Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, The Iraqi Brain Drain


I'm an innumerate, but the figures on this -- the saddest story of our
Iraq debacle -- are so large that even I can do the necessary
computations. The population of the United States is now just over
300,000,000. The population of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion
was perhaps in the 26-27 million range. Between March 2003 and today, a
number of reputable sources place the total of Iraqis who have fled
their homes -- those who have been displaced internally and those who
have gone abroad -- at between 4.5 million and 5 million individuals.
If you take that still staggering lower figure, approximately one in
six Iraqis is either a refugee in another country or an internally
displaced person.

Now, consider the equivalent in terms of the U.S. population. If Iraq
had invaded the United States in March 2003 with similar results, in
less than five years approximately 50 million Americans would have fled
their homes, assumedly flooding across the Mexican and Canadian
borders, desperately burdening weaker neighboring economies. It would
be an unparalleled, even unimaginable, catastrophe. Consider, then,
what we would think if, back in Baghdad, politicians and the media were
hailing, or at least discussing positively, the "success" of the prime
minister's recent "surge strategy" in the U.S., even though it had
probably been instrumental in creating at least one out of every ten of
those refugees, 5 million displaced Americans in all. Imagine what our
reaction would be to such blithe barbarism.

Back in the real world, of course, what Michael Schwartz terms the
"tsunami" of Iraqi refugees, the greatest refugee crisis on the planet,
has received only modest attention in this country (which managed, in
2007, to accept but 1,608 Iraqi refugees out of all those millions -- a
figure nonetheless up from 2006). As with so much else, the Bush
administration takes no responsibility for the crisis, nor does it feel
any need to respond to it at an appropriate level. Until now, to the
best of my knowledge, no one has even put together a history of the
monumental, horrific tale of human suffering that George W. Bush's war
of choice and subsequent occupation unleashed, or fully considered what
such a brain drain, such a loss of human capital, might actually mean
for Iraq's future. Tom

Iraq's Tidal Wave of Misery
The First History of the Planet's Worst Refugee Crisis
By Michael Schwartz

A tidal wave of misery is engulfing Iraq -- and it isn't the usual
violence that Americans are accustomed to hearing about and tuning out.
To be sure, it's rooted in that violence, but this tsunami of misery is
social and economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs,
sweeps them from their homes, tears them from their material
possessions, and carries them off from families and communities. It
leaves them stranded in hostile towns or foreign countries, with no
anchor to resist the moment when the next wave of displacement sweeps
over them.

The victims of this human tsunami are called refugees if they wash
ashore outside the country or IDPs ("internally displaced persons") if
their landing place is within Iraq's borders. Either way, they are
normally left with no permanent housing, no reliable livelihood, no
community support, and no government aid. All the normal social props
that support human lives are removed, replaced with�nothing.

Overlapping Waves of the Dispossessed

In its first four years, the Iraq war created three overlapping
waves of refugees and IDPs.

It all began with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which the
Bush administration set up inside Baghdad's Green Zone and, in May
2003, placed under the control of L. Paul Bremer III. The CPA
immediately began dismantling Iraq's state apparatus. Thousands of
Baathist Party bureaucrats were purged from the government; tens of
thousands of workers were laid off from shuttered, state-owned
industries; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military personnel were
dismissed from Saddam's dismantled military. Their numbers soon
multiplied as the ripple effect of their lost buying power rolled
through the economy. Many of the displaced found other (less
remunerative) jobs; some hunkered down to wait out bad times; still
others left their homes and sought work elsewhere, with the most
marketable going to nearby countries where their skills were still in
demand. They were the leading edge of the first wave of Iraqi refugees.

As the post-war chaos continued, kidnapping became the country's
growth industry, targeting any prosperous family with the means to pay
ransom. This only accelerated the rate of departure, particularly among
those who had already had their careers disrupted. A flood of
professional, technical, and managerial workers fled their homes and
Iraq in search of personal and job security.

The spirit of this initial exodus was eloquently expressed by an
Iraqi blogger with the online handle of AnaRki13:

"Not so much a migration as a forced exodus. Scientists,
engineers, doctors, architects, writers, poets, you name it --
everybody is getting out of town.

"Why? Simple: 1. There is no real job market in Iraq. 2. Even
if you have a good job, chances are good you'll get kidnapped or
killed. It's just not worth it staying here. Sunni, Shiite, or
Christian -- everybody, we're all leaving, or have already left.

"One of my friends keeps berating me about how I should love
this country, the land of my ancestors, where I was born and raised;
how I should be grateful and return to the place that gave me
everything. I always tell him the same thing: 'Iraq, as you and me once
knew it, is lost. What's left of it, I don't want�'

"The most famous doctors and university professors have already
left the country because many of them, including ones I knew
personally, were assassinated or killed, and the rest got the message
-- and got themselves jobs in the west, where they were received warmly
and given high positions. Other millions of Iraqis, just ordinary
Iraqis, left and are leaving -- without plans and with much hope."

In 2004, the Americans triggered a second wave of refugees when
they began to attack and invade insurgent strongholds, as they did the
Sunni city of Falluja in November 2004, using the full kinetic force of
their military. Whether the Americans called for evacuation or not,
large numbers of local residents were forced to flee battleground
neighborhoods or cities. The process was summarized in a thorough
review of the history of the war compiled by the Global Policy Forum
and 35 other international non-governmental organizations:

"Among those who flee, the most fortunate are able to seek
refuge with out-of-town relatives, but many flee into the countryside
where they face extremely difficult conditions, including shortages of
food and water. Eventually the Red Crescent, the UN or relief
organizations set up camps. In Falluja, a city of about 300,000, over
216,000 displaced persons had to seek shelter in overcrowded camps
during the winter months, inadequately supplied with food, water, and
medical care. An estimated 100,000 fled al-Qaim, a city of 150,000,
according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS). In Ramadi, about 70
percent of the city's 400,000 people left in advance of the U.S.
onslaught.

"These moments mark the beginning of Iraq's massive
displacement crisis."

While most of these refugees returned after the fighting, a
significant minority did not, either because their homes (or
livelihoods) had been destroyed, or because they were afraid of
continuing violence. Like the economically displaced of the previous
wave, these refugees sought out new areas that were less dangerous or
more prosperous, including neighboring countries. And, as with that
first wave, it was the professionals as well as the technical and
managerial workers who were most likely to have the resources to leave
Iraq.

In early 2005 the third wave began, developing by the next year
into the veritable tsunami of ethnic cleansing and civil war that
pushed vast numbers of Iraqis from their homes. The precipitating
incidents, according to Ali Allawi -- the Iraqi finance minister when
this third wave began -- were initially triggered by the
second-wave-refugees pushed out of the Sunni city of Falluja in the
winter of 2004:

"Refugees leaving Falluja had converged on the western Sunni
suburbs of Baghdad, Amriya and Ghazaliya, which had come under the
control of the insurgency. Insurgents, often backed by relatives of the
Falluja refugees, turned on the Shi'a residents of these
neighbourhoods. Hundreds of Shi'a families were driven from their
homes, which were then seized by the refugees. Sunni Arab resentment
against the Shi'a's �collaboration' with the occupation's forces had
been building up, exacerbated by the apparent indifference of the Shi'a
to the assault on Falluja.

"In turn, the Shi'a were becoming incensed by the daily attacks
on policemen and soldiers, who were mostly poor Shi'a men. The
targeting of Sunnis in majority Shi'a neighbourhoods began in early
2005. In the Shaab district of Baghdad, for instance, the assassination
of a popular Sadrist cleric, Sheikh Haitham al-Ansari, led to the
formation of one of the first Shi'a death squads� The cycle of
killings, assassinations, bombings and expulsions fed into each other,
quickly turning to a full-scale ethnic cleansing of city neighbourhoods
and towns."

The process only accelerated in early 2006, after the bombing of
the Golden Dome in Samarra, a revered Shiite shrine, and crested in
2007 when the American military "surge" onto the streets of Baghdad
loosened the hold of Sunni insurgents on many mixed as well as Sunni
neighborhoods in the capital. During the year of the surge all but 25
or so of the approximately 200 mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad became
ethnically homogenous. A similar process took place in the city's
southern suburbs.

As minority groups in mixed neighborhoods and cities were driven
out, they too joined the army of displaced persons, often settling into
vacated homes in newly purified neighborhoods dominated by their own
sect. But many, like those in the previous waves of refugees, found
they had to move to new locales far away from the violence, including a
large number who, once again, simply left Iraq. As with previous waves,
the more prosperous were the most likely to depart, taking with them
professional, technical, and managerial skills.

Among those who departed in this third wave was Riverbend, the
pseudonymous "Girl Blogger from Baghdad," who had achieved
international fame for her beautifully crafted reports on life in Iraq
under the U.S. occupation. Her description of her journey into exile
chronicled the emotional tragedy experienced by millions of Iraqis:

"The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go
and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said
goodbye to my desk -- the one I'd used all through high school and
college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I
said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I
said goodbye to the big table over which we'd gathered for meals and to
do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that
once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken
down and stored away -- but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye
to the silly board games we inevitably fought over -- the Arabic
Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to
throw away�

"The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints
being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a
cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same
was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but
I've learned that the best technique is to avoid eye contact, answer
questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been
careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were
both in long skirts and head scarves...

"How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between
car bombs, militias, death squads and� peace, safety? It's difficult to
believe -- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can't
hear the explosions..."

The Human Toll

The number of Iraqis who flooded neighboring lands, not to speak of
even approximate estimates of the number of internal refugees, remains
notoriously difficult to determine, but the most circumspect of
observers have reported constantly accelerating rates of displacement
since the Bush administration's March 2003 invasion. These numbers
quickly outstripped the flood of expatriates who had fled the country
during Saddam Hussein's brutal era.

By early 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
was already estimating that 1.7 million Iraqis had left the country and
that perhaps an equal number of internal refugees had been created in
the same three-year period. The rate rose dramatically yet again as
sectarian violence and ethnic expulsions took hold; the International
Organization for Migration estimated the displacement rate during 2006
and 2007 at about 60,000 per month. In mid 2007, Iraq was declared by
Refugees International to be the "fastest-growing refugee crisis in the
world," while the United Nations called the crisis "the worst human
displacement in Iraq's modern history."

Syria, the only country that initially placed no restrictions on
Iraqi immigration, had (according to UN statistics) taken in about 1.25
million displaced Iraqis by early 2007. In addition, the UN estimated
that more than 500,000 Iraqi refugees were in Jordan, as many as 70,000
in Egypt, approaching 60,000 in Iran, about 30,000 in Lebanon,
approximately 200,000 spread across the Gulf States, and another
100,000 in Europe, with a final 50,000 spread around the globe. The
United States, which had accepted about 20,000 Iraqi refugees during
Saddam Hussein's years, admitted 463 additional ones between the start
of the war and mid-2007.

President Bush's "surge" strategy, begun in January 2007, amplified
the flood, especially of the internally displaced, still further.
According to James Glanz and Stephen Farrell of the New York Times,
"American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful
Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of
thousands of additional troops arrived." The combined effect of the
American offensive and accelerated ethnic expulsions generated an
estimated displacement rate of 100,000 per month in Baghdad alone
during the first half of 2007, a figure that surprised even Said Hakki,
the director of the Iraqi Red Crescent, who had been monitoring the
refugee crisis since the beginning of the war.

During 2007, according to UN estimates, Syria admitted an
additional 150,000 refugees. With Iraqis by then constituting almost
10% of the country's population, the Syrian government, feeling the
strain on resources, began putting limits on the unending flood and
attempted to launch a mass repatriation policy. Such repatriation
efforts have, so far, been largely fruitless. Even when violence in
Baghdad began to decline in late 2007, refugees attempting to return
found that their abandoned homes had often either been badly damaged in
American offensives or, more likely, appropriated by strangers (often
of a different sect), or were in "cleansed" neighborhoods that were now
inhospitable to them.

In the same years, the weight of displaced persons inside Iraq grew
ever more quickly. Estimated by the UN at 2.25 million in September
2007, this tidal flow of internally displaced, often homeless, families
began to weigh on the resources of the provinces receiving them. Najaf,
the first large city south of Baghdad, where the most sacred Shiite
shrines in Iraq are located, found that its population of 700,000 had
increased by an estimated 400,000 displaced Shia. In three other
southern Shia provinces, IDPs came by mid-2007 to constitute over half
the population.

The burden was crushing. By 2007, Karbala, one of the most burdened
provinces, was attempting to enforce a draconian measure passed the
previous year: New residents would be expelled unless officially
sponsored by two members of the provincial council. Other governates
also tried in various ways, and largely without success, to staunch the
flow of refugees.

Whether inside or outside the country, even prosperous families
before the war faced grim conditions. In Syria, where a careful survey
of conditions was undertaken in October 2007, only 24% of all Iraqi
families were supported by salaries or wages. Most families were left
to live as best they could on dwindling savings or remittances from
relatives, and a third of those with funds on hand expected to run out
within three months. Under this kind of pressure, increasing numbers
were reduced to sex work or other exploitative (or black market)
sources of income.

Food was a major issue for many families; according to the United
Nations, nearly half needed "urgent food assistance." A substantial
proportion of adults reported skipping at least one meal a day in order
to feed their children. Many others endured foodless days "in order to
keep up with rent and utilities." One refugee mother told McClatchy
reporter Hannah Allam, "We buy just enough meat to flavor the food --
we buy it with pennies... I can't even buy a kilo of sweets for Eid [a
major annual celebration]."

According to a rigorous McClatchy Newspaper survey, most Iraqi
refugees in Syria were housed in crowded conditions with more than one
person per room (sometimes many more). Twenty-five percent of families
lived in one-room apartments; about one in six refugees had been
diagnosed with a (usually untreated) chronic disease; and one-fifth of
the children had had diarrhea in the two weeks before being questioned.
While Syrian officials had aided refugee parents in getting over
two-thirds of school-aged children enrolled in schools, 46% had dropped
out -- due mainly to lack of appropriate immigration documents,
insufficient funds to pay for school expenses, or a variety of
emotional issues -- and the drop-out rate was escalating. And keep in
mind, the Iraqis who made it to Syria were generally the lucky ones,
far more likely to have financial resources or employable skills.

Like the expatriate refugees, internally displaced Iraqis faced
severe and constantly declining conditions. The almost powerless Iraqi
central government, largely trapped inside Baghdad's Green Zone,
requires that people who move from one place to another register in
person in Baghdad; if they fail to do so, they lose eligibility for the
national program that subsidizes the purchase of small amounts of a few
staple foods. Such registration was mostly impossible for families
driven from their homes in the country's vicious civil war. With no way
to "register," families displaced outside of Baghdad entered their new
residences without even the increasingly meager safety net offered by
guaranteed subsidies of basic food supplies.

To make matters worse, almost three-quarters of the displaced were
women or children and very few of the intact families had working
fathers. Unemployment rates in most cities to which they were forced to
move were already at or above 50%, so prostitution and child labor
increasingly became necessary options. UNICEF reported that a large
proportion of children in such families were hungry, clinically
underweight, and short for their age. "In some areas, up to 90 per cent
of the [displaced] children are not in school," the UN agency reported.

Losing Precious Resources

The job backgrounds of an extraordinary proportion of Iraqi
refugees in Syria were professional, managerial, or administrative. In
other words, they were collectively the repository of the precious
human capital that would otherwise have been needed to sustain, repair,
and eventually rebuild their country's ravaged infrastructure. In Iraq,
approximately 10% of adults had attended college; more than one-third
of the refugees in Syria were university educated. Whereas less than 1%
of Iraqis had a postgraduate education, nearly 10% of refugees in Syria
had advanced degrees, including 4.5% with doctorates. At the opposite
end of the economic spectrum, fully 20% of all Iraqis had no schooling,
but only a relative handful of the refugees arriving in Syria (3%) had
no education. These proportions were probably even more striking in
other more distant receiving lands, where entry was more difficult.

The reasons for this remarkable brain drain are not hard to find.
Even the desperate process of fleeing your home turns out to require
resources, and so refugees from most disasters who travel great
distances tend to be disproportionately prosperous, as the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans so painfully illustrated.

In Iraq, this tendency was enhanced by American policy. The mass
privatization and de-Baathification policies of the Bush administration
ensured that large numbers of professional, technical, and managerial
workers, in particular, would be cast out of their former lives. This
tendency was only exacerbated by the development of the kidnapping
industry, focusing its attentions as it did on families with sufficient
resources to pay handsome ransoms. It was amplified when some insurgent
groups began assassinating remaining government officials, university
professors, and other professionals.

The exodus into the Iraqi Diaspora has severely depleted the
country's human capital. In early 2006, the United States Committee on
Refugees and Immigrants estimated that a full 40% of Iraqi's
professional class had left the country, taking with them their
irreplaceable expertise. Universities and medical facilities were
particularly hard hit, with some reporting less than 20% of needed
staff on hand. The oil industry suffered from what the Wall Street
Journal called a "petroleum exodus" that included the departure of
two-thirds of its top 100 managers, as well as significant numbers of
managerial and professional workers.

Even before the huge 2007 exodus from Baghdad, the United Nations
Commissioner of Refugees warned that "the skills required to provide
basic services are becoming more and more scarce," pointing
particularly to doctors, teachers, computer technicians, and even
skilled craftsmen like bakers.

By mid-2007, the loss of these resources was visible in the
everyday functioning of Iraqi society. By then, medical facilities
commonly required patients' families to act as nurses and technicians
and were still unable to perform many services. Schools were often
closed, or opened only sporadically, because of an absence of qualified
teachers. Universities postponed or canceled required courses or
qualifying examinations because of inadequate staff. At the height of
an incipient cholera epidemic in the summer of 2007, water purification
plants were idled because needed technicians could not be found.

The most devastating impact of the Iraqi refugee crisis, however,
has probably been on the very capacity of the national government
(which de-Baathification and privatization had already left in a
fragile state) to administer anything. In every area that such a
government might touch, the missing managerial, technical, and
professional talent and expertise has had a devastating effect, with
post-war "reconstruction" particularly hard hit. Even the ability of
the government to disperse its income (mostly from oil revenues) has
been crippled by what cabinet ministers have termed "a shortage of
employees trained to write contracts" and "the flight of scientific and
engineering expertise from the country."

The depths of the problem (as well as the massive levels of
corruption that went with it) could be measured by the fact that the
electrical ministry spent only 26% of its capital budget in 2006; the
remaining three-quarters went unspent. Yet, at that level of
disbursement, it still outperformed most government agencies and
ministries in a major way. Under pressure from American occupation
officials to improve its performance in 2007, the government made
concerted efforts to increase both its budget and its disbursements for
reconstruction. Despite initially optimistic reports, the news was grim
by year's end. Actual expenditures on electrical infrastructure might,
for example, have slipped to as low as 1% of the budgeted amount.

Even more symptomatic were the few successes in infrastructural
rebuilding found by New York Times reporter James Glanz in a survey of
capital construction throughout the country. Most of the successful
programs he reviewed were initiated and managed by officials connected
to local and provincial governments. They discovered that success
actually depended on avoiding any interaction with the ineffective and
corrupt central government. The provincial governor of Babil Province,
Sallem S. al-Mesamawe, described the key to his province's success: "We
jumped over the routine, the bureaucracy, and we depend on new blood --
a new team." They had learned this lesson after using provincial money
and local contractors to build a school, only to have it remain closed
because the national government was unable to provide the necessary
furniture.

The government's staggering institutional incapacity is, in fact, a
complex phenomenon with many sources beyond the drain of human capital.
The flood of managers, professionals, and technicians out of the
country, however, has been a critical obstacle to any productive
reconstruction. Worse yet, the departure of so many crucial figures is
probably to a considerable extent irreversible, ensuring a grim
near-future for the country. After all, this has been a "brain drain"
on a scale seldom seen in our era.

Many exiles still intend to, even long to, return when (or if) the
situation improves, but time is always the enemy of such intentions.
The moment an individual arrives in a new country, he or she begins
creating social ties that become ever more significant as a new life
takes hold -- and this is even truer for those who leave with their
families, as so many Iraqis have done. Unless this network-building
process is disrupted, for many the probability of return fades with
each passing month.

Those with marketable skills, even in the dire circumstances facing
most Iraqi refugees, have little choice but to keep seeking work that
exploits their training. The most marketable are the most likely to
succeed and so to begin building new careers. As time slips by, the
best, the brightest, and the most important carriers of precious human
capital are lost.

The Displacement Tsunami

The degradation of Iraq under the American occupation regime was
what initially set in motion the forces that led to the exile of much
of the country's most precious human resources -- absolutely crucial
capital, even if of a kind not usually considered when talk turns to
investing in "nation building." How, after all, can you "reconstruct"
the ravaged foundations of a bombed-out nation without the necessary
professional, technical, and managerial personnel? Without them, Iraq
must continue its downward spiral toward a nation of slum cities.

The orgy of failure and corruption in 2007 was an unmitigated
disaster for Iraqi society, as well as an embarrassment for the
American occupation. From the point of view of long-term American goals
in Iraq, however, this storm cloud, like so many others, had a silver
lining. The Iraqi government's incapacity to perform at almost any
level became but further justification for the claims first made by L.
Paul Bremer at the very beginning of the occupation: that the country's
reconstruction would be best handled by private enterprise. Moreover,
the mass flight of Iraqi professionals, managers, and technicians has
meant that expertise for reconstruction has simply been unavailable
inside the country. This has, in turn, validated a second set of claims
made by Bremer: that reconstruction could only be managed by large
outside contractors.

This neoliberal reality was brought into focus in late 2007, as the
last of the money allocated by the U.S. Congress for Iraqi
reconstruction was being spent. A "petroleum exodus" (first identified
by the Wall Street Journal) had long ago meant that most of the
engineers needed for maintaining the decrepit oil business were already
foreigners, mostly "imported from Texas and Oklahoma." The foreign
presence had, in fact, become so pervasive that the main headquarters
for the maintenance and development of the Rumaila oil field in
southern Iraq (the source of more than two-thirds of the country's oil
at present) runs on both Iraqi and Houston time. The American firms in
charge of the field's maintenance and development, KBR and PIJV, have
been utilizing a large number of subcontractors, most of them American
or British, very few of them Iraqi.

These American-funded projects, though, have been merely
"stopgaps." When the money runs out, vast new moneys will be needed
just to sustain Rumaila's production at its present level.

According to Harper's Magazine Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, who
visited the field in the summer of 2007, Iraqi engineers and
technicians are "smart enough and ambitious enough" to sustain and
"upgrade" the system once the American contracts expire, but such a
project would take upwards of two decades because of the compromised
condition of the government and the lack of skilled local engineers and
technicians. The likely outcome, when the American money departs,
therefore is either an inadequate effort in which work proceeds "only
in fits and starts;" or, more likely, new contracts in which the
foreign companies would "continue their work," paid for by the Iraqi
government.

With regard to the petroleum industry, therefore, what the refugee
crisis guaranteed was long-term Iraqi dependence on outsiders. In every
other key infrastructural area, a similar dependence was developing:
electrical power, the water system, medicine, and food were, de facto,
being "integrated" into the global system, leaving oil-rich Iraq
dependent on outside investment and largesse for the foreseeable
future. Now, that's a twenty-year plan for you, one that at least 4.5
million Iraqis, out of their homes and, in many cases, out of the
country as well, will be in no position to participate in.

Most horror stories come to an end, but the most horrible part of
this horror story is its never-ending quality. Those refugees who have
left Iraq now face a miserable limbo life, as Syria and other receiving
countries exhaust their meager resources and seek to expel many of
them. Those seeking shelter within Iraq face the depletion of already
minimal support systems in degrading host communities whose residents
may themselves be threatened with displacement.

From the vast out-migration and internal migrations of its
desperate citizens comes damage to society as a whole that is almost
impossible to estimate. The displacement of people carries with it the
destruction of human capital. The destruction of human capital deprives
Iraq of its most precious resource for repairing the damage of war and
occupation, condemning it to further infrastructural decline. This tide
of infrastructural decline is the surest guarantee of another wave of
displacement, of future floods of refugees.

As long as the United States keeps trying to pacify Iraq, it will
create wave after wave of misery.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University,
has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. This report
on the Iraqi refugee crisis is from his forthcoming Tomdispatch book,
War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket Books, June
2008). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites,
including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET.