The continuing tragedy:

For many Christians in Iraq, flight is the only option. The United Nations estimates that about 40 percent of the more than million Iraqis who have emigrated are Christians. That’s an astounding number for a group who made up perhaps four percent of Iraq’s pre-war population. Some Iraqi Christians believe the number of emigres is higher: Chaldean Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Andreos Abouna of Baghdad says half of Iraq’s 1.2 million Christians may have fled.

Ironically, most of them have ended up in Syria, a member of the Axis of Near-Evil, and Jordan and Lebanon, rather than in America or the West. United Nations officials figure that about 100,000 of Christian Iraqis would like to come to America, but only 200 were allowed into the U.S. last year. Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic complains that the administration prefers not to acknowledge the existence of religious persecution, since doing so would counter its claim that steady progress is being made in Iraq. Arthur E. Dewey, the assistant secretary of state for refugee affairs until 2005, echoes Kaplan’s charge: "for political reasons the administration will discourage" Iraqi resettlement in the U.S. "because of the psychological message it would send, that it is a losing cause."

The tragic irony of the Iraqi exodus is that it is U.S. action that threatens to trigger the final destruction of a historic Christian community deep in the Middle East. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute speaks of the "extinction of an ancient Christian community" which dates "to apostolic times." A community of believers who survived prior rounds of religious persecution and political oppression. So bad is the situation that Mark Hetfield, senior vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which traditionally has helped Jews come to America, told the New York Times: "There are few religious minorities in the world today as persecuted as the Iraqi Christian population."

There are no good options in Iraq, and it is unrealistic to expect to expect U.S. policymakers to design overall policy around the suffering of Iraqi Christians. However, argues Jacobson, "America has a moral obligation to help people who have come under jihadist attack because of their association with the U.S."