Ever since invading U.S. troops failed to find those infamous WMDs that Saddam was supposedly about to unleash on the United States, U.S. officials have claimed that their primary objective in invading and occupying Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country, has been an altruistic one: They did it out of love and concern for the Iraqi people, nobly sacrificing more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers, countless Iraqis, and billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money for the sake of “democracy” and “freedom.”
However, it is difficult to reconcile that purported altruism with the U.S. government’s refusal to permit Iraqi refugees to immigrate to the United States.
Due to the devastation that the U.S. invasion and occupation have wrought in Iraq, there are 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria, a country headed by a regime that is considered evil by U.S. officials, and Jordan, which is ruled by an authoritarian regime that U.S. officials consider a good ally of the U.S. government.
Guess how many Iraqi refugees the altruists in the U.S. government admitted to the United States from 2003 to 2007. The grand total of 466. That’s right — less than 500 Iraqi refugees. (See:https://www.inthesetimes.com/article/continued/3611/they_cant_go_home_again.)
In early 2007, U.S. officials promised to admit 25,000 Iraqis to the United States. That number then fell to 7,000, and then again to 2,000. By the end of 2007, the grand total of 1,608 Iraqi refugees had been admitted into the U.S. by federal altruists. Today, the total number of Iraqi refugees who have been permitted to enter the U.S. is less than 5,000. (See:https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22abramowitz.html.)
Compare that 5,000 figure to the 1.5 million — yes, million — that Syria and Jordan, both of which are predominantly Muslim countries, have admitted. Indeed, compare that 5,000 figure to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that have been killed or maimed as a consequence of the purportedly altruistic U.S. intervention in Iraq.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that immigration controls have been used for keeping out people that the U.S. military was supposedly trying to save. How often do we hear U.S. officials glorifying World War II as the “good war” because of the purported attempt by U.S. officials to save the Jews from the Holocaust?
Yet, as I pointed out in an article I wrote in June 1991 entitled “Locking Out the Immigrant,” the truth is that U.S. officials, during the purportedly altruistic regime of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, intentionally and deliberately used immigration controls to prevent Jews from immigrating from Germany to the United States.
As I wrote in that article, “The sordid facts and details are set forth in two books:While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy by Arthur D. Morse and The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy of Genocide by William R. Perl.
As Morse observed,
“The United States not only insisted upon its immigration law throughout the Nazi era, but administered it with severity and callousness. In spite of unprecedented circumstances, the law was constricted so that even its narrow quotas were not met. The lamp remained lifted beside the golden door, but the flame had been extinguished and the door was padlocked.”
Perl writes:
“Anti-Semitism … was certainly a part of the anti-immigration mood of the country, but it was not the sole cause. This was 1938, the U.S. was still on the fringes of the 1929 depression and fear that newcomers would take away jobs needed from those already in the country was genuine.”
The truth and the reality are that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq no more had anything to do with an altruistic love and concern for the Iraqi people, most of whom are Muslims, than U.S. entry into World War II had anything to do with an altruistic love and concern for the Jewish people. But how else could the American people have been made to feel good about all the death, maiming, torture, and destruction in Iraq, especially after Saddam’s infamous WMDs failed to materialize?