At State, the News Needs No Muse

Time to jump on?

Holiday Cheer and Rumsfeld Don't Mix

So everyone in the Joint Chiefs' directorates (J-1 to J-8) at the Pentagon was planning on holding Christmas parties on Friday, Dec. 15 -- the most obvious day since, after that, folks might start drifting out of town. But buzz is that someone, apparently in the office of the chairman, Gen. Peter Pace, had fretted that it might look as if all the hootin' and hollerin' that would be spilling out into the hallways was in celebration of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's departure that same day. (Leaving on that day, by the way, Rumsfeld will apparently fail to realize his dream of surpassing Robert McNamara's length-of-service record as secretary.)

So word came down last week to change the dates of the Christmas parties. Done.

Opening the Door Wider for Iraqis

Meanwhile, the State Department has approached the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office to see about having more Iraqi refugees screened for admission to this country. Back in the '90s, when Saddam was in charge and oppressing and killing people, Washington admitted as many 4,980 Iraqi refugees a year.

Since the U.S. invasion, however, the numbers have plummeted to 298 in 2003, 66 in 2004, and about 200 in each of the past two years.

But with as many as 2 million Iraqis having fled the chaos and sectarian violence since the invasion -- and an estimated 100,000 a month coming out these days -- the United States is talking to the United Nations about boosting its intake. The focus, we're told, appears to be on helping Chaldean Christians, who are getting pounded by everyone over there. There's a U.S. ceiling of 5,500 refugees for this fiscal year for all the Middle East, plus a few thousand more "unallocated" slots that might be used.

One major problem is that the United Nations is grossly underfunded and understaffed, the refugee folks say, so they don't have enough people to process the huge numbers of Iraqis.

Still, it shouldn't be hard to boost the numbers just a little. Eight were resettled in October and nine in November. Well, that's an upward trend.