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Betrayed
World Conflicts Today
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, U.S. troops enlisted the interpreting services of many pro-American Iraqis. How do our attitudes toward the Iraq war shape our perceptions of what we owe Iraqis who once helped Americans and now, fearing for their safety, want to emigrate to the United States?
Betrayed -- that's the title of an article in a March 2007 edition of the New Yorker. Written by George Packer, it describes the dangers facing Iraqis who helped the Americans after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Targeted by Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaida elements, and other anti-occupation forces, many Iraqi interpreters have appealed to U.S. authorities to grant them sanctuary in the United States. Their appeals, Packer writes, have gone largely ignored.
In the middle of Packer's long article, he relates a revealing anecdote. Ali, an Iraqi interpreter, worked at an American base in Baghdad. Denied permission to stay on the base overnight, he was forced to return home in the dark. Since the base's massive floodlight was projecting his shadow hundreds of feet down the street, Ali asked U.S. soldiers to switch it off while he walked home. They told him not to worry because snipers were protecting him all the way home. Several days later, one of Ali's Iraqi friends thanked the snipers. "For what?" they said. When Ali's friend explained, the snipers laughed; they'd been doing no such thing.
Packer uses this episode as a stand-in for a larger betrayal that saw U.S. troops use pro-American Iraqis as interpreters then refuse to protect them when their own people turned on them.
"The message was clear," Packer writes, summing up the sniper story. "You Iraqis are on your own."
A masked Iraqi interpreter working with U.S. troops (Iraq, 2003)
© Getty Images, Inc.
U.S. officials express various justifications for not allowing all the Iraqi interpreters to immigrate. Some express straightforward national security concerns: the more Iraqis you give immigrant visas to, the greater the chance you let in a terrorist. Others imply it is strange to even consider evacuating Iraqis from their own country. And still others talk in terms of denying visas in order to ensure that the most skilled Iraqis stay in Iraq to help rebuild.
Activity
Read through the history sections of the Iraq report.
Then answer the following essential questions for critical thinking:
- Do you believe that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to provide immigrant visas to the Iraqi interpreters that worked with the U.S. military after the 2003 invasion?
- How might the specific case of the Iraqi interpreters be used to make a general argument for or against liberal immigration policies in the United States?
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