To Be a Friend Is Fatal (32 page)

EXCERPT FROM:

Iraqi Volunteers, Iraqi Refugees: What Is America's Obligation?

Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress

Mr. Gary Ackerman, D-NY: You anticipate the number of Iraqis who have worked for the United States or our coalition is in excess of 100,000?

Ms. Ellen Sauerbrey, Assistant Secretary of State: We do not really have that number. We have been talking to contractors trying to get a better understanding. . . . However, I have to point out that because
of the security measures that were put in place with the changes to the INA following 9/11, getting Iraqis into the country today is very time consuming; there are multiple security checks that slow down the process. It is not like it was in the days of the fall of Vietnam when we were able to bring in huge numbers of people without any security measures.

Mr. Ackerman: Is it because in Vietnam despite the fact we were at war with them we decided that not everybody in Vietnam was a security risk or an evil person?

Ms. Sauerbrey: We did not have the measures in place at that time that were put in place by the Congress and by the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11.

Mr. Ackerman: And how many people do we have doing the processing?

Ms. Sauerbrey: We have ramped up. In the last several months, we have ramped up the capacity of our overseas processing entities so that we are now getting a stream of referrals from UNHCR.

Mr. Ackerman: I find it very frustrating when we are dealing with an administration that is supposed to be part of a unified government, and we are talking to the people who are responsible for refugees, and everything depends on somebody else, and numbers are not available, and that it is hard to understand why the department responsible for helping people resettle in the United States, you know, does not have these numbers at their command. I would think that is what you would do.

It sounds like a lot of foot dragging. Well, let me say this. There are many people who believe that if we started in earnest bringing in the people who so many of us in a nonpartisan fashion believe deserve to be rescued because of what they did to help us and trusted us, that if we began doing that it would be admitting a failure in the war, which, for some reason, some people do not want to come to terms with, and, therefore, they will put every roadblock possible in the way of bringing these refugees over here.

President Ford did not have to wrestle very long. He said, “Get this done,” and it got done. I think we have met the enemy, and they are us.

As kids, whenever my brother Derek beat me in a game of one-on-one, I'd snatch the basketball and declare, “C'mon, best two out of three!” If he won the next game, I'd pant, “Best three out of five!” He usually cut me off when I begged for best four out of seven.

In 2007 the war was in its fourth year. In each of those years, the Bush administration and war planners had tried to locate victory with every manner of strategy short of quitting. They toppled Saddam, hoping that the Iraqis would figure things out on their own. They trained Iraqi troops to take over their own security—troops who soon turned their weapons on us or each other. They tried to repair power plants, but contractors pocketed most of the funds and then asked for more. They flew in new rulers, who were rejected. They rushed elections and unwittingly herded Iraqis into voting along sectarian lines. Hoping to change the narrative that the war was a fiasco, the White House relentlessly introduced catchy phrases to roll out new strategies: “As they stand up, we'll stand down.” “Oil spots.” “Clear, hold, and build.” “Operation Together Forward.” “The New Way Forward.” Some elements of the strategy were named by the media, such as the “Baghdad Wall,” where we emplaced miles of concrete around hot spots to keep insurgents in or out.

When these failed to stanch the bleeding or to convince the American public that Iraq had not become a “lost war” like Vietnam, the war planners and think-tank sages teed up a ternary set of options for President Bush, following the bruising results of the 2006 midterm elections:

+1, or “Go big,” in which tens of thousands of additional troops could be sent in a last-ditch “surge” to somehow change the course of the war;

0, or “Go long,” in which the status quo is maintained, but for a period so dispiritingly long that the insurgency peters out; or

-1, or “Go home,” in which the president acknowledges the overwhelming domestic dissatisfaction with the war and initiates a withdrawal.

For President Bush and many of the neoconservatives who led the charge into Iraq, the “Go big” option of a surge presented a tantalizing opportunity. It was a do-over, a best-four-out-of-seven attempt to break the narrative that the war had become one of the greatest blunders in American history. By the time that the president announced the surge in January 2007, one estimate counted 93,964 Iraqis who had already died and nearly 2 million refugees. More than 3,000 US troops were dead and approximately 23,400 wounded.

But no matter. There was still a chance to
win
. Columnists and pundits and experts and hosts and congressmen picked their side of the debate like Little Leaguers choosing teams. With only a year left in office, the president needed the surge to succeed, or to at least look as though it were succeeding, and the executive branch agencies under his control needed to operate as though it were succeeding. The decision to surge soon worked its way through the arteries and intestines of the federal bureaucracies.

The president sent a charismatic, Princeton-educated general named David Petraeus. He would herald a new type of war, the papers whispered excitedly, in which the concept of protecting civilians was more important than body counts. After years in the wilderness, America finally had a strategy figured out, and apparently it only needed another thirty thousand troops.

Less reported, though, was the seismic shift that had occurred in Anbar Province known as the
Sahwa
, or “Awakening,” in which more than one hundred thousand Sunnis—many of them former insurgents—abandoned the anti-American insurgency in order to take up arms against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other foreign fighters that had overplayed their hand by instituting their version of sharia law in a number of Iraqi towns. They effectively joined our side, getting placed on the Pentagon's payroll, in order to help rid Iraq of what had become a common enemy. The trend lines of US casualties soon dropped, along with the media's and public's concern with the war.

As I made the rounds in Washington, the parlor game of the surge debate had hardened into a new narrative: America was
winning
. In a tense meeting on the fifth floor of the State Department with Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, a small group of refugee organization directors criticized the department's languorous pace of resettling Iraqi refugees. At one point, when I was describing a spate of death threats and assassination attempts that the List Project had documented in the previous weeks, Negroponte cut me off and said, “Look, I don't know if you've noticed, but we're winning! The surge has worked. I've been in Fallujah when nobody lived there, and now people are moving back!”

John Bolton, Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, spoke for the Darwinian id of the White House: “Our obligation 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. . . . 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.”

Since the new narrative meant that things were getting better, why didn't everyone just go back home? They were needed by their countrymen. Besides, if the US government brought too many educated Iraqis to safety, numerous officials lectured me, Iraq might suffer a brain drain, depriving the country of its best and brightest when they were needed most. “What about an Iraqi who isn't working for the US anymore and who is being hunted by a militia?” I'd ask of deaf ears. “What about those who did try to work for the government of Iraq and received death threats when their prior work with the Americans became known? Could helping a few hundred people on my list really trigger a brain drain?”

But there were other, more primal forces at work against the mission of the List Project.

“You know, Kirk, not everyone agrees with you that the best thing for this country is the resettlement of large numbers of Muslims,” an exasperated senior official in the State Department's Refugees Bureau snapped at me after I'd called to check in on the list. It was nice to finally hear someone speak so candidly. Of the various arguments against
swiftly helping US-affiliated Iraqis, this was the shortest answer I could relay whenever someone asked me why it was so difficult and time-consuming to get an Iraqi a visa: nobody wanted his or her signature to be on the visa papers of the next 9/11 hijacker.

For years, the American public had been instructed that Iraqis were part of an “axis of evil.” In speech after speech, President Bush told us that we needed to invade Iraq to rid it of terrorists. When the public's support of the war began to dwindle, our president told us that we needed to stay there to save it from sinking into a failed state that harbored terrorists, inveighing against anyone who suggested withdrawing. “However they put it,” Bush said, “the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses.”

NBC's David Gregory once asked George W. Bush why he was still a credible messenger on the stakes of the war. The president's response was feisty:

I'm going to keep talking about it. That's my job as the president, is to tell people the threats we face and what we're doing about it. They're dangerous, and I can't put it any more plainly to the American people, and to them, we will stay on the offense. It's better to fight them there than here.

And this concept about, well, maybe, you know, let's just kind of just leave them alone and maybe they'll be all right is naïve. These people attacked us before we were in Iraq. They viciously attacked us before we were in Iraq, and they've been attacking ever since.

They are a threat to your children, David. And whoever is in that Oval Office better understand it and take measures necessary to protect the American people.

After years of being told by our president that we fight them “there” so that we wouldn't have to fight them “here,” it made sense that an official in the refugee bureaucracy would do whatever he or she could to keep anyone who looked or sounded like “them” from coming over here.

This wasn't pleasant to relay to Iraqis on the list, but it made it easier to explain the many nonsensical dimensions of the “enhanced” screening
measures for Iraqis, such as the requirement that they must obtain a slip of paper from the local police station clearing them of any crimes, even though many of them had fled the civil war into neighboring countries illegally.

It was painfully apparent that President Bush's unwillingness to lead, much less utter a syllable about tens of thousands of imperiled US-affiliated Iraqis, meant that his executive branch agencies—the Departments of State and Homeland Security—would never step in front of him by taking any bold or urgent action.

If there was to be a breakthrough, it would have to come from the Congress.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon's Third District was the first to sponsor a bill in the House dealing with the refugee crisis. The genteel, bow-tied Democrat rode his bike to the Capitol Building each morning. When we met, he spoke quietly but eloquently about our moral obligation to protect US-affiliated Iraqis. I was eager to recruit support for the bill. Dennis Hastert was no longer in Congress, but Peter Roskam, an old family friend and former colleague of my dad's in the Illinois State Legislature, had just been elected to the US House. To boot, his chief of staff had some experience in Iraq working for a USAID grantee. I sent Roskam and his chief a note urging him to sign on to the Blumenauer legislation, which would create a special preference for those who had served alongside the United States as well as for Iraqi Christians, whose ranks had been decimated during the civil war.

A few days passed before his chief of staff called to notify me that Roskam would not be signing on to the legislation. As it turns out, the bill would have also protected gay Iraqis, whom militants were killing in shocking numbers. As the war worsened, the most common method of murdering gay Iraqis was to crush their skulls with cinder blocks. On principle, the representative would not sign on to anything that created “preferential treatment” for gay people.

A few months later, after the Blumenauer legislation failed to pass, his chief of staff sent me an email with the name of an Iraqi that he wanted added to my list.

After the collapse of Representative Blumenauer's legislation, progress was fitful until Senator Kennedy took up the cause. He drafted a new bill that utilized a little-known program called the Special Immigrant Visa, which had been created in 2005 at the urging of the marines. The original SIV program had opened fifty slots for interpreters each year, but as soon as it had passed, there was a decadelong backlog of applications. So in late 2007 Kennedy led a bipartisan coalition of senators, including Republicans Richard Lugar, Sam Brownback, and Gordon Smith, and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in an effort to expand the SIV program to five thousand visas per year for five years. These twenty-five thousand visas were designated exclusively for Iraqis who had worked alongside the United States. The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act also established in-country processing, meaning that Iraqis would no longer have to flee to Syria or Jordan in order to apply for resettlement; they could go directly to the embassy in Baghdad.