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Regrets Only : Bush is Sorry About Immigration and Iraq

13:37 H | Topics: Immigration - Iraq War - Politics

As President Bush prepares to leave office, he's reflecting on what went wrong and according to him immigration and the war in Iraq went wrong. Well kind of sort of.

Bush said that one of his biggest disappointments was the failure to pass a comprehensive bill on immigration reform.

"I firmly believe that the immigration debate really didn't show the true nature of America as a welcoming society," he said. "I fully understand we need to enforce law and enforce borders. But the debate took on a tone that undermined the true greatness of America, which is that we welcome people who want to work hard and support their families."

Note that Bush did not apologize for the way his Department of Homeland Security enforced laws, by terrorizing families and tearing them apart, by creating an atmosphere of fear that allowed crimes like the murder of Marcelo Lucero to happen.

"The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," Bush told ABC television in an interview scheduled for broadcast last night. "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." But he followed that moment of candour with an attempt to try to deflect charges that the White House misled Congress and the public to build a case for war, arguing that there had been widespread belief that Saddam had a nuclear arsenal.

Again, Bush's apology is only as good as the truth he says he believes and the truth is that much of the Iraq intelligence was manufactured. The apology should have been for that not for the getting caught, which is essentially what he is apologizing for.

Kyle makes the point of how Bush is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

A recent Los Angeles Times article announces the latest figures:

More than 3 million refugees have fled Iraq, and 1.5 million more have been displaced from their homes, according to Deborah Decker, community resource director of the Interfaith Refugee & Immigration Service in L.A.
Teresa Watanabe - Los Angeles Times (29 November 2008)

3 million refugees. 3 million refugees. This is one of the great unspoken contradictions of the nativist movement in the U.S. It is impossible to be pro-war and anti-migrant. War causes the very same mass migration that nativists are opposed to, yet I'll bet anything that most nativists are pro-war.

If Bush truly cared about the U.S. being a welcoming nation, he would admit as many Iraqi refugees as he could. That same Los Angeles Times article reports that more Iraqi refugees being admitted to the U.S.. Up from 1,600 in 2006, 13,800 were admitted in 2007. The target is 17,000 in 2008.

17,000? 17,000 out of the 3 million refugees that the U.S. is directly responsible for? That's .567% of the damage the U.S. has caused in Iraq when it comes to refugees and that doesn't even include Afghanistan.

Via / The Latin Americanist, The Guardian, Citizen Orange

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