To Be a Friend Is Fatal (35 page)

This time, of course, I would not be going as a government official, protected by a ring of taxpayer-funded mercenaries. I inquired with a security firm about the cost of a week's worth of protection and found the gunslinging business alive and well in Iraq: one week would cost the List Project upward of $50,000, an impossible sum. I was left with two options: travel with a low profile with Iraqi friends in soft-skin cars, potentially increasing the risk to them in the process, or embed with the US military as a “journalist,” thereby securing the protection of the
military. I opted for the latter, traveling with Chris Nugent, the Holland and Knight attorney who had single-handedly helped scores of Iraqis on the list to safety in the years since the launch of the List Project.

My twenty-ninth birthday began on the outskirts of Kuwait City, surrounded by snoring grunts and contractors in tent P7 at the Logistics Support Area of Ali Al-Salem air base. After cajoling our way onto the next manifest into Baghdad, I threw on some body armor on loan from the military and led Chris up the ramp of the C-130.

Wind whipped in through the back of the transport plane as we hurtled north from Kuwait over Karbala' toward Camp Victory. On the red mesh bench next to me sat a heavyset KBR employee engrossed in a book called
Thong on Fire: An Urban Erotic Tale.
Across the way, Chris clicked away on his BlackBerry, responding to Iraqis on the list and bureaucrats back in Washington. In a fit of nostalgia, I queued up my old HELO playlist and leaned back as the Rolling Stones blasted over the din of the plane.

I soon found myself back at the same tent- and generator-clogged corner of Camp Victory that I had left years earlier, waiting for the same up-armored Rhino Runner bus to sneak me into the Green Zone in the dead of night. If I had hoped for a wave of closure upon my arrival, I was met instead with a prickly rash of unanswerable questions: What was I doing back here? Why was I still dealing with Iraq when all of my friends had long since moved on? Why did I think anything would happen as a result of this trip, when nobody in Washington cared about Iraq anymore? What in God's name was I going to tell all of these people who were emerging from hiding at great risk to meet with me? When would this all end?

I wandered restlessly around the base and noticed little had changed. There was Wi-Fi now, and the morale, welfare, and recreation tent was much busier than when I had left in 2005, but that was about it. Soldiers and contractors sprawled out on black pleather couches and stared sleepily at B movies flickering on a wrinkled movie screen. On the other side of the massive tent, several rows of carrels were filled with young
men watching episode after episode of TV shows on DVDs that they checked out from an Indian man behind a nearby counter. A sign hung above each carrel: “Please limit usage to one season only.” Others sat at folding tables with PSPs, squinting into the tiny screens as they played games. Everyone already seemed to know the war was over, two years before they were allowed to come home.

I slipped out of the tent and ambled past a grinding generator, which powered the lights illuminating the basketball courts. Taco Bell had made its way into the base, encased between rows of blast walls. A Nepalese employee wearing a Taco Bell Baghdad hat smiled as he handed me a Crunchwrap Supreme and nachos, both oozing orange sauce. The McDonald's now had a bright red bench upon which sat a human-sized Ronald McDonald statue, lounging in clown makeup with his arm over the back of the bench.

Who was going to pack up all of this shit?

Twenty minutes later, stomach churning from the toxic cheese sauce, I made my way back to the plywood and canvas tent that served as the waiting area for the Rhino Runner. I tilted a packet of purple Gatorade powder into a bottle of water and watched it disperse into the shape of a small inverted explosion. A couple grunts sat behind a desk littered with empty cans of Red Bull, zoned out in oppressive boredom, waiting for the nighttime run. A flat-screen TV suspended on a nearby plywood wall blared out Fox News. I took a long sip and shut my eyes.

My ears pricked up when someone on TV shouted “the Tides Foundation!” which had given a grant to the List Project and served as our fiscal agent. I had never heard Tides discussed in the media before. I opened my eyes to find a squat, comical man in Keds standing in front of a blackboard and flailing his arms.

Glenn Beck described the many projects of Tides as pushing a radical agenda, part of a left-wing conspiracy dedicated to destroying capitalism using a group of “all the people that hate America.” I took off my armor and tried to steal an hour of sleep before the military transport arrived.

(A year later, a forty-five-year-old Beck devotee in Oakland named Byron Williams hopped into his mother's Toyota Tundra truck. Wearing a bulletproof vest, he headed to the Tides headquarters in San Francisco. On the passenger seat, he placed a 9 millimeter handgun, a shotgun,
and a .308 caliber rifle, which he had loaded with armor-piercing bullets. En route, he was pulled over for erratic driving: he fired his weapons and injured two police officers before being shot himself. Later that night, in the hospital, he told investigators that he had been trying to “start a revolution” by killing “people of importance” at Tides.)

Many of the Iraqis had traveled for days to meet with me. My staff had sent texts and emails to Iraqis on the list giving them the dates of my arrival, and word soon spread throughout the community of US-affiliated Iraqis. They hid their badges in their shoes and brassieres and waited quietly in the lobby of the Rasheed Hotel, where I had rented several rooms overlooking an empty pool. The mattresses were thin and lumpy, the curtains pungent with years of gathered cigarette smoke. We rotated as many in as possible: while I met with someone in my room, Chris met with another in his, and a group waited in the third room. Over scores of hours, we triaged their cases, offering counsel and preparing the lucky few who had upcoming interviews.

The stories no longer shocked: our binders of cases had grown too numerous and grief-filled. I barely raised an eyebrow when I wrote “wife taken and raped” in my notebook. Another dropped his pants to show me the bullet wounds across his leg and torso. Another lifted his shirt to show me his scars. One man's wife was on a Fulbright scholarship to study medicine in Saint Louis, but his neighbors had found out and told him that he had seventy-two hours to leave. Kids abducted, ransomed, limbs mangled, family members missing, threat letters folded up alongside faded American certificates of appreciation.

When I asked a man to show me his US government badge, he looked at me remorsefully and told me he had eaten it. He had been thrown into the trunk of a Shi'a militiaman's car for being a Sunni in the wrong place. If they discovered that he was also an interpreter, there was no chance at survival or paying a bribe, so he feverishly broke the plastic badge into bits and swallowed them before they pulled him from the trunk. As he now struggled to make his way through the visa process, he'd have a harder time verifying his employment with the United States: “If you worked for us, where's your badge?”

Their children sat glumly on the mattress while we smoked and filled notebooks with the details of their bureaucratic limbo, took copies of their papers, the names of their friends, the names of their Iraqi colleagues who'd been assassinated, the names of their American bosses whom they needed to find in order to verify their employment, names, and more names. All of them had been waiting at least a year without seeing any real progress in their applications. They asked me if Obama would save them. I didn't know how to answer.

I took a break during lunch one day to visit a close friend in the USAID compound who had been posted back to Baghdad. She escorted me through the compound security gate, where guards wiped me down for the bomb residue detection machine. I walked past the familiar palm trees and piazza back into the mission, feeling like an intruder. In the years since I left, I had become involved in a proxy war with the agency, which had treated my former colleagues poorly and made unsubtle threats when pressuring me to keep quiet. I was worried that management would toss me out of the compound, but I wanted to see my old house and office.

She brought me into the twelve-thousand-square-foot Hammurabi Office Building, which had been under construction when I first arrived in January 2005. After clearing the bombproof ballistic security doors, I found myself staring into the unchanged forest of blue cubicles. My friend trailed me as I walked up and down each row, remembering where Yaghdan, Tona, Amina, Ziad, and my other friends had sat. Only one Iraqi from 2005 still worked there: the rest had fled, and thanks to the List Project, the majority now lived in the United States.

I poked my head into the panic room, where Yaghdan had been told three years earlier that the only support USAID could provide was a month's leave. I did not linger at my old cubicle, site of the manufactured
Iraq Daily Update
s.

I wandered over to my old house, its mortar-proof roof crumbling. As I walked into the cafeteria, my concerns about a scene with USAID management gave way to an embarrassing realization: nobody had a clue who I was. A couple years earlier, Iraqi colleagues informed me that they had been explicitly warned by their American bosses, “Kirk Johnson can't do anything for you; do not write to him.” Since then,
staff attrition had rinsed from the compound any recognition or hostility toward my efforts.

Before I left, my friend gave me a parting gift common among foreign service officers in the final phase of the war: a miniature blast wall, hewn from the real thing, with the seal of the Embassy of the United States in Baghdad. Its edges crumbled at the slightest touch.

That night, I stretched out on the Rasheed Hotel's pitiful mattress and listened to a small-arms skirmish crackle along the Tigris. A birthday cake, brought to me by one of my few Iraqi friends who was still stuck in Baghdad and would probably be left behind, decomposed on the hotel desk. The following day, we would work our way through the intestines of the occupation: long periods of waiting broken by peristaltic bursts of movement from Rhino Runner to tent to shuttle bus to C-130 to a whistling descent into the fiery haze of Kuwait. As far as I was concerned, this would be the last time I'd ever see Iraq.

The morning after I left, on August 19, a string of massive car bombs exploded across the Green Zone, damaging the Rasheed Hotel and the nearby Foreign Ministry. The attacks, which killed one hundred and wounded nearly six hundred, were the largest in over two years and were carried out by Al-Qaeda in Iraq. I had little left in the reservoir of my emotions to do more than send an all-clear email to my family. It barely registered in Western media outlets. Another explosion in Baghdad.

And as the Iraqis who'd met with us went back into hiding, we traveled onward to meet with others on the list in Syria and Jordan. Word had spread throughout the diaspora of US-affiliated Iraqis in Amman that I was coming. Although I hadn't told anyone where I was staying, a resourceful Iraqi who wanted his name added to the list cold-called hotels to ask whether anyone under my name was staying there. When I stepped out for breakfast the morning of my second day, I encountered a small group of Iraqis waiting by the hotel entrance. They hurried over to thrust copies of their badges and commendation letters at me and asked to be added to the list.

A few weeks after I returned from the Middle East, the roof of the USAID office building collapsed under its own bombproof weight.

When a friend asked me what I had learned from the trip, my mind raced through the questions that confronted me upon my arrival, but found no clear answers. The war was over. So long as Iraq didn't erupt into a new civil war, the Obama administration was fine with the strategy and policy bequeathed to it by the Bush White House. Pack up the Ronald McDonalds and Taco Bells and leave the refugee resettlement program as it is: a multiyear, understaffed, and underfunded embarrassment. The only people who still had any hope were the Iraqis we were about to abandon.

As 2010 approached, I felt as though I had reached the dead end. If the List Project had been the antigen that triggered a reaction in the refugee bureaucracy, it was depressingly clear that the antibodies had now formed and multiplied, numbing any sensation of urgency. Despite personnel changes at the top of the Obama administration's executive branch agencies, the timeline for getting a visa was growing increasingly protracted at a time when it needed to be accelerated. Every few months, refugee advocates met with the National Security Council to discuss the refugee crisis and remedies, but the meetings felt more and more like a ritual, each actor's role defined, nothing ever changing.

I had thrown everything I could think of against the problem, working with journalists and lawyers, testifying and pushing legislation, but I was running out of ideas. The List Project had helped nearly one thousand Iraqis make it to America, but there were thousands on the list still trapped in the system.

What else could be done? The media were uninterested:
the story's been written
. Congress was uninterested:
Iraq's finished; it's all about Afghanistan now
. The White House was uninterested:
this wasn't our war anyhow.
My law firms, ever steady, continued to prod the refugee bureaucracy, but everything had settled into a quiet stasis. The first, second, and nth laws governing this absence of motion were defined by terror—a state of terror so overpowering that the United States government regarded even its closest Iraqi friends as potential enemies. The bills passed by one branch were shredded by another, but no one really protested because we'd become brilliant at terrifying ourselves out of taking
any risks in helping them: What if one of these visa programs, however well intentioned or just, let in someone bad? In one case, an endangered Iraqi Christian who worked as an interpreter had been granted a visa, pending the completion of his security check. Soon thereafter, his visa was revoked on the grounds that there was suspicion that he worked for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. When he and others appealed on grounds of common sense—that the terrorist organization wasn't in the business of recruiting Christians—an official said, “Yes, but wouldn't that be precisely the way they'd get someone in?”