Arthur E. "Gene" Dewey, who was President Bush's assistant secretary of state for refugee affairs until last year, said that "for political reasons the administration will discourage" the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the United States "because of the psychological message it would send, that it is a losing cause."

We've reached a sad crossroad in which an ever-increasing number of Iraqis are choosing to leave their country with few prospects of ever returning and the U.S. government is actively discouraging their resettlement in the United States due to the fact that it "might look bad."  

Since we've already liberated them once, we're evidently under no obligation to do so again, but despite assurances that policy might change, the more interesting thing not said in the article is that our current policy means that we probably aren't even planning for the eventuality of a major influx of Iraqi refugees.  For example, the article uses Vietnamese refugees as an example of how U.S. policy can change but neglects to mention that a resettlement plan happened only after the situation had evolved into a major crisis of international proportion.  Hell, there wasn't even a real plan in place before the fall of Saigon to evacuate Vietnamese employees of the American embassy and consulates, also for political reasons.  In fact, things went so badly that despite the best efforts of a handful of very courageous State and Defense Department employees on the scene we still managed to leave well over half of our Vietnamese employees behind. 

For Christ's sake, the President's poll numbers are so low that sending the wrong "psychological message" is almost meaningless right now.  In the short term, increasing the quota and planning for a worst case scenario are merely acknowledging that millions of Iraqis are already fleeing the country and the U.S. will honor its commitments in respects to protecting the Iraqi people while taking some pressure off neighboring countries.  If the situation on the ground stabilizes in the near future then many of those who can return probably will.  If this is one of the consequence of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, so be it, but let's not pussyfoot about and play political games with those in harms way.