In 2008, Congress passed legislation calling for 25,000 special immigrant visas (SIVs) to be issued over a five-year period - to Iraqis whose lives were endangered because they'd worked for U.S. soldiers or civilians. The law's criteria were so onerous that only about 3,600 have been issued; at least 1,500 are pending a decision.
What's worse, the numbers have slowed to a trickle just as we're departing. Only 10 SIVs were issued in August. The preliminary figure for September is 43. At that rate, it will be years before the backlog is cleared.
U.S. troops are leaving Iraq by the end of 2011. I've received dozens of e-mails from desperate Iraqi interpreters (some with glowing recommendations from senior U.S. military officers) who have all received death threats. Some have been told they must wait another eight months. Interpreters are getting kicked off U.S. bases where they've lived for safety's sake, because those bases are closing.
We know what's likely to happen. Iraqi militants have already denounced those "terps" as "traitors" who should get "nine bullets." When the British left Iraqi staff behind in 2006, 17 of their interpreters were publicly executed in Basra.
We promised to get our Iraqi staff out. To quote candidate Obama: "Keeping this moral obligation is a key part of how we turn the page in Iraq."
So let's cut to the chase, President Obama: Do you intend to honor your promise? Or will you betray the Iraqis who helped us? If you don't intervene, the SIV logjam won't budge.
That's because the SIV issue is caught in a bureaucratic thicket; nothing will move without White House intervention. The recent slowdown in SIVs stems from new security checks put in place after the arrest of two Iraqis in May in Kentucky for terrorist links. (These two rotten apples did not have SIVs.)
