Dakar, Senegal—There is George W. Bush and there’s Larry Siems.

Siems is among those Americans, like Senator Ted Kennedy, who want their president to take moral responsibility for creating the refugee crisis in Iraq.

They want him to admit at least 100,000 Iraqis into the United States, the way Washington resettled 140,000 Indo-Chinese after the Vietnam War.

Siems was here at the annual meeting of International PEN, the writers’ group. As programs director of the PEN American Center, he has taken up the cause of Iraqi poets, essayists, novelists, translators and journalists.

There’s no knowing how many of those are among the 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan.

What we do know is that a disproportionate number of them are professionals. They are the ones who could afford to leave or were forced to because they were branded American collaborators or targeted simply for their liberal views on pluralism, secularism, etc.

Take the case of Omar Ghanim Fathi, a lecturer in Mosul. No sooner had he written for a newspaper set up by the Americans than he faced death threats. Students told him to his face in class: “You deserve to die.”

He was lucky to escape, to Norway as a refugee.

Translators working for the coalition forces, or foreign contractors or international agencies have become the most endangered species, along with those working for the Western media as stringers, handlers and fixers.

(Foreign reporters are mostly confined to the Green Zone, and rely heavily on Iraqis from across the country.)

Such Iraqis, said to number about 100,000, are marked. Many have given up work, gone into hiding or escaped to Damascus or Amman.

But Bush refuses to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis. Doing so means admitting that his Iraq project has been a failure. So he lets the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees struggle on against impossible odds.

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