Veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus provides an update today on a small but important organization that is doing invaluable work to help Iraqis who have helped us. The List Project was begun in early 2007 by Kirk Johnson, who spent a year working in Iraq for the U.S. Agency for International Development and was appalled at the suffering of translators and other Iraqis who have risked their lives to work with American forces. Many of them, and their families, have been targeted for death by insurgents. And too often, as George Packer described in the New Yorker last year, the U.S. has seemed uncaring about their concerns. We have not done nearly enough to safeguard employees and their families within Iraq, and we have done even worse when it comes to helping them leave the country.

The State Department has erected elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms to make it almost impossible for them to get visas to come to the United States. As Pincus notes: “In the two years that an Iraqi visa program has been available for people who worked for the United States, only 763 of more than 7,000 Iraqis have been granted entry. When spouses and children are included, the number of Iraqis who had come to the United States under the program through the end of May is 1,696.”

Kirk Johnson has intervened and so far his List Project has helped to bring 31 Iraqis and 61 of their family members to the U.S. But he has a thousand more names on his list of Iraqis desperate to come here. (Readers can contribute to his important work via his website.)

Last week at the Council on Foreign Relations I hosted a roundtable discussion featuring Kirk; Owen West, a Marine reservist who has served two tours in Iraq; and “Alex,” an Iraqi translator who worked with Owen in Iraq and whom Owen has generously sponsored to relocate to the United States. Alex related a harrowing tale of how insurgents tortured and killed his brother because of his work for the Americans. Countless other translators and others have similar tales to tell, and many of them can only dream of coming to America. Indeed another one of Owen’s former translators, “Reyes,” remains trapped in bureaucratic purgatory.

It is a real blemish on our honor as a nation that we are not doing more to help these brave allies. It is not only immoral but stupid: How can we expect others to risk their lives to help us in the future if we don’t take care of those who have volunteered in the past? Some might object that making it too easy for Iraqi translators to leave the country will make it more difficult to accomplish our mission. But many have already left and are now stranded in countries such as Jordan and Syria. The surge is improving security conditions in Iraq, but locals on the American payroll still remain on too many insurgents’ death lists for them to have any confidence of a future in Iraq.

Helping Iraqis who have helped us should not be a partisan issue.  Senator Ted Kennedy, an opponent of the war, has sponsored legislation to increase the number of visas available and to expedite their processing in Baghdad. That’s a good start, but the prime imperative now is for President Bush to get off its keister and do more to help our allies. The administration’s foot-dragging in this regard is as inexplicable as it as counter-productive. We need some high level intervention to break through the bureaucratic logjam. If this requires personal attention from the commander-in-chief, so be it. We owe the Iraqis nothing less.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 3:31 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.