The Christians and other smaller minority groups here, however, have been explicitly made targets and have emigrated in disproportionate numbers. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these groups account for 20 percent of the Iraqis who have gone abroad, while they were only 3 percent of the country’s prewar population.
More than half of Iraq’s Christian community, estimated to number 800,000 to 1.4 million before the American-led invasion in 2003, have already left the country.
It's a tragedy. And it should act as a cautionary note. We don't know what native forces we're going to unleash when we decide to make war on a country that we don't actually need to make war upon. Because we don't know that we can make things better by using our armed forces to create regime change, perhaps we should only do so when a given situation is going to become intolerably worse. That wasn't the case in Iraq in 2003.
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