In 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.
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 Updates.
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?”
We were in a spell of our own post-9/11 creation. When our government wanted to do something wrong, we accepted the exigencies of war and turned our backs on the moral choices of torture, extraordinary rendition, “black site” prisons, suspension of habeas corpus, unwarranted wiretapping, and unending drone warfare. We wanted there to be no constraints to do harm to other people if it might keep us safe. So the government swiftly cultivated a sophisticated ganglia of secret prisons throughout the world, contractors to assist in interrogations, a fleet of off-the-books airplanes to shuttle detainees to and from hostile countries.
But when we ask our government to do something right or just, we accept every possible constraint it summons as an excuse for inaction. We accept that it takes the same government years to put an Iraqi interpreter—whose retinal scans, fingerprints, and polygraph results are all within our records—on an airplane and fly him to safety.
“Your country put a man on the moon,” an exasperated Iraqi told me in Baghdad, an expired interpreter badge in hand, his daughter on his lap. “Why is it so difficult for America to give me a visa?”
What could I tell him? That it is the government that owns the language of security and that it doesn’t want anyone to meddle with it when it says it’s keeping us safe? That it owns the language of the counterfactual, which it uses to tell us what awful things might have happened if it had done things any differently? That it owns the language of prediction, which it employs to tell us what terrors might come if we poke or prod it to do too much? That I’d been shouting at it for years about our moral obligation to Iraqis like him, and all they ever murmured in reply was Tick, tick, tick, boom?
I was sick of the narrowness of thought in post-9/11 Washington. Even the best humanitarians among us who put on nice suits and walked into federal buildings seemed unable to change the government’s behavior.
There was really only one strategy left, and it was a real Hail Mary: if I could somehow reframe the debate by appealing to the lessons of history, arming leaders with the precedents established before everything changed on 9/11, the government might finally snap out of it and start acting with an urgency that the imminence of the withdrawal required.
After all, my list was not the first.