To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  After Pearl Harbor, the prospects for Jewish refugees only worsened. In the conclusion of the McDonald diaries, the historian Richard Breitman remarked, “President Roosevelt moved away from humanitarian action. The war changed his views as to how much humanitarian spirit the United States could afford at a time of grave dangers abroad and perceived foreign dangers to national security. State Department officials, most of whom dragged their feet during earlier refugee initiatives, quickly found evidence and ways to reduce immigration. . . . The most restrictionist phase of American refugee policy—from mid-1941 to mid-1943—overlapped with the first two years of the Holocaust.”

  Tragedy on the Horizon

  The historical parallels were at once infuriating and empowering. After years of struggling with government officials, I had burned myself out of ideas. But in every war I researched, I found people who struggled on behalf of their own lists, against many of the same officials in the same bureaucracies. The people who held those positions were dead, but their titles and tactics lived on.

  All my reading of history would be worthless if it wasn’t used to fuel one final campaign for the Guam option, the remedy I had proposed to Samantha Power on the eve of Obama’s inauguration and in every meeting since. I recruited a brilliant group of students from Vanderbilt University’s Law School who had started a List Project chapter to help Iraqis who had been resettled in the Nashville area, and we began to draft a historical, legal, and policy assessment of how a departing power’s withdrawal affects those who collaborated with it. We examined how our allies had used airlifts to evacuate their Iraqis as they withdrew in the late 2000s, and how President Clinton had airlifted twenty thousand Kosovar Albanians to Fort Dix in 1999 and seven thousand imperiled Iraqis to Guam in 1996. We extracted the lessons of Vietnam, Laos, Algeria, and World War II, making it clear that unless the president took ownership of the issue, the bureaucracies would never take it upon themselves to act boldly.

  Since they had ignored my calls for a Guam option, I shifted my tactics: rather than politely asking the White House to preempt a predictable tragedy upon our withdrawal, I would get Congress to force it to begin contingency planning.

  * * *

  The idea of placing so much hope in a report seemed foolish to some of my friends, but I clung to the only strategy left in the quiver. While there was still time to improve the refugee resettlement process before the withdrawal, the situation was grim. Beyond the average wait of over a year for an initial interview, the Special Immigrant Visa created by the Kennedy legislation to resettle 5,000 interpreters each year was a shambles, granting visas to only about 150 Iraqis each month. Maddeningly, nearly 20,000 Iraqis were admitted through the traditional Refugee Admissions Program in Obama’s first year, but only 250 of them were from the list. Though they may have had legitimate persecution claims, the overwhelming majority of those who were granted visas had zero affiliations with the United States. And with a population of refugees in the millions, it was a given that only those in the most dire circumstances could be resettled to America. For every Iraqi on the list who made it in, though, there were fifty stuck in administrative purgatory. US government policy in the final phase of the war was Darwinian: survive your death threats for a year or two while you wait for an appointment for an interview, and we might consider granting you a visa.

  Shortly before we released the report, I came across a strategic document issued by the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization that included Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The ISI and its member organizations were responsible for the assassination of hundreds of interpreters and other Iraqis. They prescribed “nine bullets for the traitors and one for the crusaders.” The ISI closed with an exhortation: “This won’t be an easy mission; we’ll have to confront both social and security obstacles, but it is a worthy struggle . . . just because the goals are difficult doesn’t mean we should abandon them.” As I read the pragmatism and discipline undergirding the lethal ambitions of our enemy, I was embarrassed by the shabby excuses offered by my government for its own languid efforts to protect the Iraqis on the list.

  On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the List Project released Tragedy on the Horizon: A History of Just and Unjust Withdrawal. We urged Congress to instruct the executive branch to produce a contingency plan for a Guam option. We also pushed legislation requiring the first-ever government-run assessment of just how many Iraqis had worked for the United States, how many had applied for resettlement, and the status of those applications. For years, in hearing after hearing, nobody in the government had a sense of this basic number: with estimates ranging between 30,000 and 130,000, I knew that my list of several thousand names was far from exhaustive. I wanted the government to make its own list.

  The response to the report was immediate. Within a week of its publication, Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida and Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland invited me to speak at congressional hearings that they called to discuss how the Obama administration’s withdrawal would affect US-affiliated Iraqis. Hastings sponsored legislation requiring the executive branch agencies to produce a contingency plan and to determine the numbers of Iraqi allies at risk. While it didn’t order an evacuation, the preparation of such a plan would present the president with a tool to draw on in the event that a campaign of violence unfolded in the wake of our withdrawal.

  * * *

  My dad flew in from West Chicago to watch my testimony. Assistant Secretary of State Eric Schwartz entered the hearing room followed by a claque of staffers from the Refugees Bureau—among them the woman to whom I had given the very first copy of the list nearly four years earlier. After the secretary’s initial statements, Senator Cardin pressed him on the Guam option.

  Schwartz leaned toward his microphone and let loose the dam of USGspeak:

  You don’t have to remind me about the Guam program because I managed it at the National Security Council. . . . We take very seriously concerns expressed by many that there will be increased reprisals against Iraqis who have worked for us in Iraq. We currently have a range of robust resettlement and visa programs that benefit Iraqis, as you know. And I think we need to bolster them and strengthen them and increase contingent capacity in neighboring countries. We need to do all of that—think about ways that adapting these programs to changes in circumstances to enhance capacity to move people who are at imminent risk because our capacity to do that right now—we have capacity, but it’s limited.

  The assistant secretary closed with a classic yes/no flourish: “At the same time . . . so while we don’t anticipate the kind of problems to which you allude and we’re certainly—you know, our plans and our efforts are in the absolute opposite direction; reconciliation, reintegration, and normalcy—we do need to look at options for the kind of contingencies that your question addresses.”

  Put simply, the Obama administration did not foresee the kind of postwithdrawal bloodletting that I was predicting. Even though nearly every withdrawal throughout human history had been stained by reprisals, and even though at least a thousand Iraqi allies had already been assassinated, for some reason the White House thought things would be fine when we left.

  I testified alongside Craig Johnstone, the former foreign service officer whose struggle to evacuate his Vietnamese employees during the fall of Saigon in 1975 was rewarded by the State Department with a warrant for his arrest. He recounted the lesson of Vietnam: “We stepped up to it too late in Vietnam in many respects, but we did step up to it, and we need to be sure that we are ready this time . . . and that we leave the situation honorably.”

  I implored the Obama administration not to repeat the mistakes of the Bush White House in Iraq by basing its plans upon wishful, best-case scenarios. While “reconciliation, reintegration, and normalcy” were nice goals, the stigma borne by those who worked for us would probably last a generation. Why not plan to use some of the twenty thousand unused Special Immigrant Visa slots to bring them back with us?

 
; Alcee Hastings’s legislation cleared the House within weeks of the release of Tragedy on the Horizon but stalled for nearly six months in the Senate due to the fight over the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

  * * *

  In January 2011, the Hastings legislation cleared the Senate as part of a major defense funding bill. I was exhausted from watching the little shrub of hope sprout and wither each year, but I approached the last year of the war in Iraq with guarded optimism. The challenge of raising funds for a cause related to a forgotten war had forced me to lay off half my team and halve the salaries of those that remained, but I knew that the List Project had to continue until the bitter end.

  When Obama signed the bill, a 120-day deadline for the administration’s preparation of the Guam option was set into motion.

  22.

  Game Over

  And how can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?

  —Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

  In February 2011, I walked down the hallway of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration with another binder of five hundred names to give to Assistant Secretary of State Eric Schwartz. Ellen Sauerbrey beamed bright white teeth at me from the row of official portraits of previous bureau chiefs outside of Schwartz’s office.

  I had scored a legislative victory with the passage of the Hastings amendment, which required the Obama administration to make contingency plans in order to protect US-affiliated Iraqis throughout the withdrawal. The legislation had also instructed federal agencies to determine just how many Iraqis had worked for the government, how many had applied for refugee resettlement, and the status of their applications. On the basis of this information, the Obama administration was instructed by Congress to prepare a Guam option contingency to evacuate Iraqis as necessary.

  In conversations with Lale Mamaux and Marlene Kaufmann, unflagging aides to Representative Hastings and Senator Cardin, respectively, I had suggested ninety days as a deadline for the congressionally mandated report. In response, the administration had requested 120 days. I asked for a meeting with Assistant Secretary Schwartz to gauge its progress.

  “Kirk, you don’t need to be coming after me,” the secretary said as he leaned forward for a sip from a can of diet soda. “I’m on your side. And the people who can make the decisions you’re looking for are above me.”

  I looked around the room. The bureaucrats sitting off to one side of his office were unchanged from the Bush administration. I forced a smile in their direction, crossed my legs, and inadvertently bumped my boot into one of the coffee table legs, breaking it loose.

  “Whoops!” I said. “Your furniture is falling apart here.” I looked around his office, which had prison-cell-sized windows looking out onto another bureau’s bank of prison-cell windows. It didn’t seem as though they could be opened more than a couple inches, like suicide-proof windows in hotels. I continued.

  “Well, you can understand, Secretary—”

  “Eric. Just call me Eric.”

  “You can understand why I might be confused. You’re the only person in the entire federal government with the word refugee in his official title.” I paused. “Are you saying Samantha Power has the reins, or what?”

  “I’m not going to get into specific names, but what you’re looking for—the Guam option—that kind of thing wouldn’t originate out of this bureau.”

  I pulled a slip of paper from my backpack and handed it to the secretary. It contained only a few paragraphs: Section 1233 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2010, the Hastings Amendment. The NDAA was the vehicle through which our wars were funded, part of a screwy world of shadow budgeting in which the true costs of the war were kept from the annual books for the bulk of the war’s duration.

  “What am I looking at here, Kirk?”

  I spoke as though I were just refreshing his memory, unwilling to contemplate the possibility that he truly didn’t know. “That’s in the current Defense Authorization requiring you and other agencies to survey the current population of Iraqi employees and to produce a contingency plan.”

  “I’ve never seen this before.” He looked back up at me and asked, “This is the law of the land?”

  “Yes. It has been for about fifty days so far. The deadline is about two months away.”

  Schwartz turned to his row of backbenchers. They all had L-shaped erect postures. “Guys, did you know about this?”

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary,” someone replied. “We are in interagency talks about it.”

  Contented, he turned back to me and said, “Yeah, so interagency discussions are under way, Kirk,” and then set the paper on the broken table.

  I handed him the latest binder of names on the list. He passed it to a staffer, who thumbed through it and said, “Kirk, we can’t expedite five hundred names. Can you give us, say, the fifty most urgent cases in this binder?”

  Annoyed, I said that they were all urgent, but I agreed to send them an email within twenty-four hours highlighting the fifty most critical cases in the binder.

  * * *

  In May 2010, the deadline of the Hastings Amendment, the FBI announced the arrest of two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky in a sting operation in which the men apparently tried to purchase missiles to send back to Iraq to use against American forces. A confidential informant, reportedly another Iraqi refugee, tipped off authorities after one of the men bragged about planting bombs back in Iraq. When the FBI looked into their backgrounds, they discovered that these two men had carried out hundreds of attacks against US forces in Iraq, and that their fingerprints were linked to a phone that had been used to detonate an IED and was now stored at the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center in Quantico, Virginia. More than seventy thousand defused bombs from Iraq and Afghanistan were warehoused at the center, but analysts were six years behind in extracting intelligence from the IEDs.

  These men had come in through the traditional Refugee Admissions Program. They never claimed any affiliation with the United States but somehow made it through the process that so many of my former colleagues were struggling to navigate.

  Hearings were scheduled, during which freshman senator Rand Paul of Kentucky crowed, “There’s no reason to continue this policy” of granting visas to Iraqi refugees. To the assembled officials from the Departments of State and Homeland Security, Paul continued, “I don’t fault you for missing the needle in the haystack. . . . You’ve got to make the haystack smaller.”

  The response was as fierce as it was predictable. I’d lost track of the number of times over the years that the government announced “enhanced” screening measures for Iraqis, but there would be still more enhancement. The following month, the Iraqi refugee program sputtered to a near halt. The traditional Refugee Admissions Program, which had hit a monthly average of roughly 1,500 Iraqis, was back down to numbers not seen since the earliest days of the crisis: 111 in March, 184 in April. The Special Immigrant Visa program remained lifeless: each year, fewer than 20 percent of the 5,000 slots were filled. Iraqis on my list had all but given up.

  The Kentucky arrests pushed the debate all the way back to the John Bolton days, when people asked why Iraqis should even receive refuge in the first place. There was a self-defeating and maddening circularity to it all: even though the government had slowed the process of granting visas to a glacial pace over the years, it still screwed up by admitting two men who clearly should have been denied. Its own failure then justified further measures to slow the program. With roughly a half year left in the war, the time frame for receiving a visa had stretched to an average of eighteen months.

  The deadline for the Hastings Amendment was only a couple weeks away, but I knew from my meetings with Schwartz and sources inside Iraq that the Obama admini
stration had ignored it entirely. No needs assessment had been conducted, and no contingency plan had been drafted.

  I contacted Tim Arango, the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times. He wrote a front-page story about the disregarded Hastings Amendment, which included a dismissive quote from Secretary Schwartz: “We feel that we are prepared to deal with any variety of contingencies.”

  The negative publicity prompted an eleventh-hour report by the Pentagon, a juvenile effort consisting mostly of guesswork and useless charts that had been copied and pasted from other reports. “Preparation of this report cost the Department of Defense a total of approximately $5,001” was emblazoned across the cover page. In an angry op-ed for the Washington Post, I pointed out that by comparison, the Pentagon had spent $15 billion on air-conditioning the previous year.

  They had won. Everything I threw at the bureaucrats in the State Department—op-eds, lists, journalists, lawyers, politicians, history, hearings—it was all deflected by a wall of USGspeak. When I thought I had finally contrived a way to force them into action through legislation, they simply ignored it.

  * * *

  On November 4, 2011, I participated alongside other refugee organizations in my last National Security Council meeting with Samantha Power, although I didn’t know then that it would be my last. The tenor was quite different from earlier in the administration, when everyone had been so excited to meet her. The numbers were disastrously low, and refugee organizations were no longer impressed by her personal stature. At one point, a veteran refugee advocate asked Power why the United States even had a refugee program if the process was so tortuous and inefficient.