Years ago, near the end of the first George Bush administration, I had a conversation with a very dear military friend about the people who flee to the United States from their own countries. It’s so long ago now, I can’t remember which country we were talking about, though it could have been any one of dozens.
He said, effectively, that rather than come here, they should take control of their own destinies. If they were truly unhappy with their lives under whichever system they had, then those people should fight back… and then we would help them.
How, I wondered? Their government has all the power and weapons. They can’t fight with sticks and stones against military might.
We couldn’t get across that gap; his answer was a shrug, while I couldn’t shake my mental image of peasants shot down by militias.
We can’t do it for them, he said.
That friend is dead now, one of the undiscussed after-they-come-back casualties of the Iraq War, but I think of him often. He’s most often in my thoughts, of course, when I’m telling Adorable Child (AC) about her Daddy — but that’s not the only time.
When the Palestinians exercised democracy, for instance, and elected Hamas to a majority position, I wanted to ask him whether that was what he meant. Were they not taking charge of their own destinies?
He died in 2003, well before the situation in Iraq had devolved to today’s level of madness and chaos. What, I wonder, would he think of it all now?