To Be a Friend Is Fatal (34 page)

By November, the Bush administration and the Pentagon had grown so confident of the surge's success that an order came down through the war bureaucracy: Iraqi interpreters could no longer wear balaclavas to conceal their identity while on patrol with US forces. “We are a professional army, and professional units don't conceal their identity by wearing masks,” bleated Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover, army spokesman. Those who refused to remove their masks could “seek alternative employment.” The policy was dropped after much criticism by the List Project and others, but it signaled a bleaker truth: in addition to opening up the possibility of leaving, the surge's “success” gave us permission to forget about Iraq. With imploding stock and housing markets, failing banks, and the specter of economic collapse, there was no longer any
interest in following what was happening in a war that we'd “won.” The major media outlets began to shutter their Baghdad bureaus, and the country's attention turned inward.

Unsurprisingly, this also meant that big-budget items such as funding the Sahwa members fell along the wayside. Al-Maliki's Shi'a-dominated government in Iraq turned its sights on the Sunni Awakening movement, which had lost its American patron. Many were killed, others arrested, and even more fled the country. By the end of 2008, I was receiving appeals to take on Sahwa cases, an idea that I rejected at once, knowing the history of many of these former insurgents. When I mentioned this to Yaghdan, he chuckled and told me that the group had set half his home on fire with a rocket-propelled grenade and then occupied it once the flames subsided.

The American public couldn't be bothered with the minutiae of the status-of-forces agreement, but the Iraqis on the list paid close attention to the negotiations. They looked on in terror when America agreed to dismantle the bases as a condition of the SOFA. When the surge had intensified, many US-affiliated Iraqis could no longer afford to risk traveling past the
alassas
into military bases and the Green Zone each day, so large numbers of interpreters simply moved into the security of our bases. Applications flooded into the project from desperate interpreters whose confidence in the US government had been shaken by the mask ban and the SOFA. They wanted to know if they would be left behind when we withdrew. Unless the newly elected Democratic president acted swiftly, it was hard to imagine any other outcome.

EXCERPT FROM:

“Turning the Page in Iraq”

A speech.

We must also keep faith with Iraqis who kept faith with us.

One tragic outcome of this war is that the Iraqis who stood with America—the interpreters, embassy workers, and subcontractors—are being targeted for assassination.

An Iraqi named Laith who worked for an American organization told a journalist, “Sometimes I feel like we're standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.” And yet our doors are shut. In April, we admitted exactly one Iraqi refugee—just one!

That is not how we treat our friends. That is not how we take responsibility for our own actions. That is not who we are as Americans. It's time to at least fill the seven thousand slots we pledged to Iraqi refugees and to be open to accepting even more Iraqis at risk.

Keeping this moral obligation is a key part of how we turn the page in Iraq. Because what's at stake is bigger than this war—it's our global leadership.

Now is a time to be bold. We must not stay the course or take the conventional path because the other course is unknown.

To quote Dr. Brzezinski: we must not allow ourselves to become “prisoners of uncertainty.”

—Candidate Barack Obama

September 12, 2007

Clinton, Iowa

I
n January 2009, two weeks before Barack Obama's inauguration, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, hosted a performance of George Packer's award-winning play about the abandonment of US-affiliated Iraqis.
Betrayed
, which had won critical acclaim off-Broadway, drew heavily from his
New Yorker
piece. There was even a character named Prescott, an American who compiles a list of his former Iraqi colleagues after a freak accident ended his service.

My guest for the evening was Samantha Power, the “rock star” humanitarian who'd written a history of America's response to genocide. Three years earlier, as soon as the casts were sawn from my arms in West Chicago, I'd driven to Boston with the flighty notion that I'd work as her research assistant. When Obama had been elected to the US Senate in 2004, she served as his principal foreign policy advisor and was now set to take a senior role in the upcoming administration.

Power was an obvious ally. In 2007 she wrote a magazine piece for
Time
in which she assailed the Bush White House for its meager results in resettling Iraqi refugees. An ex-girlfriend of mine taking Power's course at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government emailed me in surprise to say that she had been assigned my op-eds for that night's reading.

Her influence on Obama was clear. In the fall of 2007, when no other candidates in either party had uttered a word about the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, Obama gave a major campaign speech about how he would address Iraq if elected president, devoting several paragraphs to the plight of our interpreters.

The significance of Obama's election was debated in the loftiest terms, but in my wearied state, I was simply relieved. No more of the ideological timidity demonstrated by the Bush White House and its executive branch agencies, which never failed to generate a 9/11-rooted justification for the torpid pace of granting visas to Iraqis on the list. No more of the “The surge worked!” mantra, which might finally allow for honest
appraisals of the situation on the ground in Iraq. No more political appointments for money bundlers in posts that required experience and competence. No more hostile interpretations of congressional intent by administration lawyers. No more silence from the White House.

We would have a pragmatist in charge. A man who was not burdened by a political need for Iraq to look a certain way on account of decisions he'd made but who could address it on its own terms. A man who had spoken eloquently about the need for bold solutions to protect the Iraqis who had kept the faith with America. A man whose key advisor had written forcefully about the issue and who knew about my list.

In a fever of hope, I reasoned that the remaining names on my list, now some two thousand long, could be resettled within a year of Inauguration Day.

After the curtains dropped on Packer's play, I was seated at a dinner next to Power and Ben Rhodes, Obama's talented speechwriter who'd penned the “Turning the Page in Iraq” speech. For nearly two hours, we discussed the minutiae of the Bush administration's Iraqi refugee policy and the bureaucratic pitfalls that had riddled the process.

I laid out my concern, which was simple: the refugee resettlement bureaucracy they were about to inherit from the Republicans would not work quickly enough to keep pace with the withdrawal. Unless they made some serious changes and initiated some contingency planning, the United States would abandon thousands of its Iraqi employees, and it would be bloody.

Although Obama had campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, the timetable and framework for withdrawal had already been established for him in December 2008 by the outgoing Bush administration. Within six months of Obama's inauguration, US forces would withdraw from the archipelago of forward operating bases and outposts throughout Iraq's cities, consolidating into a number of large bases in more remote parts of the country. Following that, twenty thousand troops would be reassigned to logistics, implementing the largest movement of soldiers and matériel since World War II. “Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now,” crowed Lieutenant General William G. Webster. The effort was so advanced that logistics teams had the
capacity to track a coffeepot from a dismantled forward operating base in Baghdad all the way along its journey back to America.

For all of this advance planning, though, nobody in government seemed to be considering what would happen to the thousands of Iraqis still living and working for our troops in those bases. In early 2009, when it was clear that the withdrawal was under way, many of the Iraqis on the list were told they'd need to wait an entire year for just their initial interview, and much longer for a travel date, if they were lucky. I suggested to Power that there would be an increase in applications for visas as more interpreters were laid off, placing greater strain on an overstrained system.

The implications were far from hypothetical. As we ate, I went through each of the recent examples set by our coalition partners. The previous year, British forces beat a hasty withdrawal from southern Iraq without any contingency plans to protect their own interpreters. A ghastly campaign of targeted assassinations commenced with the public execution of seventeen British-affiliated Iraqis. Their bodies were dumped throughout the streets of Basrah as a warning.

Only after a public outcry in the United Kingdom did the newly elected prime minister, Gordon Brown, commit to reversing the policy bequeathed to him by Tony Blair. The British Royal Air Force subsequently airlifted its Iraqi interpreters directly to a military base in Oxfordshire, England, where they were screened and granted refugee status.

Denmark quietly airlifted hundreds of its Iraqi interpreters in a single night. Poland and Australia did the same. None of our allies had contrived a convoluted process that condemned Iraqi employees to a year or longer of hiding and survival as they waited for an interview with a lumbering bureaucracy. Our coalition partners simply loaded their endangered Iraqis onto planes, flew them back to controlled military bases, and screened their cases swiftly.

The United States had its own history of airlifts. In 1999 President Clinton airlifted twenty thousand Kosovar Albanians who had fled from Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević's forces. The refugees were flown directly to Fort Dix in New Jersey, where they were granted refugee status under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Just a few years earlier, after a 1996 uprising in the north of Iraq, Clinton ordered Operation Pacific Haven, in which nearly seven thousand Iraqi Kurds were evacuated in advance of an attack by Saddam Hussein's army. Clinton's administration understood that the traditional mechanisms for resettling refugees would never work quickly enough, so Eric Schwartz, then senior director for multilateral and humanitarian affairs at the National Security Council, worked with the US Army to fly thousands of Iraqis in a matter of days to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, where the average processing time was ninety days. Major General John Dallegher, commander of the airlift, stated, “Our success will undoubtedly be a role model for future humanitarian efforts.”

By the end of dinner, I had made my case for what we called “the Guam option” in the best way I knew. Tens of thousands of the Special Immigrant Visa slots created by the Kennedy legislation were sitting there for them to use, I said, urging Power not to get lost in the thickets of minor tweaks within the bureaucracy but to remember what the United States has been capable of when the president takes the lead in protecting refugees. She, of course, knew far more than I did about this history.

A few weeks later, Power was appointed to President Obama's National Security Council in the same position that Eric Schwartz had held under Clinton. Serendipitously, Schwartz was appointed to Ellen Sauerbrey's old post as assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration.

Beyond the promising appointments, the Obama administration's first term began with a radically different approach: it granted us access. In April 2009 Power convened the first meeting between the National Security Council and leaders of organizations involved in confronting the Iraqi refugee crisis. While waiting for the NSC officials to arrive, two advocates next to me whispered excitedly to each other, “I can't believe we're about to meet Samantha Power!” There was a general atmosphere of catharsis: refugee organizations had for years tried to get through to the Bush administration. (At one low point, the Bush NSC had sent
out an email soliciting the names of potential invitees for a discussion on the issue. But when the list of advocates desperate to finally speak with someone in power came back, the Bush White House decided that it was too long and simply canceled the meeting.) After a two-hour discussion of the broader refugee crisis, each organization deposited its most recent field reports in a stack before Power. I gave her a two-page letter that simply reiterated my recommendation of the Guam option for US-affiliated Iraqis.

Access to the Obama White House was a welcome change from the Bush years, but as 2009 wore on, I grew anxious about how Iraqis on my list were faring in the midst of the withdrawal. Thanks to the tenacity of the law firms, more than seven hundred Iraqis had made it through the gauntlet to safety in America since the launch of the List Project in 2007. But the list was well over two thousand names long and growing mercilessly. The first critical benchmark in the status-of-forces agreement, in which US forces were to pull back from their outposts and checkpoints throughout Iraq's cities, passed on July 1, 2009. Shortly thereafter, I decided it was time to return to Iraq. If I was going to be effective in advocating on their behalf throughout the withdrawal, sitting around in meetings in Washington wasn't going to help much. I needed to go back to see exactly how they were faring under the new administration's bureaucracy. I wasn't thrilled about returning but had convinced myself that it might help bring about “closure”: after all, it had now been four years since I'd left Fallujah on what was supposed to have been a weeklong vacation.