George Packer tells stories of the Iraqi and Afghan allies we have betrayed:
Of the eight thousand seven hundred and fifty visas created for Afghan interpreters, just a thousand one hundred and fourteen have been issued. In the five years of the Iraqi S.I.V. program, eight thousand out of twenty-five thousand have gone through. So far this year, the number for Iraqis is down around three hundred sixty. As of September 30th, the Iraq program is scheduled to end, with thousands of visa slots unfilled. In July, the House passed a bill that would extend the program, with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 420-3, nothing short of miraculous in this Congress.
But the bill won’t come to the Senate floor until December, and, meanwhile, it stands to die in the House, where Republicans just passed a budget whose single priority is the defunding of Obamacare. Iraqis who attached their fates to the U.S. government in Iraq stand to be casualties of a U.S. government shutdown in Washington.
I asked Becca Heller, of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, why so few visas have been issued. “It’s not nefarious,” she said. “It’s just a total lack of political will.” Kirk Johnson, who founded The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, has just published a searing account of his years working on this issue, “To Be a Friend Is Fatal.” In it, he writes, “I have yet to meet an Iraqi interpreter who can’t rattle off the names of several slain colleagues. If George Bush or Barack Obama had been willing to exercise leadership, many of them would have been saved, but instead bureaucracies under each president’s control continue to regard these friends as potential enemies. They do this, they say, to protect us against terrorists, who hate us for our values.”
Recent Dish on visas for Iraqi allies here.
(Photo: A protester shouts during a protest of Afghan refugees against their deportation, in the Wetstraat – rue de la Loi in Brussels, on September 25, 2013. By Olivier Vin/AFP/Getty Images)
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