Presidents & Precedents
(Major resettlement initiatives from US history and by coalition allies in the current war)
While Americans should be proud that our country lets in more refugees each year than any other country in the world, there's a critical problem when it comes to moving swiftly to save the lives of refugees who are in immediate peril. Because of bureaucratic lag time, it takes the leadership of an American President to order the airlifts and other life-saving operations. Only an American President can save our Iraqi allies. It is the President who sets the annual determination (or quota) that decides how many refugees will be allowed into the United States and how those refugees' cases will be processed. Iraqis on the List are giving up in desperation on the resettlement process, having waited years in some cases despite repeated assurances from administration-appointed czars and taskforces. They will be forced by circumstances to return to death threats from which they fled.
Until the President involves himself, the bureaucracies will continue at their glacial pace, and our allies will continue to die. Contemporary and historical precedents for dramatic Presidential intervention in refugee crises abound.
Take a moment to learn about what we've been capable of in our past, and what our coalition allies are currently doing to help those Iraqis who have helped them.
Operation Pacific Haven (President Clinton - Iraq) 1996-97
In the final four months of 1996, the United States evacuated 6,493 Iraqis to the US territory of Guam in three airlifts. A majority of them were Kurds but there were others as well; all had worked with American agencies and their lives were under immediate threat from Saddam Hussein's forces. They were screened and their cases processed at military facilities on the island. Seven months later, nearly all of them were granted asylum and then moved to the United States. Major General John Dallager, the operation's commander, said at the time that 'Our success will undoubtedly be a role model for future humanitarian efforts.' Every person on The List could be transported to Guam in a handful of flights. (Photo, right: Airman 1st Class George Hildebrand administers immunization shots to a Kurdish woman in a temporary hospital tent at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, during Operation Pacific Haven. Source: Department of Defense website.)
Read more about Pacific Haven at The New Yorker, Slate.com, GlobalSecurity.org and the Department of Defense website here and here.
Task Force Open Arms/Operation Safe Haven (President Clinton - Kosovo) 1999
When Slobodan Milosevic renewed his ethnic cleansing offensive against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, 20,000 refugees were brought from neighboring Macedonia and Albania to the United States in a matter of months at a cost of $100 million US dollars.
Within a month and a half of the crisis' beginning, 4,000 refugees had already been airlifted. Though some of the refugees were processed in Macedonia, the vast majority were processed at Fort Dix in New Jersey. In the secured military environment, the refugees could be kept from the US general public until processing and screening were completed while still escaping the violence and refugee camps they had left behind.
Many of America's Iraqi allies are already familiar with American military bases - they've worked there before - making it all the more striking when the US rejects its own precedent of securely getting people out of harm's way before proceeding with proper processing. (Photo, left: a Kosovar child rests on the shoulders of Spc. Brian Tiehen. Source: DoD Website.)
Read more about Open Arms at The New York Times, GlobalSecurity.org and the Department of Defense website.
Operation Newlife (President Ford - Vietnam) 1975
Perhaps the clearest parallel to today's Iraqi refugee crisis is Vietnam in 1975. Two years after American military operations in Vietnam ended, the North Vietnamese took Saigon, forcing a wave of refugees who had either been tied to or part of the US-backed Saigon government. On orders from President Ford, 111,919 refugees were transited through Guam from April to September. 1,546 of them were eventually sent back to Vietnam for political reasons; the vast majority of the rest of them became United States citizens.
The scale of the operation is most striking: over 110,000 in five months. By contrast, the US has pledged to resettle 12,000 Iraqi allies in fiscal year 2008 (October 1- September 30) but so far has only mana-ged 1,876 and pledged 7,000 in FY 2007 only to come up with 1,608. Processing of Iraqis applying for translator visas has been completely halted as of the end of February, 2008.
Notably, many estimates of the number of Iraqis who have worked for American organizations in Iraq have also come in at 110,000.
Read more about Operation New Life at GlobalSecurity.org and the book Operation Newlife: The Untold Story.
Precedents set by coalition partners in the current conflict
America's coalition allies have already begun operations similar to those described above, airlifting their Iraqi allies out of harm's way and processing their asylum requests on friendlier shores.
In summer 2007, the Danish government announced that it had secretly transported its Iraqi allies and their families to Denmark. In February 2008, Britain announced that it would begin airlifting out Iraqi allies starting in April and would continue doing so until the fall.
With these precedents already set, could the United States be far behind? We hope not.