Calling on the United States to Leave No Iraqi Ally Behind

Dick Cheney's pre-invasion fantasy of Iraqis rushing to the streets to greet their American "liberators" didn't exactly come to pass — and that's putting it kindly. Yet, in the aftermath of Baghdad's April 2003 fall, many thousands of Iraqis, glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein and hopeful about what the Americans might help them accomplish, turned up at American bases looking for work. For a military with so few fluent Arabic speakers, English-speaking Iraqis were in high demand and found jobs primarily as interpreters, but also as impromptu intelligence agents and cultural consiglieres. Other skilled Iraqis, like engineers or people with economic aid expertise, teamed up with U.S. and other civilians on various reconstruction projects.

Insurgent groups bent on undermining the American effort immediately set to work discrediting American-affiliated Iraqis, who they tarred as "traitors" or "collaborators." They targeted them with death threats, kidnapped and tortured many, and killed hundreds with knives, bullets, car bombs, and suicide bombers. The pace of the targeted-violence against these Iraqis picked up, and its gruesomeness and ferocity grew, following the 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque, widely-regarded as the turning-point event that greatly intensified sectarian violence, in turn displacing some five million people within Iraq's borders and forcing millions more into neighboring Syria and Jordan or even further from home.

As the United States proceeds with the withdrawal of some 50,000 combat troops from Iraq by the end of August 2010, The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, a non-profit that maintains a list of Iraqis who have worked with the U.S., is sounding the alarm. In a just-released report, The List Project warns that these Iraqis will continue to face extraordinary dangers once U.S. forces leave — only now, with a diminished U.S. presence, there will be no one helping to protect them from groups with scores to settle. The danger is real. Recently, the Islamic State of Iraq, which includes Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, promised "nine bullets for the traitors," i.e. those who've worked with the United States. The List Project is calling on the United States to live up to its moral obligation to these Iraqis by ensuring that they aren't thrown to the wolves, but are instead offered sanctuary far away from their waiting tormentors. But can the U.S. resettle so many Iraqi refugees so fast?

After the passage of the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act via a Defense Department authorization bill in the fall of 2007, the United States has annually resettled more and more Iraqi refugees, from a paltry 1,608 in 2007 to nearly 19,000 in 2009. Yet, even given that upwardly generous trajectory, only fractions of the Iraqis who deserve refuge have seen their applications approved. For instance, fewer than one third of the 5,000 special visas available per year for U.S.-affiliated Iraqis have been approved so far by the State Department. The established channels for resettlement are simply too narrow, the pace of processing too glacial, to avert a catastrophe.

The List Project offers a number of recommendations, but is championing what's known as "The Guam Option," a reference to the successful 1996 U.S.-run airlift of several thousand Iraqi refugees to the Pacific island of Guam. The advantage of a moving American-affiliated Iraqis to Guam is that it gets them out of harm's way and en route to resettlement. Since the Obama Administration has failed to put in place a plan, this may be the best option, even though it seems like the policy equivalent of patching up a broken pipe with some chewed gum.

Although not put forward as a recommendation by The List Project, if The Guam Option proves unworkable, it'd be worthwhile for the Obama Administration to consider enlisting a "coalition of the willing" to temporarily take in some Iraqis who will be endangered by the U.S. troop draw-down. Again, the priority must be in getting them to safety and making them more accessible to the officials in the U.S. Government who are working their cases. Some might argue that because these countries weren't in favor of the invasion of Iraq, they shouldn't have to pay any of its costs. I can empathize with that point of view, but the fact remains that the international community has a moral obligation to help every human being with a "well-founded fear of being persecuted." Showing fidelity to international law today, and engaging other countries in doing so, seems like a good way to repudiate prior instances when that law was cast aside.

In any case, the plight of all Iraqi refugees, American-affiliated or not, should serve as a powerful reminder of armed conflict's costs and consequences for ordinary, innocent people — especially, one would hope, to the "intellectual warriors" and their praise-singers in both major political parties who remain enthralled with the wrongheaded idea that the U.S. military is the indispensable, go-to instrument for advancing U.S. foreign policy goals and/or human rights abroad.

Photo credit: U.S. Army