U.S. Ambassador to Iraq: U.S. Processing Iraqi Refugees Too Slowly

Wars historically have produced flows of refugees.   Viet Nam, Central America, and Haiti are but a few examples.  As we have reported, the war in Iraq, not surprisingly, has produced thousands of refugees.  Earlier this month,Joseph P. Hoar, a retired Marine general, commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991 to 1994, wrote in the N.Y. Times that the United States should admit more refugees from Iraq.

The Washington Post reports that “[t]he 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.”

KJ