Iraq

WASHINGTON, July 6 (UPI) -- The displacement of Iraqi refugees -- close to 4 million -- represents the most serious crisis involving population movements in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinians in 1948, when fleeing the creation of the state of Israel, hundreds of thousands established themselves in decrepit refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Iraq’s Kurdish north has offered a heartening contrast to an otherwise blood-soaked country. Its polity works; its economy thrives. But the reports last week of a Turkish military incursion, in pursuit of Kurdish rebels, is an eruption of only one of three steadily deepening problems that could combine to worsen the Bush administration’s predicament in Iraq.

To: The New President
From: The National Security Adviser
Date: January 21, 2009

Evening in Erbil, Kurdistan, what passes for an oasis of peace in Iraq. It’s March 2006, and I’m waiting for a ride down to Baghdad along one of the world’s most dangerous roads, a six-hour drive through the Sunni Triangle. A few years ago, I would have taken a taxi, but now the insurgents run roadblocks looking for targets -- soldiers, contractors, journalists. I can’t rely on the Iraqi police, who are as likely to turn me over to insurgents for money as to be insurgents themselves. And then there are the improvised explosive devices, hidden in rubbish, wreckage, dead goats.

TONY JONES: The American military has displayed pictures of 42 prisoners it rescued from a desert hide-out in Iraq, believed to be an Al Qaeda base. Some of the prisoners have reported they'd been kidnapped and held at the camp for up to four months. Tom Iggulden reports.

TOM IGGULDEN: This modest hide-out held 42 prisoners until American troops raided it today, after a tip-off from locals...

I arrived in Iraq before L. Paul Bremer arrived in May 2003 and stayed on long after his ignominious and furtive departure in June 2004 -- long enough to see the tragic consequences of his policies in Iraq. So I was disappointed by the indignant lack of repentance on full display in his Outlook article on Sunday.

While the public gaze is fixated on the reasons for and success of the Iraq war, few policy analysts, commentators, and journalists are paying attention to the largest refugee problem in the Middle East since 1948.

I. Roads to Damascus

At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees.

President George W. Bush will almost certainly veto on Tuesday a $124bn war-spending bill that the White House says would impose an “artificial deadline” on the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

The Democratic majority on Capitol Hill choreographed Tuesday’s expected veto to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the president’s “mission accomplished” speech in which he declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”.

As Arab presidents, emirs, and kings lined up alongside the United Nations secretary general and the Pakistani, Malaysian, and Turkish heads of state in last month’s Arab League summit in Riyadh, one key player was missing at the highest level: Iran. Its nominal head of state, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, was not invited to the summit. Instead the relatively weak foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki, attended on behalf of the Islamic Republic.