by George Packer
03/26/2007

The New Yorker

Click here to read the entire article.

Below is an excerpt from the New Yorker:

On a cold, wet night in January, I met two young Iraqi men in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, in central Baghdad…The two Iraqis, Othman and Laith, had asked to meet me at the Palestine because it was the only place left in Baghdad where they were willing to be seen with an American...From the hotel window, Othman could see the palace domes of the Green Zone directly across the Tigris River. "It's sad," he told me. "With all the hopes that we had, and all the dreams, I was totally against the word 'invasion.' Wherever I go, I was defending the Americans and strongly saying, 'America was here to make a change.' Now I have my doubts."

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One day in late 2004, Laith, who had never given up hope of working for the American Embassy, did well on an interview in the Green Zone and was called to undergo a polygraph. After he was hooked up to the machine, the questions began: Have you ever lied to your family? Do you know any insurgents? At some point, he thought too hard about his answer; when the test was over, the technician called in a security officer and shouted at Laith: "Do you think you can fuck with the United States? Who sent you here?" Laith was hustled out to the gate, where the technician promised to tell his employers at the National Endowment for Democracy to fire him…"That was the first time I hated the Americans," Laith said.

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In June, 2006, with kidnappings and sectarian killings out of control in Baghdad, the number of Iraqis working in the Embassy's public-affairs section dropped from nine to four; most of those who quit fled the country. The Americans began to replace them with Jordanians…In every way, Jordanians were easier to deal with. But they also knew nothing about Iraq…In the summer of 2006, Iraqis were fleeing the country at the rate of forty thousand per month. The educated middle class of Baghdad was decamping to Jordan and Syria, taking with them the skills and the more secular ideas necessary for rebuilding a destroyed society, leaving the city to the religious militias--eastern Baghdad was controlled by the poor and increasingly radical Shia, the western districts dominated by Sunni insurgents. House by house, the capital was being ethnically cleansed.

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Between October, 2005, and September, 2006, the United States admitted two hundred and two Iraqis as refugees, most of them from the years under Saddam. Last year, the Bush Administration increased the allotment to five hundred. By the end of 2006, there were almost two million Iraqis living as refugees outside their country--most of them in Syria and Jordan. American policy held that these Iraqis were not refugees, that they would go back to their country as soon as it was stabilized. The U.S. Embassies in Damascus and Amman continued to turn down almost all visa applications from Iraqis. So the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world remained hidden, receiving little attention other than in a few reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch and Refugees International.

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On February 14th, at a press conference at the State Department, members of the task force declared a new policy: the United States would fund eighteen million dollars of the U.N.H.C.R. appeal, and it would "plan to process expeditiously some seven thousand Iraqi refugee referrals," which meant that two or three thousand Iraqis might be admitted to the U.S. by the end of the fiscal year. Finally, the Administration would seek legislation to create a special immigrant visa for Iraqis who had worked for the U.S. Embassy.

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In Baghdad, among Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, it's impossible not to want to give the new strategy a try. The alternative, as Iraqis constantly point out, is a much greater catastrophe. "I'm still hoping Bush's new plan can do something," Othman told me. In the weeks after the surge was announced, there were anecdotal reports of Shia and Sunni families returning to their homes.

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