TO BE A FRIEND IS FATAL:
The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind
By Kirk W. Johnson
Scribner, 338 pages, $26
Almost a year after he came back from Iraq, Kirk Johnson got an e-mail from Yaghdan, an Iraqi colleague whom he had known in USAIDs Baghdad office. Like all the other Iraqis working for Americans, Yaghdan took elaborate precautions to keep his employment secret. But one day in the fall of 2006, a man from his neighborhood recognized him as he was leaving the fortified U.S. headquarters compound known as the Green Zone. The next morning, he found the severed head of a dog outside his door, with a note saying We will cut off your heads and throw them in the trash.
Yaghdan (Johnson doesnt use his last name) asked his USAID bosses to let him and his family move temporarily into the Green Zone or help him emigrate to the United States. Both requests were denied. Finally, in desperation, he sent his e-mail to Johnson. At first Johnson didnt even reply. He was unemployed, still in physical and emotional distress from a serious injury he had suffered after leaving Iraq, and had no idea how he could help anyway. But his conscience prodded him and finally, not knowing what else to do, he wrote an op-ed commentary for the Los Angeles Times, relating Yaghdans story and advocating a more liberal visa policy for Iraqis in such circumstances. Hours after the article appeared, Johnson began getting e-mails and calls from other Iraqis in similar situations the first of hundreds of such pleas he would receive while spending the next seven years trying to help those Iraqis, at first by himself and later through his organization, The List Project.
To Be a Friend Is Fatal tells the story of that struggle. It documents a moral disgrace that should have caused much more outrage than it has, because Yaghdans situation and the indifference of his U.S. superiors were not unusual but are the common experience of American-employed Iraqis. Threats are all but universal, and hundreds have been murdered. But in a war-on-terror climate in which all Muslims are seen as potential enemies, U.S. officials seem much more worried about possibly letting a terrorist slip through the refugee process than about any moral obligation to Iraqis who helped Americans. Johnson sums up the issue this way: nobody wanted his or her signature to be on the visa papers of the next 9/11 hijacker.
The law authorized 25,000 visas over a five-year span; in its first year, only 438 were granted, and over the full five years, only about one-fifth of the total were ever issued. A similar program for Afghans showed almost identical results.
With that fear overshadowing all other considerations, a bureaucrat has every motive to obstruct or delay a visa, and no reason for any urgency in granting one. The only way those incentives could be reversed would be a high-level commitment to give refuge to endangered Iraqis. As Johnsons account makes shamefully clear, that did not happen in either the Bush or the Obama presidencies.
The List Project was able to pry loose some visas, typically when its volunteer lawyers raised the prospect of legal action or when a particular case got media attention or was pushed by someone with political clout. But applications routinely met excruciating obstruction and delay, most often due to drawn-out, mindlessly repetitive security checks. That remained true even after Congress (mainly spurred by Senator Edward Kennedy, the only prominent political figure appearing in these pages who showed any real concern for the refugees) established the Special Immigrant Visa program specifically for Iraqis who were targeted by insurgent death squads because they worked for Americans. The law authorized 25,000 visas over a five-year span; in its first year, only 438 were granted, and over the full five years, only about one-fifth of the total were ever issued. A similar program for Afghans showed almost identical results.
There are two important insights from this book that I wish Johnson had pinpointed more explicitly and more forcefully: One is that the e