A little advice for the 'Tomb Raider' - Policy is over Angelina Jolie's head

I love Brad and Angie, I really do. I admire Brad for doing whatever he can to help re-build New Orleans and I think it’s great that she takes her job as Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees so seriously. After reading her opinion column in the Washington Post last week, however, it’s clear she has the wrong idea about what that title means and what the world in general, and the UNHCR in particular, needs from her. She obviously didn’t get the memo, so I’ll spell it out: Get over yourself, Angelina, you’re an Ambassador in name only.

She starts by pointing out that in the six months since her last visit, the humanitarian crisis caused by millions of Iraqis being driven from their homes hasn’t gotten any better. She notes that in the week before her most recent trip, however, the Iraqi government, U.S. forces, and the UNHCR “have begun to work together in new and important ways.” She met with Gen. David Petraeus, who said he would “support new efforts to address the humanitarian crisis”. She also met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who “announced the creation of a new committee to oversee issues related to internally displaced people, and a pledge of $40 million to support the effort,” and she was left feeling “hopeful that more progress can be made.”

I don’t know how to tell her this but in Iraq, a week-old solution to a years-long problem isn’t a good reason for hope. These men, Patraeus and al-Maliki, work in a place where you never know when the next parked car on the street or shopper in the market is going to randomly explode and kill everyone within a fifty-foot radius. While I’m sure they took their meeting with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider seriously, I wouldn’t put it past them to tell her what she needed to hear so they could get back to business.

She mentions that some 2.5 million refugees have found their way to Syria and Jordan, causing those countries to “close their borders until the international community provides support.” She goes on to say, “I'm not a security expert, but it doesn't take one to see that Syria and Jordan are carrying an unsustainable burden. They have been excellent hosts, but we can't expect them to care for millions of poor Iraqis indefinitely and without assistance from the U.S. or others.” She got one thing right: she’s no expert. Neither am I. But I know that if you’re the Syrian or Jordanian government and you allow weapons, men, and material from all over the region to pass through your country on their way to jihad against America in Iraq, you can’t be surprised when a stream of people trying to escape the fighting starts flowing the other way. The Syrians and Jordanians may be “excellent hosts”, but they’ve been lousy neighbors.

She says her visit left her “even more deeply convinced that we not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis.” This bothers me. Who the hell is Angelina Jolie, she of the $200 million prenuptial agreement, to tell the rest of us what our moral obligations are? We are responsible for un-doing the damage we’ve done, but are we responsible for the de-facto ethnic cleansing that happened at the hands of government death squads and private militias? Aren’t millions of displaced Iraqis more of a serious, long-term, national security interest for the Iraqi government than ours? When can we, as Americans, say we’ve spent enough of our resources in Iraq to demonstrate our commitment to the people of that country?

She wraps up by asking if we can afford to risk millions of poor and displaced people in the region reacting to their desperation by causing chaos? Her answer is to call on Congress (that can’t pass comprehensive immigration laws at home) to come up with a “comprehensive refugee plan” for Iraq. In an attempt to get my head to explode, she ends by addressing the issue of whether or not the “surge” is working. She says the U.N. wants to stay because they feel like they can finally “scale up” their operations, and the troops she spoke to want to stay because they don’t want their friends to have died in vain. She’s all for continuing the undermanned U.S. occupation of Iraq, not realizing the reason so many people were displaced was there weren’t enough troops to provide the security they needed to be able to stay in their homes. That’s why we only ask the U.N. Goodwill Ambassador to call attention to the needs of others, not to make policy recommendations, Angelina.