USA Today: As Iraqi refugees flee, let's not forget Vietnam

[PhilipShore]

January 30, 2007
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/01/as_iraqi_refuge.html

As Iraqi refugees flee, let's not forget Vietnam

By Adam Goodheart and John R. Bohrer

At a hearing on Capitol Hill two weeks ago, a young Iraqi http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=2470&wit_id=5989">gave gripping testimony of the price paid by his countrymen who have risked their lives serving the U.S. occupation. The 27-year-old former military translator, whose name was withheld for his safety, told senators of receiving death threats and surviving a car bombing after he was identified as a friend of the Americans.

It was a story eerily reminiscent of tales from Southeast Asia more than three decades ago, when hundreds of thousands of our loyal allies faced imprisonment and death as the Vietnam War drew to a close. The world still remembers the agonizing photo of crowds swarming the last U.S. helicopter that took off from Saigon in 1975.

Although Iraq, as yet, offers no image to match that one, its refugee crisis is almost as dire. http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html">According to the United Nations, as many as 3.4 million people have fled (including many who left before the U.S. invasion), a number that continues to escalate. Yet since the 2003 invasion, only 466 Iraqi refugees have http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/world/middleeast/02refugees.html?ex=1325394000&en=ec941ee7f10f7aed&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">been allowed into the USA.