U.S. May Not Meet Iraqi Refugee Pledge

[sabra]

Source: CBS News/AP

Officials Concede Goal Of Accepting 12,000 Refugees By September Unlikely

(AP) The Bush administration conceded Monday it may not meet its goal to admit 12,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of September, although officials stressed that remained their target.

With the monthly admissions rate hovering in the low hundreds for the past four months despite pledges to improve refugee processing, officials said they expected a boost in numbers toward the end of spring and hoped for a significant surge in the summer.

While January admissions improved slightly over December, to 375 from 245, the United States must still accept 10,568 Iraqi refugees in the next eight months if it is to reach 12,000 - the number the administration has pledged to resettle in the current budget year, which began in October 2007 and runs until Sept. 30.

"This is a tall order, but it remains attainable," said James Foley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's point man on Iraqis refugees. Still, he said: "We're not guaranteeing that we're going to reach 12,000. There is no way to guarantee that result."

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/04/iraq/main3789659.shtml

[gratuitous]

1. We've created 3 million Iraqi refugees

And we're willing to say that we'll take in 12,000 (though there's no way to guarantee that we'll take 12,000). Absolutely pathetic. Thanks for the fucked-up country you've left us, Mr. Bush. Thanks ever so much, Supreme Court. Oh, and great big thank you to the morons who saw four years of this incompetence in 2004, and voted for four years of more of the same and worse.

Let's start putting things to right in 2008.

[tanyev]

2. 11,900 would be "not meeting" the pledge.

The numbers they've got now are "barely even trying".

[primavera]

4. Exactly

The State Department, which administers the US Refugee Program, is notorious (at least under the Bushista junta) for offering to take X number of thousands of refugees in order to alleviate criticisms that the administration isn't honoring the US' international human rights treaty obligations, but then sittin around on their hands when it comes to actually processing the refugees for admission. Another favorite trick is to impose processing requirements for which no mechanism exists to meet, so State Department can lean back and claim, oh, well of course we'd take these refugees, but they haven't yet been cleared by the superdatabase which we expect will be built in the year 2472, so what can we do? Our hands are tied!

[Solly Mack]

3. there is so much wrong with that .....with all of it..

the premise, the thinking, the everything...

I don't know where to begin

[LynnTheDem]

5. Everyone knows bush's America never keeps its word.

So this isn't gonna surprise anyone.