Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem From Hell, penned an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times in which she illustrates many of our fears about the United States’ presence in Iraq and how it will eventually lead to increased ethnic conflict and possible future genocide(s).
First, although it has a familiar and thus unsatisfying ring to it, the most viable long-term route to preventing mass atrocities is to use remaining U.S. leverage to bring about a political compromise that makes Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds feel economically stable, physically secure and adequately represented in political structures. This is consistent with the position of leading U.S. generals and the members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, who have stressed that there is no military solution to Iraq’s meltdown and urged the administration, the Iraqis and regional players to reopen broad-ranging political negotiations.
Instead of simply lining up behind Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government in the hopes that it will one day decide to stop ethnic cleansing, recent withdrawal proposals in Congress use the leverage of the proposed redeployment to press Iraqis to reach a political solution. A plan put forth by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has come under neoconservative fire for setting a target departure date, but it provides for flexibility to suspend the U.S. drawdown if Iraqis meet the key economic, political and security benchmarks they have committed to achieve this year. The plan would also retain some U.S. forces in Iraq and the region to help deter atrocities by sectarian militias and aggression from Iraq’s neighbors.
However, if this political pressure fails and U.S. forces remain unable to stave off an ever-widening civil war, the U.S. should go further and announce its willingness to assist in the voluntary transport and relocation of Iraqi civilians in peril. If Iraqis tell us that they would feel safer in religiously homogenous neighborhoods, and we lack the means to protect them where they are, we should support and protect them in their voluntary, peaceful evacuation — a means, one might say, to preempt genocide in advance of our departure.
The administration must help secure asylum for those Iraqis — and there are millions who fit this bill — who have a “well-founded fear of persecution.” At the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ conference scheduled for April, which will be attended by Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the United States, the overburdened countries of first asylum (Syria is sheltering 1 million Iraqis; Jordan has taken in 700,000) must be persuaded to reopen their gates to fleeing Iraqis. And Western countries must dramatically expand the number of resettlement slots for Iraqis. Astoundingly, the U.S. took in just 202 Iraqis last year and, although the maximum for this year was recently raised to 7,000, this is still not sufficient.
Finally, if we are serious about preventing further sectarian horrors, the U.S. must send a clear signal to the militias and political leaders who order or carry out atrocities that they will be brought to justice for their crimes. That means offering belated U.S. support to the International Criminal Court, the only credible, independent body with the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity and genocide.
As I’ve written in the past, the fractured social structure and lack of stability in Iraq are perfect incubators for ethnic strife. With a crumbled economy and a lack of infrastructure, it’s easy to see the entire country sliding into an eventual genocidal rage.
While I agree that the only solution to a pending humanitarian crisis is refugee repopulation, I have trouble believing that the conservative movement will widen talks on US immigration for threatened Iraqis. I don’t argue against refugee support, I’m merely pointing out that I can’t see it actually happening.
As someone who studies genocide professionally, I can tell you there’s no modern case of ethnic conflict that’s harder to understand, particularly for Westerners, than the current crisis in Darfur. At the onset, the western press was billing the violence as religious based, or merely as spill-over from the years long Civil War in South Sudan. As the government began enlisting the aid of janjaweed militia to fight armed rebels, it became increasingly hard to understand exactly who was fighting who and why.