To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  My folks had readied the small cottage in the backyard that had played host to Jewish refugees from the Ukraine in the 1990s and my Palestinian friends just a few years earlier. My mom had printed out a Google map of mosques in the western suburbs, along with halal grocers and butchers. The night before Yaghdan arrived, my dad and I sat on the front porch, talking about the events of the past year. He rocked in his chair, wisps of pipe smoke overhead, and ribbed me: “I think you owe the State Department a whole lot of thanks, now that Yaghdan’s here, don’t you?” I knew he was joking, but I couldn’t constrain my annoyance at the idea of thanking the government.

  The morning of August 29, 2007, I drove from West Chicago to O’Hare International Airport to meet Yaghdan and Haifa. It had been nearly two years, and the only image of him I’d seen since I left was his smiling face in the picture I snapped of the USAID staff, several of whom were now dead. And there he was, twenty yards away and grinning as he walked past the luggage carousels, at least six inches taller than the twenty Iraqi refugees who had also made the flight with him out of Syria through Jordan, settling at last in Chicago. My grin was uncontrollable, as I held my arms up and opened hands in a “How did this happen?” state of delight.

  Yaghdan saw me and laughed. He advanced ahead of the group and gave me a strong hug.

  When I saw Haifa, I wanted to ignore Muslim convention and give her a hug but instead smiled and welcomed her. The exciting strangeness of the moment was amplified by the fact that although I had never met her, our lives had been wildly redirected by each other’s. Within an hour, they would be living in our house.

  Their arrival was made bittersweet when we learned that the airline had lost two of their three bags—two-thirds of their earthly possessions that Haifa had packed frantically while Yaghdan went to the USAID compound to ask for help the day of the death threat.

  As I drove them out to the suburbs, my mom and dad sat in the kitchen, practicing their welcome phrase, as-salaamu ‘alaikum. When we arrived, they were waiting in the driveway with their Arabic greeting and balloons.

  After a tour of their new home, my dad told Yaghdan that he wanted to take him on a tour of West Chicago. I sat in the back seat of the Buick as we sailed down Route 59 past the Taco Bell, where I had positioned imaginary tanks during the bleak winter of 2006. My dad pointed out the landmarks to Yaghdan, who laughed and said, “It’s amazing that everyone obeys the lines on the roads! Not in the Middle East . . .”

  I hadn’t prepared Yaghdan for how to win over my dad, but singing the virtues of American rule of law was a surefire bet.

  “Everyone here seems so peaceful,” he reflected, as we turned past the high school and junior high.

  “Yeah, you know, it’s true, Yaghdan. I think you’ll find we really are a peaceful country.” My dad tapped the dottle from his pipe into the ashtray as he spoke.

  From the backseat, I mustered a “Yep.”

  * * *

  When I flew back to West Chicago a few months later to celebrate the holidays, Yaghdan and Haifa were already full-fledged family members. He had taken to signing his emails to me as “the fourth Johnson brother” and was settling into suburban life surprisingly smoothly. He found a job in the intake center at the emergency room of the Good Samaritan Hospital, taking every possible shift. When the hospital gave him a Christmas ham, he politely accepted it and dropped off the pork at the Johnson clan’s kitchen.

  On December 29, my brothers and I poured a few glasses of whiskey and toasted the two-year anniversary of my survival in the Dominican Republic. It was hard to remember feeling so elated at any other point in my life. I had somehow managed to ride a flood of events that culminated in Yaghdan and Haifa’s arrival, and Senator Kennedy’s creation of twenty-five thousand visa slots for US-affiliated Iraqis, which would effectively solve the crisis, I believed. The glasses clinked and the new year came.

  19.

  George W. Bush

  Journalist Bob Woodward:

  How do you think history will judge your Iraq war?

  President George W. Bush:

  History. We won’t know. We’ll all be dead.

  As a flood spreads wider and wider

  the water becomes shallower and dirtier.

  The revolution evaporates,

  and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

  The chains of tormented mankind

  are made out of red tape.

  —Franz Kafka

  Every American high school student learns that Congress makes the laws and the president executes them. But it seems that the intent of Congress is often misinterpreted by the executive branch.

  I had my attorneys, but the Bush administration had its own, who skimmed through the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act and decided that it did not need to be implemented, at least not yet. Despite the use of the word crisis in the name of the act, the White House and State Department attorneys claimed that they were uncertain as to whether Congress had intended the legislation to be enforced immediately or at the start of the following fiscal year, which was a full six months away. Unless Congress amended the act, there would be no new Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) issued yet.

  Let it never be said that bureaucracies are unimaginative. All the MFAs in the country couldn’t outmatch the creativity demonstrated by the Departments of State and Homeland Security when instructed by Congress to do something they didn’t want to do. Wherever an opportunity to narrow the impact of the Kennedy legislation existed, the Bush administration’s lawyers seemed to find it. Beyond delaying the start date of the bill, the Department of State’s attorneys produced a consular interpretation that limited eligibility for the SIV. Hoping to cast a wide net of eligibility, the Kennedy legislation indicated that Iraqis who had worked directly for the US government (the State Department, USAID, and the military) or for a government contractor (Bechtel, KBR) could apply for the SIV. But when the List Project’s attorneys submitted the applications of scores of Iraqis who had worked for groups such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute, we were swiftly informed that they were ineligible because IRI and NDI were grantees. A grant from the US government differs from a contract in terms of reporting requirements, but no militia or member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq knew or cared about the subtle differences in federal funding mechanisms. Even Iraqis working for the US Institute of Peace, which is funded directly by Congress and is required by law to have the sitting Secretaries of State and Defense on its board, were deemed ineligible.

  And so the SIV program was euthanized in its infancy. Of the 5,000 slots allocated in the first year, only 438 visas were granted, an 8 percent success rate during a year of civil war, extrajudicial killings, and flight. Only a handful of those were granted to Iraqis on my list. Once jubilant, they soon saw the program as a myth—a lot of words with no truth behind them. They returned to submitting their applications through the traditional US Refugee Admissions Program, where they waited in line with tens of thousands of Iraqis who did not work for America.

  I was losing. I traveled frantically to raise awareness and find enough funding to avert the shuttering of the List Project, but my fatigue overwhelmed me one miserable evening a few weeks before the 2008 election. After eighteen straight days of talks and meetings on the road, I flew back to New York a few hours before a fund-raiser in midtown. In my opening remarks, where I thanked the various donors and law firms in attendance, my weary eyes skipped over the names of the donors who had provided the apartment I’d been living in. Before I’d even finished, they had stormed out of the event. I raced down to find them donning their coats in the lobby, and apologized for the mistake, asking them to come back up so I could correct it. One screamed, “You ingrate! I want you out of the building!” while the other called for a cab. I was mortified: it had been an error, not any deliberate snub, but I couldn’t get through to them.

  When I walked back to the building later that evening, the doorman informed me
that I had twenty-four hours to vacate the apartment. I sprinted to Hertz in my suit and rented an SUV, which my girlfriend and I packed up until three in the morning. I left an apology letter on the kitchen table.

  “I’m sorry I got us kicked out,” I said wearily to my teary-eyed girlfriend as the confused goldfish flitted around in a Ziploc bag on her lap, New York sliding out of view behind us as we drove north to Boston.

  * * *

  A child wailed in the next room. I reclined in the chair and stared up at the ceiling while my dentist wiggled her hands into rubber gloves. A large, dopey cartoon of Goofy grinned back down at me. I wasn’t sure why, but my insurance company had authorized only one dental provider, a kids clinic called Kool Smiles. Someone put goggles over my eyes before the dentist took a sander to my front teeth. I’d been grinding down my molars during sleep to such an extent that my front teeth were colliding, another unfortunate result of my mounting fatigue. The dentist decided to sand some length off the front to keep up with the loss in the back. “God, it’s nice to work in an adult mouth!” she said. “So much more room!” I blinked politely.

  Things were falling apart. The Kennedy momentum was dissipating rapidly. By the fall of 2008, the war in Iraq was a wisp in the exhaust hanging over the campaign trail. In the year and a half since President Bush knighted General Petraeus and his counterinsurgency campaign, the American casualty rate had dropped substantially, but Iraq was still in turmoil. To those willing to look beyond the cult of Petraeus-as-savior narrative, a core factor behind the drop in anti-US attacks was the Awakening movement. For the cost of roughly $370 million, the insurgency was “rented,” creating a period of quiet during 2008 and thus removing the war as an election year issue.

  The surge gave America psychological license to leave with the belief that it had somehow won. The White House negotiated a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with Nouri al-Maliki’s government, establishing a timeline for withdrawal—a concept that only a year earlier had been considered traitorous by the Republican Party.

  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.

  20.

  Barack H. Obama

  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

  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.