Red tape clogs way out for friends

By DOLPH HONICKER

Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.

The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.

They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .

Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.

The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”

Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?

But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.

Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.

For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.

Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.

“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“

Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.

“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”

As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”

Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”

Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.

Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.

L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.

As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?

Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.

It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can. With friends like us, who needs enemies

Pythian Press