It’s estimated that about one-tenth of Iraq’s population has fled that most dangerous place on Earth since the United States & Co. liberated it in 2003. In the last seven months, The Wall Street Journal reports, the U.S. has admitted 69 Iraqi refugees.

Since 2003, the U.S. hasn’t even come close to admitting 1,000 Iraqi refugees in a single year. Why such pitifully low numbers, given that the U.S. helped unleash Iraq’s bloody civil war?

The refugee wave is tricky for an administration eager to portray the recent troop “surge” as a boost to improving security and curbing the sectarian killings in Iraq. There’s also genuine concern that encouraging large-scale flight from Iraq will compound the coutnry’s many challenges, by luring its most talented citizens to the U.S.

Uh-huh. Well, this is no surprise. So it has ever been. The asylum program has played second fiddle to the politicians’ foreign-policy whims since time out of mind. What’s especially galling is this notion that talented Iraqi individuals ought to be, for all intents and purposes, sacrificed for the hypothetical good of Iraq as a whole.

Wasn’t that the kind of idiotic dogma Dubya & Co. were hoping to dethrone in their quixotic, tragically misguided effort to socially re-engineer the entire Middle East?

Dubya is likely to sign a refugee bill that will increase to 500 a year the number Afghan and Iraq military translators allowed to come to America. A Democratic-sponsored bill to welcome a measly 15,000 Iraqis a year hasn’t even been scheduled for a vote. Not only are the Democrats unwilling to stand up to Dubya on the war itself, they won’t even vote on a bill to do a small favor for just a few of the people whose lives their own votes helped to make a living nightmare.

Hawks are fond of arguing that regardless of one’s prospective position on the war, since the U.S. government invaded Iraq it took on a moral obligation to help the country transition into a place resembling something other than the eighth circle of hell. I’d say we’ve already given them plenty of opportunities, including repeated elections that were largely free and fair, to determine their own course. Whatever obligation the U.S. took on has been discharged, in my view, especially given that two-thirds of Iraqis want American troops out.

But if there is some kind of moral obligation incumbent on the U.S. today, doesn’t it include opening its doors to at least a few of the huddled masses yearning to breathe this country’s free and peaceful air?

Or should they have to sneak in through Mexico?

(Title reference explained; also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)