By Debbie Schlussel
In today’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens–with whom I usually agree–has a column claiming we’ve won the war in Iraq and that it’s over.
As evidence, he cites a bet he made with respected writer Francis Fukuyama in May 2003 for $100. Fukuyama bet that Iraq would be a mess five years after the invasion. Stephens says that Fukuyama wrote him a $100 check to settle the debt.
But here’s the thing. We haven’t won. We put our Shi’ite enemies in power. We completed the Shi’ite crescent. We energized the Shi’ite revival and strengthened Iran and Hezbollah. Not sure how that’s winning.
As for whether or not things are a mess in Iraq and whether or not the war is over and we’ve “won”–whatever that means–why is it, if things are so great there and we’ve “won”, that we are now taking in THOUSANDS of Iraqis as U.S. citizens, with the estimate being that we will “absorb” 30,000 Iraqi immigrants, most of them to Michigan, by year’s end?

Iraqi Refugees: Shukran [Thanks] America, For
“Winning” in Iraq & Letting Our People Invade Your CountryWaleed Wadie and Rahib Al-Cholan–caught in serious sex stings in Michigan.
Even normally welcoming far leftists, like the gulag-masters of Detroit’s “The Metro Times” are saying our economy–especially in downtrodden Michigan–CANNOT handle the influx and that they will compete for American citizens’ jobs:

[Detroit Mayor Kwame] Kilpatrick dropped an interesting piece of information that’s not getting a lot of press. He said that the city Planning Department was addressing issues related to the 18,000 Iraqis “coming to America” soon, presumably a significant number of them headed to the Detroit area. . . .
I headed to Seven Mile and John R where there are lots of empty storefronts with Arabic writing on the front. It looked like the kind of place people who had been living in a war zone would be familiar with. This used to be a thriving Chaldean neighborhood and business district.

It thrived only because Michigan and federal taxpayers sent a ton of money in grants and aid to the corrupt American Arab and Chaldean Council–headed by pro-HAMAS/Hezbollah ADC activist Haifa Fakhoury–to revive it, then the AACC pocketed a lot of the money.

I went into a bakery, one of few places still open. People there. said that Iraqi refugees have been filtering in over the past year but they weren’t settling in Detroit, mostly favoring Warren, Sterling Heights, Shelby Township and Southfield.
I called the Arab-American and Chaldean Council in Southfield and spoke to vice president for community relations Nabby Yono. He said that about 30,000 Iraqis will enter the United States by the end of the year with as many as 60,000 over the next few years. Based on past immigration patterns he expected 25 to 30 percent of them to settle in the Detroit area. According to migrationinformation.org, there are already roughly 32,000 foreign-born Iraqis in Michigan.
At the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Dearborn, director of communications Hannan Deep hadn’t heard about such a large number of refugees coming here so quickly. But she said ACCESS facilitates required health assessments for about 125 Iraqis a month.

ACCESS, as I’ve written, is funded by your taxes and United Way contributions and involved in facilitating Medicaid and immigration fraud, illegal aliens, and supporting Islamic terrorist groups. It also indoctrinates people into radicalism.

“A lot of these refugees are dispersed throughout the United States,” says Deep. “Eventually they hear that we have this community in the metro Detroit area and they end up coming because they feel more comfortable here.”
Nobody I talked to was real clear on what’s up. Some didn’t want to talk. But with Michigan leading the nation in unemployment, it’s hard to see how our economy is going to easily absorb a large number of newcomers. . . .
“Most of them are coming under the family reunification program,” Yono says. “Some of them maybe get assistance from family and friends. We are a country of immigrants, your father, mother, grandfather, whoever, came from somewhere. American people are good people.”

Puh-leeze. Most of these people will be on public assistance and milk the system for every tax-paid penny they can and will get. Being good Americans is different from being suckers. We will be paying Medicaid, welfare, job training, English as a Second Language education, etc. for these people.
Is this really America “winning” in Iraq, Bret Stephens? If things are so great there, why must we take in tens of thousands of them? Why can’t they return to and stay in the wonderful Iraq, where we’ve “won”?
Huh?
Time to return Francis Fukuyama’s hundred bucks.
60,000 new Iraqi refugees on American soil. Is that really “winning” in Iraq? . . . Or is it LOSING?