In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.
Yet throughout the article there is no hint other than identifying one man is a Sunni about who is leaving. Given all the ink spilled by the press on the subject of civil war, you'd think that they might say which portion is going. Could it be Sunnis? The article hints this might be so given that it mentions that Shia anger after the Samarra bombing is fueling the fear that propels leaving Iraq. So just how "ordinary" are these people? The fact that the family portrayed looks pretty well off might clue you into the fact that they had benefitted from Saddam's rule. Some might actually be former oppressers who deserve to worry after decades of face stomping orgies against the Shia and Kurds. But the Times wasn't curious enough to explore this angle.
And nevermind that the granting of passports is not the same as actually leaving.
And despite the claims of massive numbers of refugees fleeing Iraq, check this out by Amir Taheri, who sees signs that Iraqi prospects are looking up:
The first sign is refugees. When things have been truly desperate in Iraq in 1959, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1980, 1988, and 1990 long queues of Iraqis have formed at the Turkish and Iranian frontiers, hoping to escape. In 1973, for example, when Saddam Hussein decided to expel all those whose ancestors had not been Ottoman citizens before Iraqs creation as a state, some 1.2 million Iraqis left their homes in the space of just six weeks. This was not the temporary exile of a small group of middle-class professionals and intellectuals, which is a common enough phenomenon in most Arab countries. Rather, it was a departure en masse, affecting people both in small villages and in big cities, and it was a scene regularly repeated under Saddam Hussein.
Since the toppling of Saddam in 2003, this is one highly damaging image we have not seen on our television sets and we can be sure that we would be seeing it if it were there to be shown. To the contrary, Iraqis, far from fleeing, have been returning home. By the end of 2005, in the most conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2-million mark. Many of the camps set up for fleeing Iraqis in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia since 1959 have now closed down. The oldest such center, at Ashrafiayh in southwest Iran, was formally shut when its last Iraqi guests returned home in 2004.
So refugees who fled Saddam are coming home. Huh. Read the other three signs he sees indicating real progress. But lets go back to the refugee issue.
You might wonder about the contradictions of the Times and Taheri. Taheri has a good explanation for that as well, as he tells of why the public thinks things are so bad in Iraq:
To make matters worse, many of the newsmen, pundits, and commentators on whom American viewers and readers rely to describe the situation have been contaminated by the increasing bitterness of American politics. Clearly there are those in the media and the think tanks who wish the Iraq enterprise to end in tragedy, as a just comeuppance for George W. Bush. Others, prompted by noble sentiment, so abhor the idea of war that they would banish it from human discourse before admitting that, in some circumstances, military power can be used in support of a good cause. But whatever the reason, the half-truths and outright disinformation that now function as conventional wisdom have gravely disserved the American people.
Sadly, Taheri ignores the ability of the media to just write stories that support their views of doom even if they can't get pictures of masses of Iraqis streaming across the border and have to settle for living room pictures of well-off Sunnis suddenly afraid for their lives as the price to be paid for making others fear for their lives for so many decades.
Some people deserve to be unhappy. And even experience a little of the fear they doled out. Not everybody deserves our pity.
Remember who the New York Times feels sorry for, eh? Shades of the Ukraine in the 1930s, I guess.
