Watching Ambassadaor to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, during the Congressional hearings last week -- he was the man to the left of the guy who many believe ditched country for personal ambition -- it was hard not to feel sorry for him.
The diplomat looked very uncomfortable, leashed by his job to an administration which has become the world's unreliable pit bull. Today there are signs that Crocker may be unwilling to "go along to get along." He has cabled the "blunt" truth about the Bush administration's treatment of Iraq's refugees. It's not pretty.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that it may take the U.S. government as long as two years to process and admit nearly 10,000 Iraqi refugees referred by the United Nations for resettlement to the United States, because of bureaucratic bottlenecks.
In a bluntly worded State Department cable titled "Iraqi Refugee Processing: Can We Speed It Up?" Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker noted that the Department of Homeland Security had only a handful of officers in Jordan to vet the refugees.
Bush administration officials in Washington immediately disputed several of Crocker's claims.
Still, the "sensitive" but unclassified memo, sent Sept. 7, laid out a wrenching, ground-level view of the U.S. government's halting response to Iraq's refugee crisis.
The delays appear to be deliberate. As with the response to Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security's dealings with refugees seem to be made up of a lethal combination of inhumane policy and incompetence.
In his missive, Crocker said the admission of Iraqi refugees to the United States remains bogged down by "major bottlenecks" resulting from security reviews conducted by the departments of State and Homeland Security. Applicants must wait eight to 10 months from the time they are referred to U.S. authorities by the U.N. refugee agency before they set foot in the United States, he said.
"Resettlement takes too long," Crocker wrote.
Each DHS case officer in Jordan can interview only four cases a day on average because of the in-depth questioning required, and just a handful of officers were in the region, partly because Syria refuses to issue visas to DHS personnel, Crocker said. "It would take this team alone almost two years to complete" interviews on 10,000 U.N. referrals, he estimated.
As more Iraqis flee, he noted, delays are "likely to grow considerably."
The Senate will come to the rescue this time -- quickly, it seems.
In the Senate, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) will propose attaching legislation backed by a dozen lawmakers in both parties to a defense authorization bill this week; it would expand refugee and immigrant visa programs for Iraqis, including those threatened because they helped U.S. reconstruction efforts.
"Ambassador Crocker's plea for help is the latest reminder that the administration has failed to adequately address the enormity of this situation," Kennedy said in a statement, vowing to "cut through the red tape." He added, "While we can't solve the problem alone, the least we can do is our part to allow those at risk to resettle here."
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