Kirk Johnson

Biography

Kirk Johnson arrived in Baghdad with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in January 2005, intent on helping the Iraqi people rebuild their country. In this interview, EPIC speaks with Kirk about his experience with USAID, working tirelessly in Baghdad and Fallujah in America’s attempt to rebuild war-torn Iraq. Kirk talks about the successes and failures of Iraq reconstruction and what must be done to renew confidence in U.S. rebuilding efforts among Iraqis and Americans alike.

Kirk Johnson, a writer and Arabist, has worked and researched throughout the Middle East. As a Fulbright Scholar from 2002 to 2003, Kirk analyzed political Islamic “pulp” writings in Egypt. In the fall of 2005, he was appointed USAID’s first regional coordinator for reconstruction in Fallujah, Iraq. Since returning from Iraq, Kirk has advocated for a safe-haven for his former Iraqi colleagues—now refugees—and others who suffered because of their affiliation with the U.S. government. He holds a B.A. with honors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

Interview

Conducted in June 2007

Download PDF version (part one and part two)

epic: Tell us about your family and background. How did you become interested in public service and the Middle East?

Kirk: My grandmother believed that the best form of education was travel. She had been to over 80 countries by the time she died, including Iran and Iraq in the 1950s. She wanted to take all her grandchildren somewhere in the world, so when I was 15 she took me to Egypt. I was just bowled over by the trip.

I also grew up surrounded by work for the public. My dad was in public service his whole life. He was elected to the Illinois State Legislature as a Republican and served as a Congressman for about 12 years.

My mom was a policy advisor for the attorney general of Illinois. People would come to our house with their problems, and I remember my dad pulling out his notepad, taking notes while he listened to his constituents. I would end up seeing the whole process. It was quite an introduction to the way things work in America.

epic: Did the trip to Egypt introduce you to the Arab world and encourage you to study Arabic?

Kirk: Yes. A year after I came back, when I was 16, I took a course in Arabic at the local community college and over the next year I drove into Chicago twice a week to study Arabic with a tutor at the Egyptian Consul. It all kind of snowballed from there. In 1998, when I was 17, I skipped my high school graduation to attend a summer session at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo before I started at Georgetown that fall.

I attended Georgetown for a year, but I didn’t feel stimulated. I transferred to the University of Chicago, and it was a perfect match. Around the summer of 2001, I got a grant to study Arabic in Syria, and in my senior year of college I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study Islamic pulp writings in Egypt. Pulp writings are books produced en masse, on the cheap. You can buy them for a nickel all throughout the region and, though they’re considered among the most widely read books in the Middle East, no one had analyzed their content.

The war in Iraq started when I was in Egypt and, although I’m not like some who claimed they knew that this was going to happen, I was really opposed to the war. Around February 15th, three weeks before we invaded, I covered a Muslim Brotherhood rally for the New York Times. It was incredible to see and hear a million people chanting “Down with America!” In the way we went into the war, somehow we managed to lose the public relations battle against Saddam. There was clearly something wrong with our entry into Iraq if we couldn’t convince like-minded people in the West, throughout the world and in the Middle East that it was a just cause.

At the time, I was reading articles about the short supply of Arabic speakers, and, since I had the skill set, I felt a sense of responsibility, even though I didn’t support the war. This is my country. I thought I could pitch in on the reconstruction in whatever way possible. USAID hired me through International Resources Group, who had the main contract for staff positions in USAID Baghdad. They called me on November 15, 2004 and by December 1st they had sent me the contract. By December 4th, I was going to D.C. for the Diplomatic Security Anti-terrorism Course, which you have to take before you go over.

epic: What was happening in Iraq and the U.S. when you arrived in Baghdad for your tour of duty with USAID?

Kirk: When I got to Iraq, I was right in the thick of things. The November 2004 U.S. elections had just been held, reelecting President Bush for a second term, and within days the Marines pummeled Fallujah. I arrived in Baghdad to find the Iraqi people cheering us on, excited about their upcoming national and provincial elections on January 30th. The Green Zone was teeming with journalists and congressional delegations.

At that point, most people believed that Iraq’s elections would turn out as planned, consolidating people along nationalist lines. No one foresaw how the elections would help speed up the sectarian divide in Iraq. For the most part, there was still hope that the U.S. would be able to successfully finish its work.

epic: As a USAID employee, what were your areas of responsibility?

Kirk: During my first position as an information officer, I responded to requests for information from USAID Washington and from offices inside Iraq. That meant befriending a lot of people to get needed information as quickly as possible. I didn’t have any authority then, and for a long stretch I was the youngest person in the mission, which impacted my job significantly.

Part of my job meant mastering knowledge of USAID’s $5.2 billion portfolio, and that was a pretty large undertaking. I also ran the public affairs office for several months, identifying news stories and talking to journalists.

Since I had started studying USAID and tracking the war from the U.S. before I left, I thought I’d be able to dive right in when I arrived in Iraq. But once I got there, I was shocked at how little I really knew about the country and what was happening on the ground. Professionally, my job left me feeling under-stimulated and under-challenged. I’m not even sure anyone at the mission in Baghdad knew I spoke Arabic when I first arrived.

epic: What surprised you most once you were in Baghdad working with USAID?

Kirk: For one thing, there was no way to prepare for the snake fights between USAID and the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO), the overseeing agent of Iraq reconstruction.

In terms of ranking authority in Iraq, IRMO technically manages USAID and its work. But since USAID is doing development projects, I found the mission directors were very indignant about needing approval from somebody who didn’t have development experience. That created a lot of tension in our corner of the Green Zone.

In my opinion, USAID wanted to be at the table in Iraq to such an extent that it grasped at almost anything it could get. It took on the types of projects it hasn’t managed in decades, like restoring huge power plants. This was to its detriment.

epic: Who was in the Green Zone with you? Did USAID employ any Iraqis?

Kirk: There were around 50 or 60 Americans and a few dozen Third Country Nationals (TCNs) from aid missions throughout the world that helped run USAID Baghdad. In total, there were between 100 and 120 personnel when the office was fully staffed.

Living in the Green Zone were 10,000 Iraqis who moved in during the “Shock and Awe” operation in 2003. They remain there today, though they’re not employed by USAID or the U.S. government.

Those Iraqis who are employed by USAID don’t stay in the Green Zone at night, except for a handful of maintenance men. Most have to go home in the Red Zone at the end of every workday. These people take a huge risk in working with Americans.

epic: What was your impression of the quality of journalism in Iraq?

Kirk: Television was, in my opinion, fairly worthless at covering reconstruction; there were just too many complexities, and T.V. journalists could not adequately cover them in their short time on the air.

But some dedicated journalists were there, including the Los Angeles Times’ T. Christian Miller and the New York Times’ Jim Glanz and Dexter Filkins. These men understood the intricacies and minutiae of Iraq reconstruction and were able to cover it well in their reporting.

For example, Miller covered reconstruction contracts in Iraq. It probably wasn’t a beat that sounded terribly interesting at first, but it led him to discover with precision how money was wasted in Iraq and how priorities were misidentified in the early days of the reconstruction.

It’s true that there are many unreported or under-reported success stories in Iraq. However, this is not entirely the fault of the journalists working on the ground. In my experience, the U.S. government was its own worst enemy in terms of getting success stories out because it doesn’t want exposure on projects unless they are absolutely pristine.

Because I worked in public affairs, I worked my tail off to publicize successful projects. But my efforts were usually quashed because, as I learned, we were operating under a sort of “zero exposure” policy, which effectively curtailed our ability to speak frankly about the challenges of intra-war reconstruction.

Part of it was because of poor security conditions, and that was a legitimate concern. For example, in 2004, after successfully completing a telecommunications project, we held a public ribbon-cutting ceremony to commemorate its completion. Within a month, it was blown up. Then, at the Kerkh water plant in Baghdad, an IED blew up under the plant manager’s trailer and several workers were assassinated and dumped at the entryway.

These events had a pretty significant impact on the United States’ position on putting an American face on any reconstruction project. And I agree with considering the potentially lethal consequences of exposure, but if we can’t claim credit for the work that we’re doing, then it raises an existential question about the purpose of that aid and creates challenges at home in cultivating support for projects on the ground.

epic: Considering the security challenges, you have two ways to operate in the field: Either blending in, which can only be achieved with Iraqi nationals, or embedding with the military. Do you see any other options?

Kirk: Though it has its own challenges, blending in has been the most effective way to operate. But, as I learned, it doesn’t work well for major infrastructure projects because many of the highly-trained Iraqi engineers, who are needed to manage these projects, are either in jail or left the country. Though we would have liked to use teams of experts that knew the equipment and proper procedures, they weren’t around, so we had to rely on Iraqis who didn’t really know how to handle these things – and oftentimes weren’t able to accomplish much of anything.

Still, USAID had to spend its money – roughly $5.2 billion countrywide and $50 million for Anbar – and it had to get projects on the books. One way was through so-called “make work programs,” which were supposed to help generate employment and, thus, mitigate conflict. According to the records for projects in Fallujah, USAID hired thousands of Fallujans from neighborhoods throughout the city to clear rubble from the streets. It was intended to give them a choice between the financial incentives of participating in the insurgency - since there’s a lot of pay for laying IEDs or sniping at our guys - and getting paid for hard labor.

I transferred to Fallujah in 2005 and, though the projects had been supposedly up and running for months, I couldn’t find anyone actually clearing the rubble. When I started asking questions, I found out there was no collection point, so there was no way to ensure that the piles weren’t just being moved from one corner to the next. There were no controls to make sure that Fallujans were being hired and that others from outside the city weren’t just being trucked in. There was nothing to guarantee that the subcontractor actually hired people and not just backhoes to do the job more quickly and with less people.

These ‘mitigating conflict’ programs were chimerical, at least in Fallujah. My questioning soon brought strong pushback from folks in Baghdad, who didn’t like that I was second-guessing their programs.

epic: Why did you transfer to Fallujah?

Kirk: When I had arrived in Iraq in January 2005, I was intent on helping the Iraqis rebuild their country, and I was excited to put my Arabic skills and knowledge of the Middle East to good use.

But seven months into it, I felt like I was just pushing papers. My job wasn’t stimulating or challenging. And I couldn’t stand being in the Green Zone, where I rarely spoke Arabic and found it hard to tell whether or not I was actually in the Middle East. I felt insulated, but not in a good way, like I was being cut off from my driving reason for being there in the first place.

In August, I told the mission director that my job was driving me nuts, and I asked to be transferred. She said, “How would you like to go to Fallujah?” And that was that.

There was a big piece on Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the March 2007 issue of the Foreign Service Journal entitled, “Iraq PRTs: Pins on a Map.” It essentially said that the State Department will send people out to form a PRT without proper training or enough manpower to fully staff it. But, again, it allows them to put it on the books.

In my cynical days, I sometimes think that one of the main reasons I was sent to Fallujah was so that the mission director could say she had someone there.

While in Fallujah, I worked on a proposal to shift the “conflict mitigation” program from rubble removal to one for clearing irrigation canals. The city is situated on the Euphrates, giving local farmers acres and acres of lush farmland for growing crops. But the land was not being used because the people were dependent on a government-funded ration system that distributed free food. The program was costly for the Iraqi government and deprived local farmers of the incentive to grow crops and raise animals because there was no demand for their food. The farmland was basically going to waste, overgrown and poorly maintained.

Because of this, the irrigation canals used for watering crops were not usable and there was hyper-salination. I figured, since the rubble-clearing program was not appearing to be successful, we should shift the funds to a work program that employs Iraqis to clear out the canals and get them up and running. That would lead to an improved water flow and would help jump-start local agriculture.

I started to get some support in Baghdad, but there was still a great amount of pressure to spend money rapidly, not sensibly. For a long time, to simply get the money spent, USAID funded almost every program it found whether or not it was actually working. That’s why it was difficult to coax USAID away from rubble-removal to take on canal clearing.

My last day in Fallujah, I was poring over an old map of the irrigation infrastructure with some representatives from the local farmers’ union, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Fallujah Reconstruction Committee. The meeting was several hours long, but it was very constructive. I was optimistic and feverishly typing a report on the meeting that would be used to solidify support for this program in Baghdad. Then, I left for what was supposed to be a short break in the Dominican Republic.

epic: Tell us about what happened in the Dominican Republic.

Kirk: Although it’s an important part of my own story, I’d rather let an essay I wrote about the accident for the Washington Post Magazine speak (see excerpt). Suffice it to say that I sleepwalked out a two-story window and landed on my face.

Excerpt from “After the Fall” by Kirk W. Johnson, Washington Post Magazine, 1/28/07

Though I should have been exhausted from the days of travel from Fallujah to the Dominican Republic, my mind was surging. I stayed up late the first night, talking more to myself than to my relatives. When I finally made it to bed, I lay there, staring at the ceiling and waiting for sleep.

...That night, I folded my jeans, placed my watch on the nightstand and crawled under the sheets. This is my last memory of that night, which I now replay as one does the moments in which a car accident might have been avoided.

Primitivo, the Haitian night guard at the hotel, later told my family what he saw. At 4:30 in the morning, he noticed me perched on the windowsill, staring off in the direction of the unfinished apartment complex. “Peligroso!” he warned, pointing a flashlight at me. Dangerous! I yelled back something he didn’t understand. Rebuffed, he continued along his night watch until he heard a crashing thud. “Se cayo!” he shouted. He fell! He raced back to find me kneeling in a pool of my blood.

…I still couldn’t explain why the accident had happened, or even how. My dad, a Vietnam vet, still insisted that I had been attacked or robbed, unwilling, I think, to accept the idea of any sort of mental failure. Friends overseas told me that Marines and diplomats I barely knew were gossiping about me -- a two-star general was overheard declaring that I had been drunk, that I was trying to get out of coming back. When people suggested, gingerly, that I might have been suffering from PTSD, I rejected it out of hand. I hadn’t worn a uniform and didn’t believe I had the right to group my injury with those who did...

I decided to accept that explanation as the most likely, despite its obvious frustrations: The most important decision I’d ever made in my life happened that night on the windowsill, and I wasn’t around to make it.

The reconstructive surgery and my rehabilitation took many months. The doctors think I experienced a stress-induced fugue state. I later learned that my accident was related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). If the dangers and stress I experienced in Fallujah can have such an affect, one can imagine the impact on combat vets -- especially those on their third or fourth tour who have lost comrades.

The canal-clearing initiative was the first tangible point at which I felt like I might be able to make a tiny impact there, beyond just the pointless Baghdad work. But it foundered in my absence. It still drives me nuts, and it was one of the most painful things about not being able to return to Iraq.

epic: What criticisms and recommendations do you have for reconstruction in Iraq?

Kirk: One of the biggest problems I see is troop rotations and civilian staff turnover because they prevent the military and other institutions from retaining on-the-ground lessons being learned in Iraq. Instead, individuals are bringing the lessons home with them, so every new person has to reinvent the wheel.

Poor coordination and communication between institutions is also a problem. For example, the military likes to build schools in an attempt to win hearts and minds, but it doesn’t coordinate with USAID, which could fill the schools with equipment, or the Ministry of Education, which would offer guidance on placement within the city.

As a result, schools get built in illogical places, and then they go dormant because the local communities already have schools – they just need a bit of refurbishing. With the new schools left dormant, insurgents then move in and turn them into bases, shooting at us from behind the walls we built. In response, our soldiers blow them up. It’s a cycle that, apparently, has been seen all over the country.

epic: Congress recently gave the President over $100 million for PRTs. Do you think it’s enough?

Kirk: I was in Iraq when the PRT concept first started getting kicked around. It seemed like a still-born, not just to me but to a lot of folks over there.

$150 million for a year? Divided across a couple dozen PRTs? We’re spending $14 million an hour on military upkeep in Iraq. That’s a huge discrepancy in funding priorities, and if you don’t think success in Iraq can be achieved by military means alone, then the discrepancy should give you pause.

There’s also been nothing to fundamentally resolve the institutional disdain between the civilian agencies, and $150 million is not going to help. If $150 million is everything the PRTs have to bring to the table, the military is not going to pay a bit of attention to them. The military says that State and USAID have not been fully invested in rebuilding Iraq, so the PRTs are part of the response to that, pulling the Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) out of the Green Zone. The FSOs who are actually over there risking their lives deserve high praise, but I feel that they’re risking their lives to implement an under-funded, reactive strategy.

epic: The U.S. government is going to impose benchmarks on Iraq’s government. What is your opinion on this?

Kirk: The U.S. government’s favorite explanation of reconstruction failures has always been that it underestimated the state of disrepair of Iraq’s infrastructure. This is true, in part. But an excuse that points to our own ignorance is not a particularly attractive one.

Yes, there’s a lot that the Iraqis need to start stepping up on, but it’s a myth to think that Iraq’s government has fully functioning ministries that can transfer funds to the provinces and count on their employees to implement projects. The capacity is not there.

We’re building and rehabilitating public service plants, restoring them to 100% capacity for the first time in decades. But when we pass them over to untrained Iraqis, we’re surprised that within months they’re run into the ground. We’re also bringing with us Cadillac equipment: for example, obscenely expensive generators that Iraqis don’t know how to use.

Since they don’t even have the capacity to move the funds, how can we expect them to have a strategic framework for spending it? Iraq’s government has a massive surplus in oil revenues, and it can’t even spend what it has. The banking system is still horribly anemic and the ministries are being cannibalized.

Not only that, the Iraqi government is not earning the confidence of its people by providing needed services, as governments do elsewhere in the world. Right now in Iraq, power is earned through militias. Iraq’s government ministers are being played by a handful of powerful people who are moving them around like chess pieces.

epic: Do you think Americans are giving up on Iraq reconstruction? And if so, do you think we should?

Kirk: I think we’re giving up on it, and I think the government’s giving up on it. It’s not impossible to do development and reconstruction work in Iraq. As I said before, there are pockets of success. But it is impossible to do it if you don’t fund the successful projects and continue to repeat the failed ones.

I don’t really see how anyone in Washington or the Bush administration could think that after spending $30 billion on reconstruction work, $1 billion more is going make all the difference. Throwing money at the reconstruction plan without resolving its fundamental flaws will not change anything. There will still be the same catfights between USAID and IRMO and the same turf wars between the military and civilian presence.

If we were to do this right – and, unfortunately, I’m not sure if we have this option anymore – our president would need to have a frank conversation with the country, saying “This is going to take several more years. We’ve really studied the reconstruction to figure out why it went wrong. We’ve adapted. And now we’re going to recommit, from everybody’s estimate, from the World Bank estimate, another $60 billion. And to do that we’re also going to ramp up the military presence well above surge levels so we can clear and hold it so that USAID and others can build it.”

But that will never happen. The public won’t accept it anymore. And I don’t think this administration has the credibility to make those statements.

What I don’t agree with is that we create a shell, or some un-funded semblance of a reconstruction program, where marines and soldiers are risking their lives to protect civilians who aren’t bringing any real bank with them and who aren’t bringing any real coordinated strategy, all the while raising the expectations of the Iraqis and their government. I don’t think we have the capacity to do it full-force anymore.

epic: What led you to become an advocate for Iraqis threatened because of their affiliation with the U.S.?

Kirk: One day in the middle of November, I got news of an Iraqi colleague at USAID, a friend of mine named Yaghdan, who had received a death threat. I had met Yaghdan on my second day in the compound. He was one of the most mild-mannered and friendliest guys I’d ever met.

Yaghdan grew up around Karbala, where his father still lives. He and his wife are about 30 years old. I believe he has one brother and an extended family, but no children.

Initially, he worked in the children’s office on primary and secondary education. He has a BA in liberal arts, and his English was top-notch, so USAID was able to work well with him. In terms of the actual development work, he was one of the few Iraqis given authority to talk to the implementing partners.

In October 2006, Yaghdan received a death threat, along with the decapitated head of a dog on his doorstep. The lethality of his threat was mobile; he brought it with him wherever he went. It wasn’t as simple as changing neighborhoods. He was very concerned about transferring it to his friends and family, so unless he could stay in the Green Zone, he had to leave the country. USAID gave him something like two months of administrative leave, but the severity of the threat was such that it wouldn’t just blow over. Yaghdan and his wife fled to the United Arab Emirates and then to Syria, where he currently lives.

He likens Syria to pre-war Iraq, in that it’s a police state with government minders and secret police. And, because he is Iraqi, he is discriminated against. As a result, he is unable to get a job. It’s the same story in almost every case I am working on: visas, money and resources expiring and unemployment.

epic: When Yaghdan worked with USAID, did he have to come into Green Zone every day?

Kirk: Yes. It was very dangerous.

I remember Yaghdan once coming in to the compound at five in the morning just to sleep in his air conditioned office because it was so hot. Baghdad was peaking that summer at 138 degrees and there was power only about five hours a day. While Americans were getting cold because there were so many air conditioners running inside the compound, Iraqis had to develop other coping mechanisms, many of them illegal or dangerous. I remember hearing about street sweeping missions at night to gather the bodies of electrocuted Iraqis who had died trying to connect illegally to neighborhood grids. There were a lot of desperate acts.

These people were having a hard enough time outside the Green Zone, but the extra level of difficulty they took on by working for us was incredible. They would try to disguise themselves and hide their identities. They would try to enter and exit the Zone through different checkpoints. They would break their patterns. They would never get a taxi from the Green Zone to their home. They couldn’t tell their friends who they were working for. It was a secret life.

For many, the gig was up the moment they were identified. I have copies of a lot of the death threats. Yaghdan’s is hanging on my wall. Most of them say, “You’ve got three days to clear out of Baghdad.”

There have been two USAID direct-hires who have been identified and killed, and those killings sent shock waves through the Iraqi staff. They have called me to ask what would be done in the event that they received a threat. USAID is now starting to let some critically-threatened Iraqis stay inside the compound, but that’s really not an ideal solution for anybody. It puts the Iraqis closer to the source, the reason for the threat on their lives.

There seems to be this reticence about being proactive to help the Iraqis. They say, “You know what you’re getting into by working here.” We give these Iraqis salaries of between $10,000 and $12,000, and we assume that covers the price of a clean conscience if they get killed.

epic: What did you do when you heard about the death threats against your friend Yaghdan?

Kirk: The news came through the grapevine and, honestly, although it stuck with me, it didn’t mobilize me immediately. A few weeks later, one of Yaghdan’s supervisors from USAID sent an email saying, “If you want to contribute money, I think we should try to wire it.” I remember thinking, “Shoot, I wish I had more cash.” I had been living off of my savings for the whole year; I couldn’t work right away because of my injuries.

But that email set my mind racing: I began writing down everything I thought I could do to help him, trying to convince the State Department to open up an embassy for him.

At the beginning I didn’t know anything about refugee resettlement or asylum. I just knew this guy, a friend, needed my help. It hit me so hard that I couldn’t even go to sleep the first night the email came in asking for cash. It was so inauspicious in its origins. It was something as simple as a suggestion.

epic: What have you learned about the asylum and resettlement process in the U.S.?

Kirk: The way we like to resettle Iraqi refugees is to have clearly defined groups living in tent communities that are fairly stable. The U.S. doesn’t do quick resettlement; they provide a slow service, which brings refugees to the United States over several years. They fund groups like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Rescue Committee and others to refer cases to them.

After an op-ed I wrote appeared in the Los Angeles Times in mid-December, I began receiving three or four emails from Iraqi colleagues each day. I also heard from scores of Iraqis who I didn’t work with, but who might have worked with the U.S. military or the State Department. Then it ballooned out from there.

Early in January, I was quoted in a front page New York Times story about the shockingly low number of Iraqis gaining sanctuary in the U.S. I only mention it because the article was passed around in the refugee community, and I think these people recognized me as someone sympathetic to their plight.

I started keeping a list of my former Iraqi colleagues who contacted me, and began calling up folks like Refugees International and Human Rights Watch to see how they might help. But I found out that none of them take on individual cases. I assumed there must be some sort of existing framework to rapidly advocate on behalf of these people and get help.

I asked officials at the State Department if they would have a meeting with me, and they agreed. I think they had already heard of the list I was compiling, so I came down and dropped off the first list, which consisted of just 40 colleagues minus their families. I identified them as refugees: direct hires of USAID who had fled Iraq. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for them to say yes.

After about a week, they wrote to me saying they would forward the list to the UNHCR for priority processing. I thought this was a positive step. They announced a task force on February 14th, the day before my meeting with them.

After they launched the task force, they held their first public press conference, saying they would fund 30 percent of UNHCR’s request. They said they were aiming to bring in 7,000 Iraqis over the next year. Since after 9/11 we basically froze our resettlement program, a lot of these are old cases that have been sitting in the pipeline for years. But I’ve never been calling for any generic increase in number; I’ve been calling for targeted assistance and resettlement for those who worked for us and are now running from the militias.

epic: How has the public responded to your work and this issue?

Kirk: Never at any point in this war have I sensed such a strong connection to this issue on the part of average Americans. People are writing to me from all over the country, from every state, telling me that they’re so ashamed of this, that they’re ready to do whatever they can with whatever free time or money they have to make sure that we help those who helped us. It’s very heartening.

Despite the last 5 years of being told that Iraqis are terrorists, I think people understand that this is a particular group we don’t have to worry about. It’s unfortunate that Congress and the folks in government don’t seem to have the same certainty. I think the Bush administration believes that if they don’t talk about it or turn the volume up on other issues, then it’s going to go away.

50,000 Iraqis are fleeing -- not leaving voluntarily -- every month. We are ignoring this at our own serious risk, not just in terms of the moral credibility we’re losing, but strategically. When we talk about stability in the Middle East and the potential spillover, this is how it happens. I don’t like the expression that refugees are carriers of conflict, but there’s already anti-Shi’a and anti-Iraqi backlash in Syria and Jordan, and by many accounts, Egypt. You’ve got a whole mass of millions of frustrated, traumatized human beings who can’t work and are constantly terrified that they’re going to have to go back to Iraq. That’s not something anyone in government can be ignoring right now.

epic: How has Washington responded?

Kirk: Politicians are afraid to touch any issue of Iraq’s failure in a constructive way, but addressing this problem requires a constructive frame of mind. This is the first time that Iraqis are front and center in a policy issue instead of just some intangible concept. I used to think it was a fringe issue, as though it wasn’t very relevant to the larger issue. But it is.

We can occupy and live in a comfortable realm of abstraction in which we determine where money ought to be reprogrammed or where we think troops should be repositioned. But if you’re ignoring this flood of people, then you have to question whether or not those abstract deliberations are having any actual impact, improving the lives of the Iraqis, who, in theory, are the whole reason we went over there in the first place. But now that they need our help we’re not helping them quickly enough.

I’m trying to remain optimistic, but it took another President -- not Nixon, but Ford -- to help the Vietnamese refugee population. It also took a sort of universal consensus that we had lost in Vietnam. I’d prefer to help these Iraqis before making a declaration on whether or not the war is over. I’m not advocating breaking down the bases, packing up and leaving. In fact, I’m still considering going back myself to keep pitching in on the reconstruction. I’m trying to get Bush to make a statement about what we owe these Iraqis who put their lives on the line for us, but I don’t think I’m going to succeed. I wonder if he’s even thought about it, frankly. I think certain people in government need to be educated on who these Iraqis are and what they did for us.

If you believe enough in this country to represent it as an elected official, then you also have to believe in the way this country appears to the rest of the world. Though everyone in the Middle East is following what happens to the Iraqis who work for us, none of our Iraqi allies feel like we actually value them enough to help them. If we care about our involvement in the Middle East, this issue should be front and center right now.

epic: You’ve already mentioned Yaghdan as one Iraqi you are trying to help. Tell us about some of the other Iraqis on your list.

Kirk: First, I’d like to point out that nobody on my list has gotten over here yet. Some days I wonder if we’re going to see any of them in the States before the end of the year.

I wrote about an Iraqi woman named Rita in a New York Times piece called, “Hounded by Insurgents, Abandoned by Us.” Rita was an assistant for Bernard Kerik, the former Police Commissioner of New York City, who was tasked with setting up Iraq’s police force. Rita’s son was kidnapped when he was 15 and the initial ransom demand was $600,000.

Her work with the Americans had already put a huge strain on her family. She has two kids, a son and a daughter. But for her husband, that was the last straw. He said to her, “You ruined this family by working for the Americans.” So he divorced her, bringing together whatever money he could to pay the ransom for his son, and then he and his kids fled to Syria. He’s never let them talk to her. Rita has lost them all.

Even still, she kept working with us for a time. But soon she was discovered and began receiving many death threats. In early 2006, she fled to Amman, Jordan.

I included Rita in my op-ed because her story points to a gaping hole in U.S. policy. There’s a clause in the PATRIOT and Real ID Acts that says if you provide any support to terrorists then you’ll be blocked from entering the U.S. On the surface, it seems to make sense: we don’t want people who are funding terrorists to come into our country.

But the problem is that legislators never made the exclusion for material support under duress, so as written, this legislation blocks out folks like Rita, who are forced to pay a ransom for the safe release of a kidnapped family member.

They created a waiver, but it took them years, and there’s still no defined process for applying for such a waiver. People point to the material support bar as one of the major factors in explaining the decrease in refugee admissions since the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. and Real ID Acts.

Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey likes to say that Iraq’s refugee crisis didn’t start until only recently, and that Iraqi refugees and those who work for us are her bureau’s very top priority. But there are people on my list who fled well before a few months ago, and if you’re only going to respond to the heart-wrenching stories of Iraqis included in sizzling media pieces, that’s not a just response.

For every Rita, there are more with identical stories. The State Department has the list; the names are coming in right and left now. But nobody has a clue how long it’s going to take the Department of Homeland Security to respond. We know who to help, but everybody’s dragging their feet on this thing.

epic: In his March 2007 article in The New Yorker, George Packer writes at length about your time in Iraq and your work to help your former Iraqi colleagues. He also mentions an Iraqi named Ibrahim. Can you tell us about him?

Kirk: Ibrahim is in his late twenties. He was a procurement agent for USAID, making sure that we had food, desks, and other things we needed, but he left the Agency when I was there.

He wrote to me in January after hearing about what I was doing, and he sent me all his medical reports, including CAT scans. He was in the early stages of a brain tumor. Because it’s sort of the luck of the draw in terms of which militia is running which hospital, he was too scared to get any treatment in Baghdad, so Ibrahim’s tumor was going untreated and he was getting chronic headaches.

He paid over $10,000 to get into a smuggling network. At one point he was in India, at another, Malaysia. He flew into Egypt on forged documents with a group of Iraqis. He wanted to be smuggled into Sweden, but I didn’t want him to go through with the dangerous operation. There was no guarantee that he wouldn’t end up in prison somewhere.

Ibrahim is one of the high priority cases I’ve been pushing. He could get a medical parole here, allowing him to side-step the traditional process and all the different rounds of interviews. The State Department, to its great credit, had the embassy call him up and invite him in for a meeting. I know he is getting some medical treatment now, but I don’t know how long it will take for him to come here or how aggressively they’re pursuing his resettlement case. He tells me that they have pretty much run the course of available treatment in Egypt, and that he needs treatments that aren’t available in the Middle East. The bit of treatment he’s received is one of the only tangible successes that I’ve had so far.

epic: Are there any American doctors willing to help him?

Kirk: Anytime I’ve asked, Americans have been eager to volunteer their help. I’m hoping that even if these Iraqis come to the States that Americans will show their true colors and help them in the way we have before.

I think, like a lot of Iraqis, he’s proud to have worked with us, but it’s been really painful to be treated so poorly.

I’m always asking people higher up in government if they think these Iraqis are really going to be brought here. I still don’t know if they’re going to make it -- maybe only handful. But I won’t be satisfied with that. Iraqis write to me everyday saying that I’m their only hope, that they don’t know where else to go, that their emails to the State Department are going unanswered, and that they’re interviews with UNHCR are scheduled for six months after their visas expire. For many, it becomes a question of whether or not to renew their visas under the table, or simply go back to Iraq.

In the United Arab Emirates, for example, if you have to overstay your visa, you are assessed a fine of $35.00 per day. This is a huge price tag for many Iraqi refugees. They need to have hope that something will happen in their favor in order to fight through all the pressure to go back to Iraq.

As refugees, they don’t have rights; they don’t feel welcome; and if they are able to find a job, they’re ripped off by their employers. What are they going to do? There are roughly 550,000 school-age Iraqi refugees, and most are not able to attend school or get the healthcare they need. I am not minimizing the strain on the regional governments, but I am bringing it up to point out that Iraqi refugees lack the confidence of citizenship. Iraqis hear about others being deported so they just hide in their apartments and pray that something good happens before their visas run out.

For the U.S. to address this crisis, there needs political will, and it has to come from above. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apparently “feels” for these Iraqis, but she hasn’t made any statements yet. Instead, she’s allowing Assistant Secretary Sauerbrey to make statements that are patently unrealistic.

Sauerbrey said that if the State Department gets referrals from UNHCR, it could resettle 25,000 Iraqis by the end of the year. The media interpreted this as upping the ante for the Geneva Conference. Sauerbrey said, “It’s fair to say that if they give the referrals they could resettle” -- resettle, not just start processing -- “25,000 refugees under the Presidential Determination this year.”

But this year so far we have let in only 70 Iraqis, and just one per month in April and May. Initially the State Department said they would consider 7,000 referrals for the fiscal year, which ends in October -- just four months away. The State Department’s low goal for resettlement is approximately 1,500. To reach that goal, they would need to up the average to 357 Iraqis per month. And to reach the 25,000 goal, they would need to bring in 6,232 Iraqis each month. That’s doesn’t even take into consideration Department of Homeland Security processing, which everybody knows is going to take time. When you only let in one person in April and one person in May, why stop at 25,000? Why not just say we’ll resettle the entire country? All statements are equally improbable at the rate things are going.

The day they were made, Sauerbrey’s statements went through the Iraqi refugee community like wildfire. The refugees were saying, “This is great! Now more of us are going to be let in. How soon do you think it’ll happen?” Ironically, they tell me how I might be falsely raising the expectations of the Iraqis on my list!

The problem is, because there are no consequences, we’ve reached the point where we feel comfortable just throwing out numbers. It’s reckless. Our leaders have to be held to those numbers. But without political will to cut through all the bureaucratic cholesterol, there’s no way the administration will reach these numbers.

epic: Are there any other Iraqis on your list you’d like to tell us about?

Kirk: A good friend of mine, who I’ll just call ‘L,’ began working for USAID as a direct hire in 2003. In late 2005, someone in L’s neighborhood found out he was working for the Americans. His choice, as he saw it, was to either leave Iraq or move into the Green Zone. He had to pay 90 percent of his salary just to stay in the Green Zone and keep his wife and two children safe; plus he put himself in greater danger by being so closely associated with Americans.

Weeks later, American soldiers broke into his brother’s house and arrested him, asking where L was. When he heard the news, L was baffled, and he actually went over to the palace and said, “Here I am! Why are you looking for me?” It took him about a month to locate his brother and get him out.

After working for us for three years, he fled the country at the beginning of 2007 with his wife. They’re in the Gulf.

epic: Did he ever tell you how he started working for the Americans?

Kirk: No, he didn’t, but you have to understand that there’s a fairly severe firewall that blocks information about Iraqi employees. They don’t even want each other to know what neighborhood they live in.

L was thrilled that we took out Saddam. Driving around the Green Zone, he always talked about how Baghdad’s streets were awash with Kalashnikovs and side arms in the days before our forces reached the capital. He said how wonderful it was to be driving throughout the Green Zone’s streets because they had been off-limits to him and others who weren’t in Saddam’s inner circle.

L loves America, so he was elated at the chance to come and work for us. He’s still really hoping to come here one day.

epic: Some analysts claim that a fundamental mistake in Iraq has been our distrust of Iraqis. Do you agree?

Kirk: On a basic level, we didn’t even trust the Iraqis who are on my list. Every time “L” and I left the Green Zone, even for a few minutes, we’d come back and have to go to the control gate. I’d be permitted to stay in the air-conditioned car, but they’d make him get out, dozens of times a day, so they could wipe these little strips of paper on him and run them through a machine to look for bomb residue. Then they would bring out a bomb dog to sniff him. He went through this song and dance for years. At what point do we trust him?

The message every single time was that we don’t trust him. I’m not encouraging lax procedures and I’m not a security officer, but you have to understand the signals being sent and the demoralizing effect it has on your Iraqi staff. We tell everybody they have to wear flak jackets and helmets because of indirect fire, but we don’t issue any to the Iraqis.

In that environment, trust is the only way to succeed but it’s also the greatest risk. You need trust to cut past the explosions and the bombs and to make a relationship.

epic: Consider the best scenario where the Maliki government suddenly starts operating in the national interest of all Iraqis and within a few years things begin to stabilize. When would people like Yaghdan and Rita be able to return to Iraq?

Kirk: Yaghdan feels like he can never go back. He fears for his life. At the risk of a gross characterization, death seems to be a central component of the Iraqi way of thinking. I don’t know if there is another country that has been through as much war as this group of people. A lot of times there are people on my list that are losing hope and say, “I’m going to have to go back to my death in Iraq.” I do what I can to keep them from going back, but as Yaghdan says, “It’s my destiny, I have to go back and be killed.”

To begin to reverse this thinking, there would have to be a sea change in the political tenor within Baghdad, but there would also have to be faith in the security forces and in the uniform. Last year, the Iraqi government sent out messages on television telling its people not to let Iraqi policemen into their homes unless they are accompanied by a member of the coalition forces. The Iraqis were terrified when they read that. There have been so many attacks carried out by and in the presence of Iraqi police or security forces that the respect for the uniform is blown.

epic: Given that many of Iraqis you are trying to help are professionals, are you concerned that providing asylum for them diminishes the prospects for rebuilding Iraq?

Kirk: There’s not a person who has worked in Iraq who would tell you that ‘brain drain’ [the forced migration of Iraqi professionals from their homeland] hasn’t already happened. We spent billions on reconstruction projects, restoring water and power plants to capacity for the first time in decades, and found out, to our own embarrassment, that there weren’t any trained Iraqis to run them. I got into the reasons for this in our past talk, but the notion of a vibrant Iraqi civil society in June 2007 is borderline ridiculous. The folks who are the most educated suffer routine kidnapping of their children, extortion, or assassination. Iraq appears to be proceeding along the way of the gun, not of the brain, and we have been suffering from an anemic civil society for years now.

A lot of folks within the U.S. government have tried to employ the brain drain argument, but with the Iraqis on my list, I think it collapses at the first touch. I wonder how they’d be able to say that to ‘A.’, a former Iraqi colleague of mine I recently heard from.

A. had been identified by the militias, but for months tried to sneak to and from the Green Zone to help us. He was walking back one day when he saw a commotion -- militiamen were dragging his pregnant wife and small son down the street, set to abduct them. A crowd of neighbors managed to pry them free, but the militia made off with her cell-phone, which had in it the contact information for their extended family. The event gave his wife labor complications and his son was catatonic for months. They fled to Syria, and are struggling to survive.

But what do those who are concerned about the brain drain argument say to A.? “Sorry, we can’t help you because we need you to go back to Iraq to rebuild your country.” These people already tried to help their country, and they were ground in the gears. The people I am trying to help have been shot at, kidnapped, tortured, raped, extorted, thrown out of moving cars, and hounded by militias and terrorists for the simple reason that they tried to help us rebuild Iraq. People that dabble in vagaries like countering “brain-drain” are ignorant of the fact that it has already happened. They’re clinging to an illusion while people are being murdered.

epic: What would you say to those who are resistant to bringing Iraqis to the U.S. because they are afraid they might turn around and attack our country in the end?

Kirk: It’s unlikely. But let’s walk through what would need to happen for such a scenario to take place.

Al-Qa’eda would have needed to be in Iraq in the very first days of the war, recruiting the Western-oriented Iraqis who loved America and were thrilled that we toppled Saddam. Then, they would have had to direct these ‘terrorists’ to come work for the United States in spite of phenomenal risks, passing daily through Green Zone checkpoints that are routinely attacked by car-bombs, IEDs, and snipers. And they would have to face the same risks on the way home.

These Iraqis would have to work for us for years, translating for us, eating with us and helping us rebuild their country. When things got rough, say their brother is murdered or children are abducted or their house is raked by AK-47 gunfire, they’d have to go to their American employers in the Green Zone and ask for help. But they’d get nothing more than a “good luck” and maybe a couple months of administrative leave.

To flee Iraq and resettle in the U.S., they would have to pay exorbitant bribes for safe passage through Anbar Province, and hope that they could get into Syria or Jordan. There, they’d languish in waiting for a protracted series of UNHCR interviews, required by the State Department, all the while facing an increasingly hostile anti-Iraqi populace in Damascus and Amman. Given that only one Iraqi was settled in April, and one in May, they’d have to stretch their meager savings as long as possible. Then, miraculously, they’d have to make it through the series of DHS background checks.

After all of this, if they are resettled in the United States and then attack us, Al-Qa’eda is more sophisticated than we’ll ever know. All of the Americans who served in Iraq, who are struggling to help their fleeing Iraqi colleagues and allies, would become scapegoats. I’m willing to take that risk.

If we are so crippled by our fear of terrorists that we blind ourselves to our moral obligations to save those who served us and now need help, then we have already lost the war on terror.

epic: What word would you use to describe the Iraqi refugee issue and the U.S. response to it?

Kirk: Until the U.S. aggressively begins to help these people, I think the only word is “abandonment.” I know there are desperate refugees all over the world, but this is the war we’re in right now. If the theories are true -- that the Bush administration is scared to touch this issue for political reasons -- then we’re witnessing severe moral cowardice. And unless the President is willing to invest in this, the bureaucratic gears won’t turn quickly enough to save these lives. It’s a horrific glimpse at the implications of bureaucracy without presidential leadership.

Our past is full of precedents where we acted quickly and justly and honorably. Ten years ago we let into our country about 10,000 ethnic Albanians. We didn’t use UNHCR. We put them on military planes and flew them to a U.S. military base and processed them right there. Somebody needs to take the lead on this issue. Bush is the one who must tell the American public that we’re going to bring in some Iraqis and to reassure the public that these are friends who deserve our swift help.

epic: From talking with you, we have a clear picture of what the Bush administration ought to be doing to protect our Iraqi allies. What can Congress and your average American do to help?

Kirk: On the House side, Congressmen Blumenauer has led the charge with the legislation he proposed. Last week, he and Congressmen Shays told me they are seeing more and more co-sponsors sign on. I hope that folks on both sides of the aisle sign on to this legislation, because if this isn’t an issue that transcends partisan politics, I don’t know what is. Senator Kennedy has been the long-standing hero for the plight of those Iraqis who worked for us, and just introduced legislation on the Senate side that I’m optimistic about.

But the problems aren’t resolved just yet. The President just signed legislation that would expand the Special Immigrant Visa program for military interpreters, but, because of bureaucratic cholesterol, the legislation may turn out to be useless. The 500 new spots created by the legislation haven’t even been filled yet because the gears turn too slowly, and because there is no roll-over, they may end up being wasted. So Congress needs to expeditiously pass this legislation and hold the mechanisms of the government accountable to implementing it before more lives are lost.

There are more and more avenues for Americans to get involved in helping our Iraqi allies. If they’re interested, I’m launching a new initiative called “The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies” (www.thelistproject.org), which will couple Iraqis on my list with attorneys from the law firms of Holland & Knight and Proskauer Rose and American ‘sponsors’ from Amnesty International.

At the outset, I hope to plug in the thousands of Americans that have written to help these refugees into a letter-writing campaign. If they want to help fund some of the project, that would be helpful, but I hate rattling the tin cup. Then, assuming that the government starts letting them in, I am counting on Americans to step up with employment opportunities and other assistance for these Iraqis. We have rolled up our sleeves in the past as responsible Americans when our government is lagging, and this is our chance now.