Monday, June 19, 2006

Rummy saw it before it happened.

Remember a while back when Rummy was asked about a memo he wrote before the war that highlighted a bunch of things that might go wrong? Some thought that maybe he had been against the war but he put that notion to bed by telling Bob Woodward that "there's no question in anyone's mind but I agreed with the president's approach."

He told a an audience at John's Hopkins in December that:

"I sat down and I wrote out a whole host of things that could go wrong. And I discussed them at great length inside the Pentagon and I discussed them at great length with the president.
And many of them didn't go wrong. They didn't happen for a variety of reasons. But we talked about the possibility of major refugees and internally displaced persons; it just didn't happen."

It didn't? Goodness golly garcious, Rummy, it looks like you spoke too soon:

Agence France Presse reports:

"The global refugee population has begun to rise for the first time in four years, largely due to instability in Iraq, a US group said in a survey, which saw refugee protection deteriorating by all measures. The number of refugees and asylum seekers increased to 12 million in 2005 from 11.5 million a year earlier, according to "World Refugee Survey 2006" of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a non-profit group tracking the problem worldwide.

'The deteriorating situation in Iraq has led to the refugee outflow some predicted at the onset of the war, which has only now materialized,' the USCRI said. Over 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have fled the insurgency-wracked nation since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it said. Syria now hosts 351,000 Iraqi refugees and has the largest population of Iraqi Shiite Muslims outside Iraq, while Jordan hosts 450,000 Iraqi refugees, many of whom are Christian minorities, according to the report.

USCRI anticipates even 'a more significant outflow' of Iraqi refugees in the near future, based on Baghdad's issuance of two million passports over the last 10 months."

Back to the blackboard Rummy!

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