No crisis, No crisis at all.

In an otherwise blightful story about the millions of Iraqis who are now displaced in Cairo, Lebanon and Syria, comes this bit of rationalizing from John "Fuck 'em all" Bolton, our former ambassador to the UN.

The U.N. refugee agency meeting in Geneva on April 17 and 18 was the international community’s belated attempt to confront the Iraqi refugee crisis. Jordan’s minister of the interior, Mukhaimar al-Mukhaimar, claimed at the meeting that his country was spending $1 billion a year on Iraqi refugees; Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, claimed his country had spent $160 million in 2006. “It’s the fastest-growing refugee population in the world,” said Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International and assistant secretary of defense for public affairs from 1994 to 2001. “It’s a crisis in response to an American action. This is a refugee crisis that we triggered and aren’t doing enough to deal with.

“What I find most disturbing,” Bacon went on to say, “is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials.” But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

“Our obligation,” he told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.” Bolton likewise did not share the concerns of Bacon and others that the refugees would become impoverished and serve as a recruiting pool for militant organizations in the future. “I don’t buy the argument that Islamic extremism comes from poverty,” he said. “Bin Laden is rich.” Nor did he think American aid could alleviate potential anger: “Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay. You want them to go home. The governments don’t want them to stay.”

Let's recap what this recipient of Right Wing Welfare known as the American Enterprise Institute is arguing:

1. The overthrow of Saddam and his security apparatus has nothing to do with the refugees.
2. Contrary to all evidence, we have "give[n] them new institutions and provide[d] security." An "obligation" we have "fulfilled."
3. War is hell.
4. Because Bin Laden is "rich," we have nothing to fear fromo the hordes of displaced Iraqi men who don't have much left but plenty of time and resentment. And children growing up in tents.
5. And, finally, shedding new light on why the Bush administration has talked tough on subjects such as Darfur, but done nothing, helping refugees only encourages them to stay in their well-appointed refugee camps.