HISTORY REPEATING
This New York Times story tells a tale of an underground railroad of sorts being forged by our veterans to help Iraqis who've risked their lives to help us conduct operations in an intensely hostile Iraq:
"The risk taken by interpreters in Iraq is considerable and widely documented. Those who work for the Americans are often accused of being apostates and traitors. Their homes are bombed. Death threats are wrapped around blood-soaked bullets and left outside their homes. Their relatives are abducted and killed because of their work. And of the interpreters themselves, hundreds have been killed.
But many work in spite of the repercussions, and that dedication resonates clearly for many American soldiers and marines.
While there is no detailed tracking of the total number of Iraqis who have worked as interpreters, their advocates estimate that more than 20,000 people have filled such roles since 2003. In the last quarter of 2007 alone, 5,490 Iraqis were employed by the multinational force as interpreters, according to the Department of Defense."
The story goes onto to tell how difficult our agencies are making it for these folks to find refuge for themselves and their families:
"In its first year the visa program for interpreters was limited to only 50 spots. Since then it has expanded to 500 spots a year.
But the numbers tell only part of the difficulty. The program does little to minimize the visa bureaucracy. The process, complicated for anyone, is especially hard for interpreters.
They are considered refugees, and refugees cannot apply from their native countries, in this case Iraq. But Jordan and Syria have closed their borders to the flood of Iraqi refugees. Passports issued by the government of Saddam Hussein are not valid, often making it impossible to cross borders legally..."
"(there's)...a thicket of red tape. He was particularly frustrated by the requirement that interpreters produce a letter from a general on their behalf. This, he said, was like a junior associate at a Fortune 500 company asking the chief executive for a letter of recommendation."
Regardless of whether we leave or stay in Iraq, the issue of how we help those who've helped us, or not, is a big one.
It's an issue we face at the end of every war, the last time of course being a quarter of a century ago in Vietnam. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the movie and book "The Killing Fields", which was but one of many such stories from that conflict.
We're about to get a whole lot of stories that stage for a sequel to that story. And the issue needs to be front and center, not one that gets swept under the rug of a really unpopular war...again.
It's a little hard for me to call this an "underground railroad", referring to the transport of negroes out of the South. None of teh participants is risking their lives. It's more similar to acquiring of exit visas from Nazi occupied Morocco in WWII as depicted in the movie Casablanca.
The bigger picture is that it is a disgrace that both the US and UK have officially abandoned the people who offered to help after the invasion. At least both nations did not make promises that were later reneged as has happened in the past.
Posted by: Alex Tolley | Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 10:48 AM