One Utah

In the current issue of Newsweek, Christopher Dickey and John Barry wonder if anyone is planning the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq and preparing for the consequences. During previous large scale retreats by world powers like the United States, France and Britain, failure to plan ahead has led to chaos:

The central lesson in all these cases was not that withdrawal was a bad idea. Wise or not, it became inevitable. But the aftermath in every case was made worse by the fact that governments waited so long to admit that a pullout might be necessary. When the moment came, their hasty departures made the chaos that followed that much worse.

Meanwhile, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is struggling to cope with the magnitude of the Iraqi refugee crisis:

[A]lready more than 750,000 Iraqis have moved to Jordan, which had a population of only 6 million to begin with, and not enough water for those. Syria has taken in more than a million. The UNHCR and other agencies are stockpiling in Syria and especially Jordan to meet the needs of 200,000 more refugees. “The disaster is happening now,” says Astrid van Genderen Stort at the UNHCR’s office in Geneva.

The number of Iraqi refugees so far has exceeded the tide of “boat people” who fled Vietnam after the communist takeover.

UPDATE: At a UNHCR conference in Geneva, it was estimated that so far nearly four million Iraqis have fled their homes to become refugees or internally displaced persons. Some were forced to abandon all their possessions under threat of death.

For more about Iraqi refugees, see my previous posts:
1.8 Million Iraqi Refugees- USA Has Accepted 400
Trapped in Iraq
The USA Needs to Help Iraqi Refugees

This entry was posted Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Disaster, Iraq, Military, National Politics, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.