Centerfield

Distrust in the Air

H.D.S. Greenaway wonders what will come of the Iraqis who put their eggs in our promise basket

I learned from George Packer of the New Yorker that a similar betrayal is forming out of the fog of war in Baghdad. Iraqis who threw their lot in with us, many of them interpreters, are being treated as if the United States had no responsibility for them.

Never really trusted by the Americans, despised even by Iraqi government officials and politicians who see them as American lackeys, and excommunicated from normal life outside the Green Zone for being collaborators, they risk instant death when they go home at night, and yet the Americans can find them no room to live in comparative safety inside the zone. Even when they reach other Arab countries they are denied visas and are chastised for "betraying Saddam."...

...Whether you believe that the war is already lost, or can yet be won, it is becoming clear that no matter what faction or factions come to dominate Iraq, Iraqis who worked for the Americans are not going to be regarded as heroes in their own land. If that were ever a possibility outside of Kurdish territory, it is so no longer.

Greenaway concludes by acknowledging that the sense of shame he still feels from similar circumstances in Vietnam has never left him. Let's pray that such history does not repeat itself.