Sherry Chandler

Last weekend, my family and I watched Paradise Now, a powerful film in which two young Palestinean men — bitter, hopeless, angry, idealistic, choose your adjective — embark upon a suicide mission to Tel Aviv. In explaining why he has made his choice, one of the young men, Said, says, “I was born in a refugee camp.”

Now consider this McClatchy report from Warren P. Strobel:

WASHINGTON - One out of every seven Iraqis has fled his or her home or sought refuge abroad, the largest movement of people in the Middle East since the war that followed Israel’s creation in 1948, according to United Nations officials and relief workers. Every day, violence displaces an estimated 1,300 more Iraqis in the country; every month, at least 40,000.

…

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in a report last month that there are as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, primarily in Syria and Jordan. Another 1.7 million people are displaced within Iraq, the UNHCR said.

Although it smells a tiny bit of propaganda, Paradise Now realizes the fate of people displaced. Although the focus is on the angry young men, the emotional center is on those left to pick up the pieces — mothers and daughters of “heroes.”

Are we creating more “heroes” among young displaced Iraqis? The report says the U.S. has accepted a total of 202 Iraqi refugees. Are we creating a world of border fences? More from Strobel:

Non-governmental groups working with refugees say that outside aid can’t come fast enough, because Syria and Jordan are hinting at closing their doors. Other neighbors, such as Saudi Arabia, have accepted almost no refugees. The Saudis are building a barrier along the border with Iraq,

“In six months, it will be too late,” said Kristele Younes of Refugees International, an advocacy group. “We’re not seeing the U.S. do much, frankly.”

Senior U.S. officials sidestepped the question of whether Washington bears special responsibility for Iraqis fleeing the violence.

“It’s a shared global responsibility,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

…

The crisis is likely to get worse before it gets better. UNHCR projects that the number of internally displaced in Iraq could grow to about 2.7 million by year’s end.

A recent report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution said that if Iraq spirals into all-out civil war, U.S. troops might have to establish “catch basins” along Iraq’s borders to care for tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing the violence.

Link from Juan Cole, who has more on the displaced persons of this war.

A correspondent has pointed me toward this article by Hal Crowther, who, like his friend Molly Ivins, can tell it like it is:

It’s unbearably true that every American soldier who has died or will die in Iraq will have died in vain, and died in a disaster that will yield no net gain, now or ever, for his native country or for the cause of civilization and human dignity. If I had any say in divine justice, these thousands of coffins, forged of lead, would be dragged forever across the battlefields of hell by Bush and Rumsfeld and all the civilians who should have known better, or who must have known better and never tried to intervene.

Honest historians will record that a failed government of oil pirates, corporate shills, chicken hawks and neocon fantasists was the worst this country ever endured. But never tell me that Bush and his accomplices, however history makes hash of them, are getting just what they deserve. What they deserve was suffered instead by tens of thousands of young men and women who are dead, maimed, disfigured and psychologically crippled, victims of the wretched judgment of politicians whose lame schemes and pipe dreams (oil pipes, mostly) they struggled to implement and comprehend. “All we really do,” one young soldier told a reporter from the Boston Globe, “is drive around here until someone shoots us or blows us up.”

“I told you so” is a sweet-tasting thing that turns bitter in your mouth when your vindication is a mountain of corpses. But, yes, we told you so—I told you so, from the first moment George Bush waved his silly virgin sword at Saddam Hussein. Though none of us who anticipated nearly every convulsion of this monumental miscarriage could have anticipated the body count, nor quite the bewildering level of failure and futility.

Read the rest. It winds up with newly elected Senator John Tester and in another place devastated by the energy wars:

Driving down the spine of the Appalachians from Maine to North Carolina just before the election, I passed through stricken landscapes so impoverished and depopulated, so disfigured with rusted cars and trailers and uninhabitable-looking houses, that it takes a trained eye to tell which ones have been abandoned and which are still in use. Fresh paint is nowhere, in every town half the storefronts are boarded up. This is a third world countryside where TV cameras never venture. Hardly anyone lives where I grew up, and no one young.

When Americans think of poverty, they think of soup kitchens and homeless people sleeping on the grates in city sidewalks. Maybe it’s time to take another look at the farms and small towns where this country was born and baptized, before exurbs, malls, Wal-Marts, agribusiness and utility deregulation began to empty the rural counties as cruelly as London landlords cleared the Scottish glens of Highlanders. “Grave and deteriorating,” harsh words the Baker report used to describe the Iraq situation to a chastened, suddenly smirkless president, apply equally to the situation in Jon Tester’s Chouteau County and to great stretches of the desolated hill country of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. If a unique politician like Tester could call attention to this tragedy, no less profound in its implications than the national humiliation in Iraq, he’d be a hero to a lot of people who have no heroes left. And not least of all to me.