out. Now, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports, “nothing remains of Ashrafi but rubble and a few stones.”

Refugees surging to Iraq? That isn’t what the antiwar legions told us would happen if George Bush made good on his vow to end Saddam’s reign of terror. Over and over they warned that a US invasion would trigger a humanitarian cataclysm, including a flood of refugees from Iraq. This, for instance, was Martin Sheen at a Los Angeles news conference a month before the war began:

“As the dogs of war slouch towards Baghdad, we need to be reminded that as many as 2 million refugees could become a reality, as well as half a million fatalities.”

Writing on the left-wing website AlterNet last March, senior editor Tai Moses expressed dread of the coming of a war that “could create more than a million refugees.” The BBC, citing a “confidential” UN document, predicted that up to 500,000 Iraqis would be seriously injured during the first phase of an American attack, while 1 million would flee the country and 2 million more would be internally displaced — all compounded by an “outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions.” The Organization of the Islamic Conference foresaw the “displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees,” plus “total destruction and a humanitarian tragedy whose scale cannot be predicted.”

Wrong, every one of them, along with all the other doomsayers, Bush-haters, “Not In Our Name” fanatics, and sundry “peace” activists who flooded the streets and the airwaves to warn of onrushing disaster. How many have had the integrity to admit that their visions of catastrophe were wildly off the mark? Or that if they had gotten their way, the foremost killer of Muslims alive today — Saddam — would still be torturing children before their parents’ eyes? Instead they chant, “Bush lied, people died,” and seize on every setback in Iraq as proof that they were right all along.

But they were wrong all along.

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Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
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