The UN Refugee Agency set out guidlines last April which advised that asylum seekers from central Iraq be considered in need of international protection due to the human rights and security situation in central Iraq.  Not all governments, however, are taking heed.  From the UN Refugee Agency:

...the UK attempted to forcibly return 44 Iraqi men to Baghdad earlier this month. They were reportedly unsuccessful asylum claimants held in immigration removal centres in the UK. Iraq only accepted 10 who were allowed to leave the chartered aircraft in Baghdad, and the remaining 34 were returned to the UK and placed in immigration centres.Other European states have signed readmission agreements with Iraq for voluntary and forced return. Denmark has forcibly returned 38 people originating mainly from Central and Southern Iraq since signing its agreement in May 2009. Sweden has undertaken some 250 forced returns with an unspecified number of returnees originating from the five central governorates of Iraq since signing an agreement in February 2008. UNHCR has also concerns about the safety and dignity of these returns.

This is just awful.  Imagine that you are from Anbar and managed to survive Saddam's brutality, the war, the civil war, and -- against all odds -- escaped to Europe.   Now imagine that upon setting foot on European soil you apply for asylum only to be forced back on a plane to Bagdhad. It is hard to contemplate the disappointment and frustration one would feel in that situation. 

I dare say that the UK, like the United States, bears a certain amount of responsibility for the plight of Iraqi refugees.  Returning asylum seekers to places that the UN says is unsafe is an abrogation of that responsibility.  

I just got around to reading Tom Friedman's column from the other day about Kirkuk Iraq. It's odd in a number of ways, from his love of using jokes to make a point, to his blithe assumption that the U.S. military has "left a million acts of kindness" in the country, and his bizarre contention that Iraq is "100 times more important" than Bosnia (what is the point of a powder keg competition between the Middle East and the Balkans, anyway?). But this is what struck me most from Friedman's outlook:

Senior Iraqi officials are too proud to ask for our help and would probably publicly resist it, but privately Iraqis will tell you that they want it and need it. We are the only trusted player here — even by those who hate us. They need a U.S. mediator so they can each go back to their respective communities and say: "I never would have made these concessions, but those terrible Americans made me do it."

First, I have a hard time believing that Thomas Friedman can reliably attest to the private desires of most Iraqis (especially when he is writing from Kirkuk, but makes no mention that Kurds, who form a substantial part of Kirkuk's population, have a notably different outlook toward Americans). Second, I have an even harder time believing that six-plus years of military occupation has made Iraqis "want" and "need" more American help (something tells me that simply observing the diversity of American military personnel has not, as Friedman weakly argues, made an impression on Iraq's own ethnic politics). I don't believe for an instant that "those who hate us" trust the United States simply because it has been there for a long time.

Third, the United States is not the "only" purportedly neutral party in Iraq. The UN, I'd wager, has a lot more public support, and, more importantly, can lay a better claim to being an objective mediator. Rather than advocate what seems an entirely collapsible and unsustainable strategy of blaming concessions on "those terrible Americans," Friedman should consider the political reconciliation work that the UN already is doing in Iraq, particularly in Kirkuk, which he, again, oddly fails to mention. Rest assured that it does not involve sending Iraqi mediators home with the implicit point of blaming "those terrible" UN types.

(image from flickr user Charles Haynes under a Creative Commons license)

Replacing Staffan de Mistura will be the current deputy head of the UN Development Program, Dutchman Ad Melkert.  Some praise:

U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said Melkert would bring to the Iraq job "a unique combination of extensive political experience ... and economic and development expertise."

"As a result he enters with a deep understanding of the nature of the challenges and priorities that face Iraq at this phase of its transition," she told a news briefing.

He's got his work cut out for him.

Passport's Annie Lowrey is "charmed" by my reading a legality-based counter-terrorism approach into "Scooby Doo," but she doesn't quite think it's up to snuff.  In her view, maybe Velma and the monster-hunting gang are more akin to Hans Blix and his team searching for WMDs.

If anything, I think of the Scooby Doo Five as a decent analog for the United Nations weapons inspectors: mobile and peripatetic, spooked by the astral, often kicked out of the amusement park, much derided but really fairly decent at digging out the truth.

I guess the lesson here is that if you are a little too eager to dole out Scooby Snacks (or "yellowcake" and aluminum tubes) to an paranoid, excitable title character (or leader), then the rest of the team can't do its job, and the whole operation goes awry like a hungry Great Dane barreling into you at full tilt.  And how's Rummy or Cheney as the incorrigibly pugnacious Scrappy Doo...?