As for “cajoling, pleading, begging the international community to put aside their distaste for our invasion and occupation and recognize that only with a concerted effort on the part of all can innocent lives be saved”, the international community doe really care about the ordinary Iraqi and relishes the problems we are having in Iraq way too much to provide any help to them since it might help us out too.

To blame the problem the alleged lack of “steadfast and bold leadership from the United States” is mostly wrong since the much of the American people and the MSM do not support the lesser efforts of the current leadership.

more to follow. I do remember the issue of the un refugee camps because for me it was a key indicator for how well the war was going. I was shocked in both the iraq and afghanistan battles that the flow of refugees seemed to be towards the countries where the fighting was going on, not the other way. If you watch any footage from world war ii, refugees clog the roads, block progress of the armies. In both iraq and afghanistan, were never say that happen. it struck me as odd.

It also struck me as odd, that the un built these large refugee camps, and no one seems to have used them. ( maybe thats no longer true, which is what im trying to find out)

Also, while I agree wholeheartedly the premise that people should be helped(seriously I do) I offer a number of other reasons why this phenomenon might be occuring not at the beginning as one would expect, but 4 years after the start of the war.

1. under saddam, people could not leave the country, even if they had the means. to do so might endanger the rest of their relatives that were still in iraq.

2. under saddam people could not leave if they wanted to or were allowed to due to the enforced poverty of the iraqi state. Now, due to a significant uptick in the iraqi economy( the most under reported story of the last 5 years…), they can leave and are doing so. Theres now a sort of natural ’surge’ for people who have wanted to leave for some time, but couldnt. sort of like lifting off the lid of a pot just before it boils over.

3. many of the new refugees might in fact be not iraqis - but palestinians. palestinians, while given favored status and where in iraq in large numbers during the saddam regime have fallen into great difficulties throught the region. rahter than say that they were palestinian, which at one time might have brought favor in various refugee campes, they now say they are iraqi. why pretend to be omething youre not to garner sympathy? happens all the time in every culture on earth. you do what you have to do to survive. if being ‘palestinian’ gets you food, water and a place to stay, sure youre a palestinian. if being iraqi gets you the same thing, fine. so be it.

4. Sensing that iraq might soon be the active battlefront of a war between iran and saudi arabia, many people are trying to avoid what would surely be a very nasty conflict before it happens. For similar european reactions, check out ’silesian insurrection’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_Insurrections)

people sometimes have a sense for things that goes beyond the politics.

5. saddam was a brutal dictator, and a dictatorship cannot be run by small numbers of people. I have to believe that bureaucracies throughout iraq under saddam used every form of extortion knon to man to keep their power over the local populance. I have to assume that now that saddam is - in the words of the mayor of munchinkland “very clearly dead”, that theres more than a fair amount of “get even”-ism going on through the countryside against the people who used to run the banks, the dmv, the local car lots, the ater and power company, who all were in some small way a small part of the apparatus of the regime. Since the middle east work on a family and tribal basis much more than the modren west does, it would not be enough to say ‘ I didnt do anything” in my defense, because if lets say my uncle was the local gandarmerie under saddam, I assume that the natual law of “get even”-ism would apply to me as well. It would tend to make me want to go “somewhere else” for a bit until things calm down. hence, i too fall into the category of ‘refugee’.

I’m not saying help shouldnt be given, im not saying things might not be bad, im saying that the picture of what is actually going on might have more layers to it than initially meets the eye.

I will spend some time going through the “halls of google” to find any sign of the reference.

I would also like to add that its estimated that about 1 million afghani refugees left the pakistan frontier to return to afghanistan after our actions there.

Reading this article would seem to indicate that other reports I read about “camps” was either exaggerated or in error:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,471728,00.html

I should have known better than to believe anything in Raw Story.

That said, the point about internal refugees is still valid - especially if those figures regarding malnutrition are accurate.

It went completely unused. American Military officials tried to get its facilities to house various groups,but were rebuffed by the UN officials who ran the camp at the time.

What happened to it since then?