Refugees and progressive leadership

When the Vietnamese refugees arrived in 1975, to Subic Bay, Philippines, my husband and I were among the community of Americans who helped to receive them. To a person, these desperate refugees were traumatized.  There was no hesitancy in responding to their dire needs. Therefore, this particular essay is personal....

Vietnamese refugees wait to be taken aboard the amphibious command ship USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC-19).

When You Have an Administration that Wants to Welcome Refugees... "Vice-President Mondale’s diplomatic efforts and eloquent speech in Geneva, about Indonesian refugees, galvanized the world to respond."

An echo essay published in the History News Network (HNN) by Joel K. Goldstein

No historical analogy is required to be repelled by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy which involved the separation of thousands of children from their parents. 

Vice President Walter Mondale 

"Let us honor the moral principles we inherit. Let us do something meaningful—something profound—to stem this misery"

“Anybody with a heart would feel very strongly about it,” said President Donald Trump when he belatedly signed an executive order ending the policy his administration had imposed. Trump and his subordinates had previously blamed the Democrats, Congress and the courts and justified the approach as good policy with Biblical support. Trump’s executive order did not, of course, repair the damage his administration had already caused – to the parents and children separated from each other, to America’s international standing, to America’s commitment to humane values.

Jimmy Carter’s response to the Indochinese refugee crisis forty years ago illustrates a quite different attitude toward refugees and to governing. It provides a case study that illustrates how the Trump administration’s perverse substantive values and Trump’s governing approach produce such disastrous policy as intentional family separation.

Eric Schwartz, the President of Refugees International and a former dean of the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota, has recently recalled, as an “alternative vision” of American humanitarian leadership, Vice President Walter Mondale’s remarkable speech 39 years ago last month to a special meeting of about 60 governments in Geneva at a United Nations Conference on Indochinese Refugees. The Geneva meeting had been convened to address a refugee crisis that stemmed from repressive and discriminatory actions against ethnic, religious and national groups by the Vietnamese government that caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee for their lives, often by sea in decrepit craft, as well as by actions creating land migrations from Laos and Cambodia. Camps in neighboring countries were bursting with refugees, boats were being turned away, refugees were dying at sea.

Mondale’s diplomatic efforts and eloquent speech at the Geneva meeting galvanized the world to respond. After spending the first daymeeting with representatives of China and American allies, Mondale delivered his powerful speech. “[S]ome tragedies defy the imagination,” said Mondale. “Some misery surpasses the grasp of reason that language itself breaks beneath the train.” Mondale recalled that 41 years earlier an international conference at Evian had failed to act to save the Jews of Germany and Austria, an indifference that emboldened Hitler. Mondale challenged the world not to repeat the tragic mistake of Evian. “Let us honor the moral principles we inherit. Let us do something meaningful—something profound—to stem this misery. We face a world problem. Let us fashion a world solution. History will not forgive us if we fail. History will not forget us if we succeed.”

Nine years ago I called Mondale’s speech “one of the truly eloquent speeches in American history” in an article that prompted Mondale speechwriter Marty Kaplan to provide some of the backstory behind it. 

Rereading Mondale’s speech never fails to move me; you can find it here.

As inspirational as the speech was, it succeeded because it was part of a process that reflected an enlightened and capable approach to governing, one altogether absent in the Trump administration.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke had communicated with Mondale about the crisis and the obstacles impeding the Carter administration from an optimal response in spring 1979. Mondale took the problem to Carter and, with his support, brought together an inter-departmental group to address the problem. Mondale persuaded Carter to denounce the repressive policies, deploy the navy to rescue refugees from sea perils, admit 14,000 refugees per month (168,000/year), and seek additional funding to establish refugee processing centers and to assist in resettlement efforts.

Mondale took these concrete actions to Geneva. There, his diplomatic and oratorical efforts produced a strong positive response. America was able to persuade other nations to respond because in addition to Mondale’s inspiring words, he offered a seven-point plan for international action and the United States led by example, doubling the refugees it would accept and committing resources to save and resettle others.

It is instructive to consider the factors that produced the leadership of Carter and Mondale in contrast to Trump’s disastrous policy. Professor Schwartz rightly offers Mondale’s speech as “an alternative vision of U.S. humanitarian leadership” that vindicates American interests and values. Carter and Mondale believed in the Biblical teaching that we are our brothers’ keeper as a tenet of personal and political behavior in contrast to Trump’s version of empathy which seems concentrated on himself and his wealthy friends. And Carter and Mondale believed in human rights as an essential aspect of American foreign policy leadership in contrast to Trump’s affinity for authoritarian leaders.

But the Carter-Mondale “alternative vision” succeeded because Carter immersed himself in information and prioritized making the right choices, not those that catered to a political constituency. Carter created an administration in which talented people were not afraid to raise problems and think about them holistically. By contrast, it was predictable that Trump’s zero tolerance approach would produce the inhumane results it did, but Trump and his subordinates either did not think about the problem in a comprehensive way or were not offended by taking children from their parents, or both.

Government officials knew that Mondale could influence Carter and that he was willing to fight for initiatives even when they ran counter to Carter’s concern to limit government spending. Therefore, it was not surprising that the challenges involving Indochinese refugees came to Mondale and that he took the issue to Carter. Mondale understood that America could only persuade other nations if it brought a plan and an example as well as prose to Geneva.

Mondale’s eloquent speech at Geneva did represent “an alternative” and far more attractive vision of humane international leadership. We can be sure that those the navy saved from perilous seas viewed America quite differently than will the children who were locked in cages and the parents and children many of who still remain separated because the government cannot figure out how to reunite some of the families that it tore apart. In stark contrast to today, America’s 1979 actions showed the world a nation committed to stopping suffering, not creating it.

That episode demonstrated the importance of values but also of having a president engaged with information, not one oblivious to it; one who invited and often received criticism and bad news from Vice-President Mondale and others, not one who encourages sycophancy and limits his news feed; and of an administration where highly capable public servants think about problems in their complexity with empathy, not one where officials are surprised by predictable outcomes or complicit in designing and implementing programs that embarrass decent Americans and spark outrage around the world.

Iraq is crumbling - eerie 1975 flashback during the fall of Saigon

This blog isn't meant to be a premonition, but the threat of the fall of Baghdad in Iraq seems eerily similar to what my husband and I witnessed in 1975, when living in the Philippines while Saigon fell and the Vietnam War was lost. Nearly all of the initial wave of Vietnam refugees in 1975 came through Subic Bay, where we lived, where we saw the carnage, through the distress of the thousands of people who were evacuated.

Saigon's fall was preceded by the evacuation of almost all the American civilian and military personnel in Saigon, along with tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians associated with the southern regime.

Will the beautifully prayerful Vietnam Wall soon need a parallel structure, one inscribed with the thousands of names of the fallen soldiers who defended Fallujah and Mosul? These two Iraq cities were recently saturated with American blood. 

Now, unbelievably, Iraqi cities are falling to the military advances of an Al Qaeda splinter group, known by the acronym of ISIS. These cities are falling to insurgents, similar to how Saigon was crumbled by the northern Vietnam People's Liberation Army. 

These major losses caused by a splinter Al Qaeda group are happening because he Iraq government has been hiding in the "green zone", a heavily fortified region of Baghdad established for the security of the American military and ambassadorial services in Iraq.  Iraq Prime Minister al-Maliki has a fortified office in there. An article by Dexter Filkins published in the April 28, 2014, The New Yorker, reported how al-Maliki's office doesn't have windows, because there the frequency of bomb blasts outside the Green Zone risks one of them finding its way into his office. 

Filkins wrote, "I saw Maliki in his office in February, and he appeared as stiff and colorless as he did during his televised speech—an apparatchik become the boss. Wearing the same navy-blue suit and purple tie, he spoke in a monotone, his face blank, his body seemingly fixed to his chair. The office, a sterile room without a trace of warmth, had no windows, presumably because windows could be shattered by bombs."

Where will Maliki hide when the ISIS storm Baghdad? 

I'm not making a prediction (I don't think), but Maliki is likely planning his escape plan. He'll be gone, like the coward he is, before he becomes the human effigy of the Saddam Hussein statue being toppled in Baghdad on April 9, 2003, widely shown around the world as a symbol of the presumed success of the Iraq invasion.

Except, of course, the invasion has been a failure. This failure was long expected, but now evidenced as Fallujah and Mosel are falling apart. These assaults are tremendous insults to the defense of these cities that claimed the blood of American and Iraqi youth, to protect them against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. 

Tragically, we'll need parallel Iraqi War wall of names, to serve two purposes. Of course, we want to always remember the sacrifices of those who died trying to protect the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.  Yet, beyond this purpose, an Iraq War wall must be an everlasting reminder about the uselessness of war.

At this point, Americans have no way out of the catastrophic events in Iraq. It's time to acknowledge the mistaken invasion and apologize for the thousands of families who lost their youth in defense of a failed war. 

Unfortunately, the Middle East nations must figure out how to collectively protect their countries from an extremist take over, a catastrophe that will demand a world wide response.

Nevertheless, the situation in Iraq today, with Fallujah and Mosel falling to radical forces, is eeerily like a 1975 flashback when Saigon fell, and my husband and I witnessed the outcomes.