Tomgram: Michael Schwartz On The Iraqi Brain Drain

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz On The Iraqi Brain Drain

By Tom Engelhardt

Created Feb 11 2008 - 8:23am

- from TomDispatch [1]

I'm an innumerate, but the figures on this -- the saddest story of our Iraq

debacle -- are so large that even I can do the necessary computations. The

population of the United States is now just over 300,000,000 [2]. The

population of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion was perhaps in the 26-27

million range. Between March 2003 and today, a number of reputable sources

place the total of Iraqis who have fled their homes -- those who have been

displaced internally and those who have gone abroad -- at between 4.5

million [3] and 5 million individuals. If you take that still staggering

lower figure, approximately one in six Iraqis is either a refugee in another

country or an internally displaced person.

Now, consider the equivalent in terms of the U.S. population. If Iraq had

invaded the United States in March 2003 with similar results, in less than

five years approximately 50 million Americans would have fled their homes,

assumedly flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders, desperately

burdening weaker neighboring economies. It would be an unparalleled, even

unimaginable, catastrophe. Consider, then, what we would think if, back in

Baghdad, politicians and the media were hailing, or at least discussing

positively, the "success" of the prime minister's recent "surge strategy" in

the U.S., even though it had probably been instrumental in creating at least

one out of every ten [4] of those refugees, 5 million displaced Americans in

all. Imagine what our reaction would be to such blithe barbarism.

Back in the real world, of course, what Michael Schwartz terms the "tsunami"

of Iraqi refugees, the greatest refugee crisis on the planet, has received

only modest attention in this country (which managed, in 2007, to accept [5]

but 1,608 [6] Iraqi refugees out of all those millions -- a figure

nonetheless up from 2006). As with so much else, the Bush administration

takes no responsibility for the crisis, nor does it feel any need to respond

to it at an appropriate level. Until now, to the best of my knowledge, no

one has even put together a history of the monumental, horrific tale of

human suffering that George W. Bush's war of choice and subsequent

occupation unleashed, or fully considered what such a brain drain, such a

loss of human capital, might actually mean for Iraq's future.

-- Tom

Iraq's Tidal Wave of Misery: The First History of the Planet's Worst Refugee

Crisis

By Michael Schwartz

A tidal wave of misery is engulfing Iraq -- and it isn't the usual violence

that Americans are accustomed to hearing about and tuning out. To be sure,

it's rooted in that violence, but this tsunami of misery is social and

economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from

their homes, tears them from their material possessions, and carries them

off from families and communities. It leaves them stranded in hostile towns

or foreign countries, with no anchor to resist the moment when the next wave

of displacement sweeps over them.

The victims of this human tsunami are called refugees if they wash ashore

outside the country or IDPs ("internally displaced persons") if their

landing place is within Iraq's borders. Either way, they are normally left

with no permanent housing, no reliable livelihood, no community support, and

no government aid. All the normal social props that support human lives are

removed, replaced with.nothing.

Overlapping Waves of the Dispossessed

In its first four years, the Iraq war created three overlapping waves of

refugees and IDPs.

It all began with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which the Bush

administration set up inside Baghdad's Green Zone and, in May 2003, placed

under the control of L. Paul Bremer III. The CPA immediately began

dismantling Iraq's state apparatus. Thousands of Baathist Party bureaucrats

were purged from the government; tens of thousands of workers were laid off

from shuttered, state-owned industries; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi

military personnel were dismissed from Saddam's dismantled military. Their

numbers soon multiplied as the ripple effect of their lost buying power

rolled through the economy. Many of the displaced found other (less

remunerative) jobs; some hunkered down to wait out bad times; still others

left their homes and sought work elsewhere, with the most marketable going

to nearby countries where their skills were still in demand. They were the

leading edge of the first wave of Iraqi refugees.

As the post-war chaos continued, kidnapping became the country's growth

industry, targeting any prosperous family with the means to pay ransom. This

only accelerated the rate of departure, particularly among those who had

already had their careers disrupted. A flood of professional, technical, and

managerial workers fled their homes and Iraq in search of personal and job

security.

The spirit of this initial exodus was eloquently expressed by an Iraqi

blogger [7] with the online handle of AnaRki13:

"Not so much a migration as a forced exodus. Scientists, engineers,

doctors, architects, writers, poets, you name it -- everybody is getting out

of town.

"Why? Simple: 1. There is no real job market in Iraq. 2. Even if you have

a good job, chances are good you'll get kidnapped or killed. It's just not

worth it staying here. Sunni, Shiite, or Christian -- everybody, we're all

leaving, or have already left.

"One of my friends keeps berating me about how I should love this country,

the land of my ancestors, where I was born and raised; how I should be

grateful and return to the place that gave me everything. I always tell him

the same thing: 'Iraq, as you and me once knew it, is lost. What's left of

it, I don't want.'

"The most famous doctors and university professors have already left the

country because many of them, including ones I knew personally, were

assassinated or killed, and the rest got the message -- and got themselves

jobs in the west, where they were received warmly and given high positions.

Other millions of Iraqis, just ordinary Iraqis, left and are leaving --

without plans and with much hope."

In 2004, the Americans triggered a second wave of refugees when they began

to attack and invade insurgent strongholds, as they did the Sunni city of

Falluja in November 2004, using the full kinetic force of their military.

Whether the Americans called for evacuation or not, large numbers of local

residents were forced to flee battleground neighborhoods or cities. The

process was summarized in a thorough review of the history of the war

compiled by the Global Policy Forum and 35 other international

non-governmental organizations:

"Among those who flee, the most fortunate are able to seek refuge with

out-of-town relatives, but many flee into the countryside where they face

extremely difficult conditions, including shortages of food and water.

Eventually the Red Crescent, the UN or relief organizations set up camps. In

Falluja, a city of about 300,000, over 216,000 displaced persons had to seek

shelter in overcrowded camps during the winter months, inadequately supplied

with food, water, and medical care. An estimated 100,000 fled al-Qaim, a

city of 150,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS). In

Ramadi, about 70 percent of the city's 400,000 people left in advance of the

U.S. onslaught.

"These moments mark the beginning of Iraq's massive displacement crisis."

While most of these refugees returned after the fighting, a significant

minority did not, either because their homes (or livelihoods) had been

destroyed, or because they were afraid of continuing violence. Like the

economically displaced of the previous wave, these refugees sought out new

areas that were less dangerous or more prosperous, including neighboring

countries. And, as with that first wave, it was the professionals as well as

the technical and managerial workers who were most likely to have the

resources to leave Iraq.

In early 2005 the third wave began, developing by the next year into the

veritable tsunami of ethnic cleansing and civil war that pushed vast numbers

of Iraqis from their homes. The precipitating incidents, according to Ali

Allawi -- the Iraqi finance minister when this third wave began -- were

initially triggered by the second-wave-refugees pushed out of the Sunni city

of Falluja in the winter of 2004:

"Refugees leaving Falluja had converged on the western Sunni suburbs of

Baghdad, Amriya and Ghazaliya, which had come under the control of the

insurgency. Insurgents, often backed by relatives of the Falluja refugees,

turned on the Shi'a residents of these neighbourhoods. Hundreds of Shi'a

families were driven from their homes, which were then seized by the

refugees. Sunni Arab resentment against the Shi'a's 'collaboration' with the

occupation's forces had been building up, exacerbated by the apparent

indifference of the Shi'a to the assault on Falluja.

"In turn, the Shi'a were becoming incensed by the daily attacks on

policemen and soldiers, who were mostly poor Shi'a men. The targeting of

Sunnis in majority Shi'a neighbourhoods began in early 2005. In the Shaab

district of Baghdad, for instance, the assassination of a popular Sadrist

cleric, Sheikh Haitham al-Ansari, led to the formation of one of the first

Shi'a death squads. The cycle of killings, assassinations, bombings and

expulsions fed into each other, quickly turning to a full-scale ethnic

cleansing of city neighbourhoods and towns."

The process only accelerated in early 2006, after the bombing of the Golden

Dome in Samarra, a revered Shiite shrine, and crested in 2007 when the

American military "surge" onto the streets of Baghdad loosened the hold of

Sunni insurgents on many mixed as well as Sunni neighborhoods in the

capital. During the year of the surge all but 25 or so of the approximately

200 mixed neighborhoods [8] in Baghdad became ethnically homogenous. A

similar process took place in the city's southern suburbs.

As minority groups in mixed neighborhoods and cities were driven out, they

too joined the army of displaced persons, often settling into vacated homes

in newly purified neighborhoods dominated by their own sect. But many, like

those in the previous waves of refugees, found they had to move to new

locales far away from the violence, including a large number who, once

again, simply left Iraq. As with previous waves, the more prosperous were

the most likely to depart, taking with them professional, technical, and

managerial skills.

Among those who departed in this third wave was Riverbend [9], the

pseudonymous "Girl Blogger from Baghdad," who had achieved international

fame for her beautifully crafted reports [10] on life in Iraq under the U.S.

occupation. Her description of her journey into exile chronicled the

emotional tragedy experienced by millions of Iraqis:

"The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go and I went

from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk --

the one I'd used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the

curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I

broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we'd

gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the

framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long

since been taken down and stored away -- but I knew just what hung where. I

said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over -- the

Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart

to throw away.

"The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by

masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the

passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car

behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I've learned that the best

technique is to avoid eye contact, answer questions politely and pray under

your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent

jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves...

"How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs,

militias, death squads and. peace, safety? It's difficult to believe -- even

now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can't hear the

explosions..."

The Human Toll

The number of Iraqis who flooded neighboring lands, not to speak of even

approximate estimates of the number of internal refugees, remains

notoriously difficult to determine, but the most circumspect of observers

have reported constantly accelerating rates of displacement since the Bush

administration's March 2003 invasion. These numbers quickly outstripped the

flood of expatriates who had fled the country during Saddam Hussein's brutal

era.

By early 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [11] was

already estimating that 1.7 million Iraqis had left the country and that

perhaps an equal number of internal refugees had been created in the same

three-year period. The rate rose dramatically yet again as sectarian

violence and ethnic expulsions took hold; the International Organization for

Migration estimated the displacement rate during 2006 and 2007 at about

60,000 per month. In mid 2007, Iraq was declared by Refugees International

[12] to be the "fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world," while the

United Nations called the crisis "the worst human displacement in Iraq's

modern history."

Syria, the only country that initially placed no restrictions on Iraqi

immigration, had (according to UN statistics [13]) taken in about 1.25

million displaced Iraqis by early 2007. In addition, the UN estimated that

more than 500,000 Iraqi refugees were in Jordan, as many as 70,000 in Egypt,

approaching 60,000 in Iran, about 30,000 in Lebanon, approximately 200,000

spread across the Gulf States, and another 100,000 in Europe, with a final

50,000 spread around the globe. The United States [14], which had accepted

about 20,000 Iraqi refugees during Saddam Hussein's years, admitted 463

additional ones between the start of the war and mid-2007.

President Bush's "surge" strategy, begun in January 2007, amplified the

flood, especially of the internally displaced, still further. According to

James Glanz and Stephen Farrell of the New York Times [15], "American-led

operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their

homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional

troops arrived." The combined effect of the American offensive and

accelerated ethnic expulsions generated an estimated displacement rate of

100,000 per month in Baghdad alone during the first half of 2007, a figure

that surprised even Said Hakki, the director of the Iraqi Red Crescent, who

had been monitoring the refugee crisis since the beginning of the war.

During 2007, according to UN estimates, Syria admitted an additional 150,000

refugees. With Iraqis by then constituting almost 10% of the country's

population, the Syrian government, feeling the strain on resources, began

putting limits [16] on the unending flood and attempted to launch a mass

repatriation policy. Such repatriation efforts have, so far, been largely

fruitless. Even when violence in Baghdad began to decline in late 2007,

refugees [17] attempting to return found that their abandoned homes had

often either been badly damaged in American offensives or, more likely,

appropriated by strangers (often of a different sect), or were in "cleansed"

neighborhoods that were now inhospitable to them.

In the same years, the weight of displaced persons inside Iraq grew ever

more quickly. Estimated by the UN at 2.25 million in September 2007, this

tidal flow of internally displaced, often homeless, families began to weigh

on the resources of the provinces receiving them. Najaf, the first large

city south of Baghdad, where the most sacred Shiite shrines in Iraq are

located, found that its population of 700,000 had increased by an estimated

400,000 displaced Shia. In three other southern Shia provinces, IDPs came by

mid-2007 to constitute over half the population.

The burden was crushing. By 2007, Karbala [18], one of the most burdened

provinces, was attempting to enforce a draconian measure passed the previous

year: New residents would be expelled unless officially sponsored by two

members of the provincial council. Other governates also tried in various

ways, and largely without success, to staunch [19] the flow of refugees.

Whether inside or outside the country, even prosperous families before the

war faced grim conditions. In Syria, where a careful survey [20] of

conditions was undertaken in October 2007, only 24% of all Iraqi families

were supported by salaries or wages. Most families were left to live as best

they could on dwindling savings or remittances from relatives, and a third

of those with funds on hand expected to run out within three months. Under

this kind of pressure, increasing numbers were reduced to sex work [21] or

other exploitative (or black market) sources of income.

Food was a major issue for many families; according to the United Nations,

nearly half needed "urgent food assistance." A substantial proportion of

adults reported skipping at least one meal a day in order to feed their

children. Many others endured foodless days "in order to keep up with rent

and utilities." One refugee mother told McClatchy reporter Hannah Allam, "We

buy just enough meat to flavor the food -- we buy it with pennies... I can't

even buy a kilo of sweets for Eid [a major annual celebration]."

According to a rigorous McClatchy Newspaper survey, most Iraqi refugees in

Syria were housed in crowded conditions with more than one person per room

(sometimes many more). Twenty-five percent of families lived in one-room

apartments; about one in six refugees had been diagnosed with a (usually

untreated) chronic disease; and one-fifth of the children had had diarrhea

in the two weeks before being questioned. While Syrian officials had aided

refugee parents in getting over two-thirds of school-aged children enrolled

in schools, 46% had dropped out -- due mainly to lack of appropriate

immigration documents, insufficient funds to pay for school expenses, or a

variety of emotional issues -- and the drop-out rate was escalating. And

keep in mind, the Iraqis who made it to Syria were generally the lucky ones,

far more likely to have financial resources or employable skills.

Like the expatriate refugees, internally displaced Iraqis faced severe and

constantly declining conditions. The almost powerless Iraqi central

government, largely trapped inside Baghdad's Green Zone, requires that

people who move from one place to another register in person in Baghdad; if

they fail to do so, they lose eligibility for the national program that

subsidizes the purchase of small amounts of a few staple foods. Such

registration was mostly impossible for families driven from their homes in

the country's vicious civil war. With no way to "register," families

displaced outside of Baghdad entered their new residences without even the

increasingly meager safety net offered by guaranteed subsidies of basic food

supplies.

To make matters worse, almost three-quarters of the displaced were women or

children and very few of the intact families had working fathers.

Unemployment rates in most cities to which they were forced to move were

already at or above 50%, so prostitution and child labor increasingly became

necessary options. UNICEF reported [22] that a large proportion of children

in such families were hungry, clinically underweight, and short for their

age. "In some areas, up to 90 per cent of the [displaced] children are not

in school," the UN agency reported.

Losing Precious Resources

The job backgrounds of an extraordinary proportion of Iraqi refugees in

Syria were professional, managerial, or administrative. In other words, they

were collectively the repository of the precious human capital that would

otherwise have been needed to sustain, repair, and eventually rebuild their

country's ravaged infrastructure. In Iraq, approximately 10% of adults had

attended college; more than one-third of the refugees in Syria were

university educated. Whereas less than 1% of Iraqis had a postgraduate

education, nearly 10% of refugees in Syria had advanced degrees, including

4.5% with doctorates. At the opposite end of the economic spectrum, fully

20% of all Iraqis had no schooling, but only a relative handful of the

refugees arriving in Syria (3%) had no education. These proportions were

probably even more striking in other more distant receiving lands, where

entry was more difficult.

The reasons for this remarkable brain drain are not hard to find. Even the

desperate process of fleeing your home turns out to require resources, and

so refugees from most disasters who travel great distances tend to be

disproportionately prosperous, as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New

Orleans so painfully illustrated.

In Iraq, this tendency was enhanced by American policy. The mass

privatization and de-Baathification policies of the Bush administration

ensured that large numbers of professional, technical, and managerial

workers, in particular, would be cast out of their former lives. This

tendency was only exacerbated by the development of the kidnapping industry,

focusing its attentions as it did on families with sufficient resources to

pay handsome ransoms. It was amplified when some insurgent groups began

assassinating remaining government officials, university professors, and

other professionals.

The exodus into the Iraqi Diaspora has severely depleted the country's human

capital. In early 2006, the United States Committee on Refugees and

Immigrants estimated that a full 40% [23] of Iraqi's professional class had

left the country, taking with them their irreplaceable expertise.

Universities and medical facilities were particularly hard hit, with some

reporting less than 20% of needed staff on hand. The oil industry suffered

from what the Wall Street Journal called a "petroleum exodus" that included

the departure of two-thirds of its top 100 managers, as well as significant

numbers of managerial and professional workers.

Even before the huge 2007 exodus from Baghdad, the United Nations

Commissioner of Refugees warned that "the skills required to provide basic

services are becoming more and more scarce," pointing particularly to

doctors, teachers, computer technicians, and even skilled craftsmen like

bakers.

By mid-2007, the loss of these resources was visible in the everyday

functioning [24] of Iraqi society. By then, medical facilities commonly

required patients' families to act as nurses and technicians and were still

unable to perform many services. Schools were often closed, or opened only

sporadically, because of an absence of qualified teachers. Universities

postponed or canceled required courses or qualifying examinations because of

inadequate staff. At the height of an incipient cholera epidemic [25] in the

summer of 2007, water purification plants were idled because needed

technicians could not be found.

The most devastating impact of the Iraqi refugee crisis, however, has

probably been on the very capacity of the national government (which

de-Baathification and privatization had already left in a fragile state) to

administer anything. In every area that such a government might touch, the

missing managerial, technical, and professional talent and expertise has had

a devastating effect, with post-war "reconstruction" particularly hard hit.

Even the ability [26] of the government to disperse its income (mostly from

oil revenues) has been crippled by what cabinet ministers have termed "a

shortage of employees trained to write contracts" and "the flight of

scientific and engineering expertise from the country."

The depths of the problem (as well as the massive levels of corruption that

went with it) could be measured by the fact that the electrical ministry

spent only 26% of its capital budget in 2006; the remaining three-quarters

went unspent. Yet, at that level of disbursement, it still outperformed most

government agencies and ministries in a major way. Under pressure from

American occupation officials to improve its performance in 2007, the

government made concerted efforts to increase both its budget and its

disbursements for reconstruction. Despite initially optimistic reports, the

news was grim by year's end. Actual expenditures [27] on electrical

infrastructure might, for example, have slipped to as low as 1% of the

budgeted amount.

Even more symptomatic were the few successes in infrastructural rebuilding

found by New York Times reporter James Glanz in a survey of capital

construction throughout the country. Most of the successful programs he

reviewed were initiated and managed by officials connected to local and

provincial governments. They discovered that success actually depended on

avoiding any interaction with the ineffective and corrupt central

government. The provincial governor of Babil Province, Sallem S.

al-Mesamawe, described the key to his province's success: "We jumped over

the routine, the bureaucracy, and we depend on new blood -- a new team."

They had learned this lesson after using provincial money and local

contractors to build a school, only to have it remain closed because the

national government was unable to provide the necessary furniture.

The government's staggering institutional incapacity is, in fact, a complex

phenomenon with many sources beyond the drain of human capital. The flood of

managers, professionals, and technicians out of the country, however, has

been a critical obstacle to any productive reconstruction. Worse yet, the

departure of so many crucial figures is probably to a considerable extent

irreversible, ensuring a grim near-future for the country. After all, this

has been a "brain drain" on a scale seldom seen in our era.

Many exiles still intend to, even long to, return when (or if) the situation

improves, but time is always the enemy of such intentions. The moment an

individual arrives in a new country, he or she begins creating social ties

that become ever more significant as a new life takes hold -- and this is

even truer for those who leave with their families, as so many Iraqis have

done. Unless this network-building process is disrupted, for many the

probability of return fades with each passing month.

Those with marketable skills, even in the dire circumstances facing most

Iraqi refugees, have little choice but to keep seeking work that exploits

their training. The most marketable are the most likely to succeed and so to

begin building new careers. As time slips by, the best, the brightest, and

the most important carriers of precious human capital are lost.

The Displacement Tsunami

The degradation of Iraq under the American occupation regime was what

initially set in motion the forces that led to the exile of much of the

country's most precious human resources -- absolutely crucial capital, even

if of a kind not usually considered when talk turns to investing in "nation

building." How, after all, can you "reconstruct" the ravaged foundations of

a bombed-out nation without the necessary professional, technical, and

managerial personnel? Without them, Iraq must continue its downward spiral

toward a nation of slum cities.

The orgy of failure and corruption in 2007 was an unmitigated disaster for

Iraqi society, as well as an embarrassment for the American occupation. From

the point of view of long-term American goals in Iraq, however, this storm

cloud, like so many others, had a silver lining. The Iraqi government's

incapacity to perform at almost any level became but further justification

for the claims first made by L. Paul Bremer at the very beginning of the

occupation: that the country's reconstruction would be best handled by

private enterprise. Moreover, the mass flight of Iraqi professionals,

managers, and technicians has meant that expertise for reconstruction has

simply been unavailable inside the country. This has, in turn, validated a

second set of claims made by Bremer: that reconstruction could only be

managed by large outside contractors.

This neoliberal reality was brought into focus in late 2007, as the last of

the money allocated by the U.S. Congress for Iraqi reconstruction was being

spent. A "petroleum exodus" (first identified by the Wall Street Journal)

had long ago meant that most of the engineers needed for maintaining the

decrepit oil business were already foreigners, mostly "imported from Texas

and Oklahoma." The foreign presence had, in fact, become so pervasive that

the main headquarters for the maintenance and development of the Rumaila oil

field in southern Iraq (the source of more than two-thirds of the country's

oil at present) runs on both Iraqi and Houston time. The American firms in

charge of the field's maintenance and development, KBR and PIJV, have been

utilizing a large number of subcontractors, most of them American or

British, very few of them Iraqi.

These American-funded projects, though, have been merely "stopgaps." When

the money runs out, vast new moneys will be needed just to sustain Rumaila's

production at its present level.

According to Harper's Magazine Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, who visited the

field in the summer of 2007, Iraqi engineers and technicians are "smart

enough and ambitious enough" to sustain and "upgrade" the system once the

American contracts expire, but such a project would take upwards of two

decades because of the compromised condition of the government and the lack

of skilled local engineers and technicians. The likely outcome, when the

American money departs, therefore is either an inadequate effort in which

work proceeds "only in fits and starts;" or, more likely, new contracts in

which the foreign companies would "continue their work," paid for by the

Iraqi government.

With regard to the petroleum industry, therefore, what the refugee crisis

guaranteed was long-term Iraqi dependence on outsiders. In every other key

infrastructural area, a similar dependence was developing: electrical power,

the water system, medicine, and food were, de facto, being "integrated" into

the global system, leaving oil-rich Iraq dependent on outside investment and

largesse for the foreseeable future. Now, that's a twenty-year plan for you,

one that at least 4.5 million Iraqis, out of their homes and, in many cases,

out of the country as well, will be in no position to participate in.

Most horror stories come to an end, but the most horrible part of this

horror story is its never-ending quality. Those refugees who have left Iraq

now face a miserable limbo life, as Syria and other receiving countries

exhaust their meager resources and seek to expel many of them. Those seeking

shelter within Iraq face the depletion of already minimal support systems in

degrading host communities whose residents may themselves be threatened with

displacement.

From the vast out-migration and internal migrations of its desperate

citizens comes damage to society as a whole that is almost impossible to

estimate. The displacement of people carries with it the destruction of

human capital. The destruction of human capital deprives Iraq of its most

precious resource for repairing the damage of war and occupation, condemning

it to further infrastructural decline. This tide of infrastructural decline

is the surest guarantee of another wave of displacement, of future floods of

refugees.

As long as the United States keeps trying to pacify Iraq, it will create

wave after wave of misery.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, has

written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. This report on the

Iraqi refugee crisis is from his forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without

End: The Iraq Debacle in Context [28] (Haymarket Books, June 2008). His work

on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia

Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET. His email address is

Ms42@optonline.net

..

Copyright 2008 Michael Schwartz

--

NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not

always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material

available to advance understanding of

political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I

believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as

provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright

Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson