WASHINGTON IN BRIEF

Fewer Iraqi Refugees Admitted

U.S. admissions of Iraqi refugees are nose-diving amid bureaucratic infighting despite the Bush administration's pledge to boost them to roughly 1,000 per month, according to State Department statistics.

For the third straight month since the United States said it would improve processing and resettle 12,000 Iraqis by the end of the current budget year on Sept. 30, the number admitted has actually slid, the figures show.

The steady decline -- from 450 in October to 362 in November and 245 in December -- means the administration will have to allow in 10,943 Iraqis over the next nine months, or roughly 1,215 per month, to meet the target it has set for itself.

But that goal will be difficult to meet, and there are few precedents for such influxes since hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees were resettled here after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

Iraqi refugees are subject to more security checks than those from almost all other nations, and the most Iraqis ever admitted to the United States in a single month since 2003 was 889 last September.

The administration has come under heavy criticism from advocacy groups and lawmakers for its poor performance on admitting Iraqi refugees who have fled violence since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Many critics say, and Bush aides have acknowledged, that the administration has a moral obligation to Iraqi refugees.

U.S. officials have conceded that the figures remained low but insisted that improvements in processing, along with new cooperation from Syrian authorities, would lead to substantial jumps in the admissions figures from Iraq starting in the spring. And they insisted yesterday that the 12,000 target remained administration policy.

"The goals are still the same," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "We haven't lowered the bar."

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 2 million Iraqis have fled their country. Of these, 1.2 million are in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon, 10,000 in Turkey and 200,000 in various Persian Gulf countries.

U.S. to Sell Alaska Oil, Gas Leases

The federal Minerals Management Service gave final approval yesterday to oil and natural gas development off Alaska's northwest shore, drawing condemnation from environmental groups concerned with the effects on marine mammals.

The MMS said it will hold a lease sale Feb. 6 in Anchorage for bidding on nearly 46,000 square miles of Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) lands in the Chukchi Sea, the part of the Arctic Ocean that begins north of the Bering Strait and stretches between northwest Alaska and the northern coast of the Russian Far East.

It will be the first federal sale of OCS oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea since 1991. MMS Alaska spokeswoman Robin Cacy said the area available for leasing contains an estimated 15 billion barrels of conventionally recoverable oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of conventionally recoverable natural gas.

The Chukchi Sea is home to one of two U.S. polar bear populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is days away from deciding whether polar bears should be declared threatened because of global warming and its effect on the animals' primary habitat, sea ice.

-- From News Services