To Be a Friend Is Fatal (42 page)

By the end of 2012, many Iraqis who had been resettled through the List Project began calling me to excitedly announce their new citizenship as Americans. Zina, Tara, Hayder, Dina, Ali, and hundreds more will take the oath in 2013.

Was this whole war in Iraq worth it? Me and you will say no, but the politicians will say it was worth it.

I always look back at that first day, when the 101st rolled into Baghdad. I ask myself why they didn't do this. Or if they did this, maybe that wouldn't have happened. Or why did I step forward? I ask myself these questions, but I always get the same answer: somebody had to do it.

Look, when I jumped in that day, I didn't look at him as a soldier or as an American, I looked at him as a human. And if I saw an accident on the street over here, I would do the same thing, I wouldn't hesitate. Although they tell me over here, I shouldn't because maybe he'd file a lawsuit against me. But I don't care, I'm gonna help, no matter what the law says.

To be honest with you, sometimes I drink at night to get over this stuff. I drink. Sometimes I remember, like flashbacks. And you know, these memories, although they hurt, they give me hope for the future. Because after they took my leg, a second part of my life began. “I have to reach America. I have to get out of Iraq and start my life all over again.” Doesn't matter with one leg, with two legs.

Look, I love Iraq to death. I love America to death. If something happened here, I would stand up to help just as I did over there. But if I was born in America, I wouldn't have the feelings I have today.

My son sounds like a Turk when he speaks Arabic. It's funny! He is still too young to understand what happened to us. He sometimes doesn't even know that he's an Iraqi. Once, my neighbor asked him where he was born, and he said Jordan. I said, “No, you're not a Jordanian, you're Iraqi!” In school they asked him where Iraq is, and he said California. I asked him why he thought it was there, and he said, “Well, I heard all the Iraqis live there.” In the future, he'll learn
a few words of Arabic. But he'll maintain an American life more than an Iraqi life. Dina and I try a lot, but we can't change his life. I don't mind if he marries a white girl. We know Ali, though, he's gonna be a player for a long time! It's in the genes.

I don't make enough money to afford health care yet. I need a new leg, but you know how much they cost? Forty thousand dollars! I need a new silicone sleeve that helps connect my flesh to the leg, too. You're supposed to get a new one every six months, but they're eighteen hundred dollars, so I've just been wearing the same one for three years. It has some holes in it, and it's a little painful sometimes, but it's okay. These aren't real problems.

I'm not looking for great wealth. I just wanted to show that all Iraqis are not terrorists. Muslim people are not terrorists. Most people think the same way when you talk to them. I am a human being. I have the right to live on this earth. I have the right to work. I like to try to fix what is wrong.

But there are some issues that are out of our hands, because they're in the hands of people more powerful than we are. I'm just a little person, sitting in Roanoke, thinking about my future for me and my family.

A
s of the summer of 2013, Iraq remains a profoundly dangerous place for Iraqis who once worked for the United States of America. Those who remain do so in hiding, fearful of the lethal stigma of “traitor” that continues to hound them. Those who have made it to America also tend to keep a low profile, worried that their new lives here may endanger extended family back in Iraq. (Many Iraqis have received death threats for the simple reason that a family member has lived or studied in America.)

For this reason, many of the names of the Iraqis in this book have been changed. After months of interviews with the primary characters, whom I have known for many years, I gave each of them the opportunity to change his or her name to protect their security. Some were adamant about telling their stories under their true names. Others opted to use a different name, most often providing the names they used while working for the Americans in their previous lives (many were given Western names or nicknames by young soldiers and marines who struggled with Arabic pronunciation).

For a story that covers such lengths of time, I had to rely on nearly a decade's worth of emails, notebooks, and memos written during and immediately after key meetings and moments. (I often emerged from meetings with government officials and raced to a café in order to write down as many of the key comments and quotes as possible before they became muddled by memory.) Emails referenced within the book come either from my in-box or from the Iraqis themselves.

Where the dialogue is in quotation marks, it comes from the speaker, someone who was present when the remark was made, or from notes. Where dialogue is not in quotes, it is paraphrased due to a lack of certainty about the exact wording of the statement—but the nature of the comment remains unchanged.

Finally, I have changed the names but not the actions of low- and medium-level US government officials. Over eight years of sparring, I have come to realize that policies rest in the position, not in the individual holding that position. I did not want the reader to think that results would have been dramatically different if not for one particular midlevel bureaucrat sticking to the letter of his or her orders. For that reason, I have left unchanged the names of people at the top of the bureaucracies, for they surely could have done more.

“L
et's be perfectly cold-blooded about it,” President Nixon mused to Henry Kissinger, “because I look at the tide of history out there. . . . South Vietnam is probably never gonna survive anyway.”

It was August 1972, and Nixon was worried about how the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam after a dozen years of war would affect his reelection bid. As soon as US forces withdrew, he knew the North Vietnamese would surely “gobble up” their neighbors to the south. Kissinger concurred: “We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn.”

This formula became known as the Decent Interval: a long-enough period of time after withdrawal for America's war fatigue to give way to apathy and then amnesia. Twenty-eight months later, when Saigon fell, there was no chance that the American public would countenance military reengagement: indeed, congressional concerns over getting dragged back into the conflict even threatened efforts to address the spiraling refugee crisis.

Each war decomposes from memory in its own unique way, but it's hard these days to escape the cold shadow of the Decent Interval. Twenty-six months have passed since our last troops departed Iraq. In the nine months since the publication of
To Be a Friend Is Fatal
, the tide of Iraq's future has receded back into an ocean of violence. At the time of this writing, Mosul, Tal Afar, Fallujah, and other major cities have fallen to the Da'ash, an acronym for the
Dawla al-Islamiyya f'il Iraq wa Sham
, better known to Americans as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

ISIS was once just ISI, which was responsible for targeting many US-affiliated Iraqis. But as the civil war in Syria raged on (ejecting a staggering 6.5 million Syrians from their homes, the population-base equivalent of 80 million Americans), the group merged with Syrian fighters across the border, becoming ISIS. Charged with the delirious mission of restoring a Sunni caliphate, their coffers are estimated to hold over a billion dollars, the territory under their control is now the size of a small nation, and their forces are massing several dozen miles outside of Baghdad.

In some areas, they have joined forces with the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandiya Order, the Ba'athist militant group that issued a death threat to Omar's brother. Since the book's publication, the List Project and Mayer Brown successfully resettled Omar's widow and young son, but his brother's case was rejected by the State Department. Omar's widow, who cannot speak English well, has struggled in America. She teeters on the poverty line, and has been tempted to give up and return to the inferno.

Throughout the long withdrawal, the List Project implored the Obama administration to put contingency plans in place to protect our Iraqi allies. But this White House has always maintained a sterile detachment when it comes to Iraq: they had campaigned in 2008 on getting out, and planned to campaign in 2012 on the fact that they'd gotten out. It wasn't their war going in, and they weren't about to make it their war on the way out.

So they convinced themselves that Iraq was in better shape than it was and pulled out, seemingly secure in the knowledge that the American public wouldn't give them too hard a time if the country unraveled. Samantha Power cashed in her “rock star” humanitarian credentials for an ambassadorship to the United Nations. Her confirmation hearing was an embarrassing waltz away from the words that once drew so many of us close:

Senator Ron Johnson: You said a country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.

Samantha Power: Thank you, Senator . . . Let me start just by saying what I should have said perhaps at the beginning before, which is I have written probably two million words in my career, a million, two million; I've certainly lost track. There are things that I have written that I would write very differently today, and that is one of them. Particularly having served in the executive branch—

Senator Johnson: So your thinking has changed on that, then?

Ms. Power: My—again, serving in the executive branch is very different than sounding off from an academic perch. Yes.

Senator Johnson: Good. I appreciate your answers. Thank you.

Ms. Power: Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Ambassador Power.

Maybe if Hillary wins in 2016?
people ask me.

With an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis uprooted by the recent violence, the UN has upgraded the situation to a level-three disaster—its most severe designation. I fall asleep most nights to the sound of emails ringing into my inbox, with subject lines imploring “Please Help Me,” “Please help!!!!!!! Please help!!!!!!!!,” and “Need Support Please”—those from about a dozen families over the past twenty-four hours alone. There's next to nothing that can be done for them.

Of the ninety Iraqis with whom I worked during my time in Baghdad and Fallujah, eighty-five were forced to flee the country, three were assassinated as collaborators, and two remained to wrestle the fates. One of them is holed up in his apartment with his wife, his five-year-old daughter, and a Colt pistol, which will do little to protect them against ISIS militants.

The other, Jalal, fled to Turkey on Tuesday with his wife and three young daughters. He's lucky, in a way, as all flights out of Baghdad are now booked solid for another month, but his voice carried only defeat. “I've lost all the hope in everything. I left everything back there—my car, my house, everything. We have to run away for how long? One year? Two years? For how long? I'm thirty-seven. I have been in this drama for ten years. I'm fed up with everything. I need to raise my daughters. I need to secure their lives, secure their future.”

Many years ago, Jalal applied for a Special Immigrant Visa. “I sent them emails and emails and emails, but those people are really getting on my nerves.” Shortly after
To Be a Friend Is Fatal
was published, the US government shut down, and the program expired: all Jalal ever hears back is that his case is in “administrative processing.” After frenzied lobbying by the List Project and many others to renew the legislation, the White House agreed to an extension of the program, but only for 2,500 more Iraqis. That number, seemingly selected out of thin air, represented the bureaucratic coup de grâce: the preexisting backlog would claim the full 2,500 slots, leaving all those who weren't lucky enough to already be in the queue to fend for themselves.