Last Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general released a stinging critique of DHS’ 287(g) program, a controversial initiative which allows local police to enforce immigration laws. Immigrant and civil rights activists have long claimed that the program leaves all brown-skinned residents vulnerable to racial profiling and other civil rights abuses, regardless of their immigration status. The inspector general’s assessment largely concurs with observations made by groups on the ground and goes further in pointing out that the program is inefficiently administered and failing to meet its goals:

With no specific target levels for arrest, detention, and removal priority levels, and with performance measures that do not account for all investigative work and criminal prosecutions, ICE cannot be assured that the 287(g) program is meeting its intended purpose, or that resources are being appropriately targeted toward aliens who pose the greatest risk to public safety and the community. [...]

…An emphasis on civil rights and civil liberties was not formally included in the 287(g) application, review, and selection process…287(g) officers at several program sites were not knowledgeable about the asylum process, immigration benefits, and victim and witness protections. An appropriate level of knowledge in these areas could minimize processing errors and reduce the risk of wrongful detention and deportation. ICE needs to take measures to increase competencies in these areas.

In early 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) also released a report slamming ICE for failing to provide local police participating in the 287(g) program with clearly defined objectives or a consistent system of supervision. “Contrary to the objective of the program,” the GAO report found that participating local police were removing immigrants for minor violations amidst rampant allegations of discrimination and racial profiling instead of curbing serious crime committed by “removable aliens.” Napolitano responded by announcing new objectives and guidelines aimed at “providing uniform policies” that prioritized the deportation of immigrants who commit serious crimes. The new inspector general report indicates that despite recent improvements, little has changed and “significant challenges in administering the 287(g) program continue to exist.”

Last year, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus called on Obama to terminate the 287(g) program, indicating that “no amount of reforms, no matter how well-intentioned,” will address the program’s misuse. Now, even the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is calling on the President and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to end the program. “Immigration lawyers hear reports everyday that immigrants are afraid to talk to the police and to report crimes,” said Bernie Wolfsdorf, President of AILA. “Nothing is more debilitating to American values than abuses committed by local police who are the very essence of law enforcement and protection of our communities.”

The inspector general’s report came on the wings of a recently leaked DHS memo indicating that U.S. immigration authorities have set controversial new deportation quotas which differ from repeated pledges made by Napolitano to focus first and foremost on undocumented immigrants that pose a danger to public safety. Top ICE officials have denounced the memo and acknowledged that it was “inconsistent” with the views of DHS and the Obama administration. In a blog post, Joan Friedland of the National Immigration Law Center wrote that “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief John Morton asked to be judged on ICE’s record, not on rumors.” However, Friedland points out, “that’s just why I’m concerned.”

Even though Iraq continues to endure a level of terrorism that any other country would consider a national crisis, and even though Republican Congressman Dana Rohrbacher acknowledged recently that “everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in” to Iraq, you can still find people — usually people who worked in the Bush administration — who continue to insist that the war was worth it, and that the decision to invade and occupy and attempt to remake Iraq at a cost of trillions of dollars will be vindicated by history.

A recently published RAND study of the regional effects of the Iraq war should (but probably won’t, as too many influential people have too much professionally and emotionally invested in the war being seen as a “success”) put such claims to rest. The study finds that, in addition to facilitating the rise of Iranian power, undercutting perceptions of U.S. strength and influence, and increasing the profile of other actors like Russia and China, the war has seriously hurt the prospects for political reform in the region:

On the domestic front, societal conflict in the broader region resulting from the war has not yet materialized to the extent forecast; rather, state power has strengthened and tolerance of domestic political opposition has decreased. Specifically, Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity. And while the entrenchment of U.S.-allied regimes may be deceptively reassuring in the short term, it does little to address the more deeply rooted problem of regime illegitimacy or to mitigate the wellsprings of radicalism.

So not only did the Bush administration’s key (post-WMD) strategic claim about the war — that replacing Saddam Hussein with a less despotic, more democratic government would start a democratic chain reaction in the region — turn out to be false, the war actually made things worse for democracy. By offering democratic reform as a component to the “war on terror,” which many Muslims see as a war against Islam, the U.S. alienated and isolated at the outset scores of potential reformist allies. By then promoting Iraq as a potential showpiece for that agenda (“See all these explosions? This could be your country! Who’s in?”) we discredited democratic reform even more.

The irony here is that, in diagnosing the overabundance of authoritarianism as a problem in the Middle East, the Bush administration and its neoconservative brain trust were not entirely wrong. Oppressive behavior by governments viewed by many as illegitimate and unjust is a key driver of extremism in the region. But the course of “treatment” that was undertaken by the Bush administration — American invasion and military occupation — has turned out to be just as bad, if not worse, than the disease, both for the U.S., whose power and influence have declined as a result, and for the region, which will be grappling with the destabilizing consequences of the war for decades to come.

The RAND study also concludes, “on a more-positive note,” that “the war’s appeal as a draw for terrorist recruitment has been offset by declining public support among Arabs of al-Qaeda’s goals, operations, and tactics.” Less popularity for Al Qaeda is obviously a good thing. But before anybody breaks out the champagne on this, let’s remember that this is the result of Al Qaeda’s brutality against Iraqi civilians, brutality that was directly facilitated by the U.S. invading and then failing to properly secure the country.

It’s important to remember that luring terrorists to Iraq to blow themselves up in markets and mosques wasn’t just some tragic side-effect of the Iraq policy. It was, for many of the war’s architects and supporters, a bonus feature of the policy. The fact that “flypaper strategy” may have, by enabling the murder and maiming of thousands of Iraqi women, men and children, (Iraq accounts for more than half of all suicide bombings recorded since 1981) managed to drive down Al Qaeda’s poll numbers in the region doesn’t make the idea any less morally reprehensible, let alone qualify the policy as a whole as a success.