To Be a Friend Is Fatal (33 page)

The morning the legislation passed the Senate, Kennedy's staff arranged a phone call with several refugee organizations that had played a role in crafting the legislation. “This is a big one!” he exclaimed from a cell phone on the floor of the Senate.

After the call, I flopped down onto the couch and laughed. My list was approaching a thousand names. Even if every one of them took a Special Immigrant Visa, there would be tens of thousands of slots remaining for Iraqis that weren't on the list. My optimism bubbled up wildly: it had been less than a year, and a solution for tens of thousands of US-affiliated Iraqis was already in sight. We had beaten the bureaucracies. The List Project's attorneys would help everyone apply, and within a year, at most, I could shut down the nonprofit and get on with my life.

In August 2007, two months after I begged Yaghdan not to give up, I received a phone call from a Voluntary Agency in Chicago. Voluntary Agencies, or VOLAGs, are organizations that receive federal funds from
the Department of Health and Human Services to provide assistance for incoming refugees. They were calling to see if I could come sign a form acknowledging my sponsorship of Yaghdan. “They're approved?!” I shouted into the phone.

“We don't know their travel date, but yes, they will be resettled to West Chicago. You still live there, correct?”

I had half-jokingly volunteered my parents earlier in the year, saying that they could be the first to open their doors to Iraqis on the list. “Absolutely!” they said.

It wasn't the first time they had made such a commitment. In my first weeks in Fallujah, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans. (I watched the coverage with a shocked marine lieutenant colonel from Biloxi, Mississippi, which was also battered.) A Palestinian-American buddy from college and his family had been displaced by the flood, so I called home to ask my dad if they could host them. He chuckled and said that he and my mom had just talked about finding a way to help someone displaced by the hurricane. A week later, my friend and his family, seven in all, piled into a van and drove up to West Chicago. They stayed with my parents for a couple months, at which point they moved into a house that my parents' church rented for the family.

The first call I made after hearing Yaghdan's news was my dad.

“We'll be ready for them!” he said.

While he waited for a travel date from the embassy in Damascus, Yaghdan sent me questions about life in America:

Q1. What is the best salary to have a decent life in the US in general and in Chicago?

Q3. Can I buy a car? How much does it cost to buy a nineties model Japanese car?

Q4. Are there any Arabic people in Chicago?

Q6. My wife covers her head with scarves. Is there any problem with that?

Q10. I have books like the Quran and two other books for prayer. Is it ok to bring them or is it forbidden?

In late August, in the midst of replying to one of his notes, my cell buzzed with a voice mail alert. Yaghdan's voice warbled through as though from another dimension, from a pay phone on Hadara Street in the Syrian city of Homs, where he and Haifa had been holed up in order to avoid Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army representatives in Damascus. “Hello, Kirk! We got a travel date. We are flying in two days. We will see you in Chicago.”

I flew back to West Chicago to help my parents prepare for their arrival. Though ten months had passed and a thousand names had been added to the list since my op-ed in the
Los Angeles Times,
the entire reason that I had become involved in the first place was about to arrive in my hometown. I was proud of this moment. I had stumbled my way to this point, but Yaghdan's arrival was a sudden illumination: it
was
possible. As slow moving and complicated as the refugee resettlement process was, I had my first win.

My folks had readied the small cottage in the backyard that had played host to Jewish refugees from the Ukraine in the 1990s and my Palestinian friends just a few years earlier. My mom had printed out a Google map of mosques in the western suburbs, along with halal grocers and butchers. The night before Yaghdan arrived, my dad and I sat on the front porch, talking about the events of the past year. He rocked in his chair, wisps of pipe smoke overhead, and ribbed me: “I think you owe the State Department a whole lot of thanks, now that Yaghdan's here, don't you?” I knew he was joking, but I couldn't constrain my annoyance at the idea of thanking the government.

The morning of August 29, 2007, I drove from West Chicago to O'Hare International Airport to meet Yaghdan and Haifa. It had been nearly two years, and the only image of him I'd seen since I left was his smiling face in the picture I snapped of the USAID staff, several of whom were now dead. And there he was, twenty yards away and grinning as he walked past the luggage carousels, at least six inches taller than the twenty Iraqi refugees who had also made the flight with him out of Syria through Jordan, settling at last in Chicago. My grin was uncontrollable, as I held my arms up and opened hands in a “How did this happen?” state of delight.

Yaghdan saw me and laughed. He advanced ahead of the group and gave me a strong hug.

When I saw Haifa, I wanted to ignore Muslim convention and give her a hug but instead smiled and welcomed her. The exciting strangeness of the moment was amplified by the fact that although I had never met her, our lives had been wildly redirected by each other's. Within an hour, they would be living in our house.

Their arrival was made bittersweet when we learned that the airline had lost two of their three bags—two-thirds of their earthly possessions that Haifa had packed frantically while Yaghdan went to the USAID compound to ask for help the day of the death threat.

As I drove them out to the suburbs, my mom and dad sat in the kitchen, practicing their welcome phrase,
as-salaamu ‘alaikum
. When we arrived, they were waiting in the driveway with their Arabic greeting and balloons.

After a tour of their new home, my dad told Yaghdan that he wanted to take him on a tour of West Chicago. I sat in the back seat of the Buick as we sailed down Route 59 past the Taco Bell, where I had positioned imaginary tanks during the bleak winter of 2006. My dad pointed out the landmarks to Yaghdan, who laughed and said, “It's amazing that everyone obeys the lines on the roads! Not in the Middle East . . .”

I hadn't prepared Yaghdan for how to win over my dad, but singing the virtues of American rule of law was a surefire bet.

“Everyone here seems so peaceful,” he reflected, as we turned past the high school and junior high.

“Yeah, you know, it's true, Yaghdan. I think you'll find we really are a peaceful country.” My dad tapped the dottle from his pipe into the ashtray as he spoke.

From the backseat, I mustered a “Yep.”

When I flew back to West Chicago a few months later to celebrate the holidays, Yaghdan and Haifa were already full-fledged family members. He had taken to signing his emails to me as “the fourth Johnson brother” and was settling into suburban life surprisingly smoothly. He
found a job in the intake center at the emergency room of the Good Samaritan Hospital, taking every possible shift. When the hospital gave him a Christmas ham, he politely accepted it and dropped off the pork at the Johnson clan's kitchen.

On December 29, my brothers and I poured a few glasses of whiskey and toasted the two-year anniversary of my survival in the Dominican Republic. It was hard to remember feeling so elated at any other point in my life. I had somehow managed to ride a flood of events that culminated in Yaghdan and Haifa's arrival, and Senator Kennedy's creation of twenty-five thousand visa slots for US-affiliated Iraqis, which would effectively solve the crisis, I believed. The glasses clinked and the new year came.

As a flood spreads wider and wider

the water becomes shallower and dirtier.

The revolution evaporates,

and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

The chains of tormented mankind

are made out of red tape.

—Franz Kafka

E
very American high school student learns that Congress makes the laws and the president executes them. But it seems that the intent of Congress is often misinterpreted by the executive branch.

I had my attorneys, but the Bush administration had its own, who skimmed through the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act and decided that it did not need to be implemented, at least not yet. Despite the use of the word
crisis
in the name of the act, the White House and State Department attorneys claimed that they were uncertain as to whether Congress had intended the legislation to be enforced immediately or at the start of the following fiscal year, which was a full six months away. Unless Congress amended the act, there would be no new Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) issued yet.

Let it never be said that bureaucracies are unimaginative. All the MFAs in the country couldn't outmatch the creativity demonstrated by the Departments of State and Homeland Security when instructed by Congress to do something they didn't want to do. Wherever an opportunity to narrow the impact of the Kennedy legislation existed, the Bush administration's lawyers seemed to find it. Beyond delaying the start date of the bill, the Department of State's attorneys produced a consular interpretation that limited eligibility for the SIV. Hoping to cast a wide net of eligibility, the Kennedy legislation indicated that Iraqis who had worked directly for the US government (the State Department, USAID, and the military) or for a government contractor (Bechtel, KBR) could apply for the SIV. But when the List Project's attorneys submitted the applications of scores of Iraqis who had worked for groups such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute, we were swiftly informed that they were ineligible because IRI and NDI were grantees. A grant from the US government differs from a contract in terms of reporting requirements, but no militia or member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq knew or cared about the subtle differences in federal funding mechanisms. Even Iraqis working for the US Institute of Peace, which is funded directly by Congress and is required by law
to have the sitting Secretaries of State and Defense on its board, were deemed ineligible.

And so the SIV program was euthanized in its infancy. Of the 5,000 slots allocated in the first year, only 438 visas were granted, an 8 percent success rate during a year of civil war, extrajudicial killings, and flight. Only a handful of those were granted to Iraqis on my list. Once jubilant, they soon saw the program as a myth—a lot of words with no truth behind them. They returned to submitting their applications through the traditional US Refugee Admissions Program, where they waited in line with tens of thousands of Iraqis who did not work for America.

I was losing. I traveled frantically to raise awareness and find enough funding to avert the shuttering of the List Project, but my fatigue overwhelmed me one miserable evening a few weeks before the 2008 election. After eighteen straight days of talks and meetings on the road, I flew back to New York a few hours before a fund-raiser in midtown. In my opening remarks, where I thanked the various donors and law firms in attendance, my weary eyes skipped over the names of the donors who had provided the apartment I'd been living in. Before I'd even finished, they had stormed out of the event. I raced down to find them donning their coats in the lobby, and apologized for the mistake, asking them to come back up so I could correct it. One screamed, “You ingrate! I want you out of the building!” while the other called for a cab. I was mortified: it had been an error, not any deliberate snub, but I couldn't get through to them.

When I walked back to the building later that evening, the doorman informed me that I had twenty-four hours to vacate the apartment. I sprinted to Hertz in my suit and rented an SUV, which my girlfriend and I packed up until three in the morning. I left an apology letter on the kitchen table.

“I'm sorry I got us kicked out,” I said wearily to my teary-eyed girlfriend as the confused goldfish flitted around in a Ziploc bag on her lap, New York sliding out of view behind us as we drove north to Boston.

A child wailed in the next room. I reclined in the chair and stared up at the ceiling while my dentist wiggled her hands into rubber gloves.
A large, dopey cartoon of Goofy grinned back down at me. I wasn't sure why, but my insurance company had authorized only one dental provider, a kids clinic called Kool Smiles. Someone put goggles over my eyes before the dentist took a sander to my front teeth. I'd been grinding down my molars during sleep to such an extent that my front teeth were colliding, another unfortunate result of my mounting fatigue. The dentist decided to sand some length off the front to keep up with the loss in the back. “God, it's nice to work in an adult mouth!” she said. “So much more room!” I blinked politely.

Things were falling apart. The Kennedy momentum was dissipating rapidly. By the fall of 2008, the war in Iraq was a wisp in the exhaust hanging over the campaign trail. In the year and a half since President Bush knighted General Petraeus and his counterinsurgency campaign, the American casualty rate had dropped substantially, but Iraq was still in turmoil. To those willing to look beyond the cult of Petraeus-as-savior narrative, a core factor behind the drop in anti-US attacks was the Awakening movement. For the cost of roughly $370 million, the insurgency was “rented,” creating a period of quiet during 2008 and thus removing the war as an election year issue.

The surge gave America psychological license to leave with the belief that it had somehow won. The White House negotiated a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with Nouri al-Maliki's government, establishing a timeline for withdrawal—a concept that only a year earlier had been considered traitorous by the Republican Party.