Iraqi Refugees and the Pottery Barn Rule

[Vinnie From Indy]

It is 7PM, time for Wesim Badan Kheder to trudge out to the bus stop near his family’s apartment on the south side of Indianapolis.

Kheder struggles with his English and his diabetes causes him problems, but he is in desperate need of money to support his wife and two teenage daughters. So each night, he commutes three hours each way by bus to a graveyard-shift job, where he spends most of the time tearing down cardboard boxes. After work, Kheder will go the company’s break room to wait a couple more hours before the first bus comes by to start his return journey home.

With Defense Secretary Robert Gates hinting last week that the U.S. may be withdrawing from Iraq on a timetable even faster than President Obama has suggested, it is time to remember former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s so-called “Pottery Barn Rule” for foreign military actions—you break it, you own it.

Turns out Pottery Barn does not actually have such a rule, but the U.S. should. We have done enormous harm to Iraqis, and even if we make a quick exit with our military, the damage remains.

Just ask Kheder, a Sunni Iraqi who was forced to flee Baghdad in 2006 with his family after receiving a credible threat that a Shia group was preparing to kill him.

Now, Kheder’s family is among us Hoosiers, physically safe but very worried and very poor. Kheder is part of an under-reported but massive refugee crisis, as millions of Iraqis are unable to return to their homes. Most of the Iraqi refugees are in Syria and Jordan or are displaced within Iraq, but a few have been allowed into the U.S.

These include Kheder’s neighbor, Basim Najeeb, an Iraqi lawyer, and his wife and two young children. After being shot by a Shia militia in his neighborhood, Najeeb played dead to spare himself the follow-up bullets. It wasn’t always this way, Najeeb says. Just a few years before, in pre-occupation Iraq, Najeeb and his law school classmates did not even know if their colleagues were Shia, Sunni, or Christian.

On a broad policy level, the U.S. plans for a post-occupation Iraq must include safe return home for some refugees and assistance to resettle others for whom a return is impossible.

On a more local level, the Indianapolis-based International Interfaith Initiative is seeking people and congregations to assist the dozen Iraqi refugee families here in our community. To learn how to help, go to www.internationalinterfaith.org.

Both Kheder and Najeeb are grateful for the support they have received from Americans. But they agree that the U.S. invasion and occupation of their home country set the stage for the brutal chaos that has forced so many like them into exile. “Saddam Hussein began to destroy Iraq and America completed it,” Najeeb says.

We helped break the homeland of millions of families like these. Now it is time to help repair the damage.

Fran Quigley
Visiting Professor of Law
Indiana University School of Law--Indianapolis
530 West New York Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202-3225

This column is online at http://www.indystar.com/article/20090811/OPINION12/908110301/1002/OPINION/Repairing+the+damage+from+Iraq
(reprinted in it's entirety here with author's permission)