Iraq's broken pieces don't fit together

[bemildred]

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 misery is social and economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from their homes, 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.

They 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 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 (CPA), which the George W Bush administration set up inside Baghdad's Green Zone and, in May 2003, placed under the control of L Paul Bremer. The CPA immediately began dismantling Iraq's state apparatus. Thousands of Ba'athist 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 Hussein's dismantled military.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JB13Ak02.html

[DinahMoeHum]

1. . . .all King George's horses (asses) and all King George's men. . ."

(you know the rest)

:evilfrown: