Sorry Mr. Petty, Sometimes you do have to live like a refugee

It's no secret that a massive Iraqi refugee crisis has been building for several years. Saddam Hussein may have been a genocidal maniac, but his tyranny managed to keep the sectarian violence in Iraq suppressed. The apparent lack of foresight about this problem by the "planners" of the Iraq invasion helped unleash this sleeping hatred, and now nearly 2 million Iraqi refugees have been forced to flee. Many now live in camps in Jordan, Egypt and Syria, a situation that could have potential consequences for regional stability. Of the 2 million, fewer than 3,000 have been resettled in the U.S. since 2003 when Hussein's regime was overthrown.

Resettling refugees in the States is difficult, no doubt, but 3,000 in five years? I'm no math wiz, but I think if you found the lowest common denominator and expressed that as a fraction it would be something like a really small number over a really big number.

Whether or not you supported the invasion -- and let's face it, many of you did -- you have to recognize the smell of poo poo when it's sitting on your face. And I know, we can all bash the current administration yet again, but I'm now more inclined to listen to the argument presented by Alasdair Roberts in the latest issue of Foreign Policy: that we, the American public, are to blame for the way Iraq is going. After all, this is still a democracy -- sort of. Perhaps you are one of the few who care, but we must admit that the public has been sleepwalking for quite some time now.

One thing the refugee situation is making painfully obvious is that we could care less about the Pottery Barn rule, that quirky phrase supposedly coined by NY Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman: You break it, you buy it. Colin Powell later used the phrase in an attempt to communicate to the administration the seriousness of overthrowing a government. I'm sure the latent sectarianism must have seemed trivial at the time.

I think Stephen Colbert's May, 2007 explanation of the rule seems more accurate:
"At Pottery Barn, if you knock over a lamp, you have to glue it back together, even if when you're done it looks terrible and it doesn't work. Oh, and you have to stay in the store forever. Oh, and it's an exploding lamp."