Rubin: Will U.S. honor vow to Iraqi aides?

Trudy Rubin is an editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where this first appeared.

In September 2007, Barack Obama made a stump speech berating the Bush team for breaking faith with Iraqis who had helped Americans.

"One tragic outcome of this war," said Obama, "is that the Iraqis who stood with America -- the interpreters, embassy workers, and subcontractors -- are being targeted for assassination. . . . And yet our doors are shut. That is not how we treat our friends. That is not who we are as Americans."

So why are our doors still virtually closed to our Iraqi helpers, as we exit their country? Why is Obama consigning many of them to death?

In 2008, Congress passed legislation calling for 25,000 special immigrant visas, or 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 arduous 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 46. At that rate, it will be years before the backlog is cleared.

U.S. troops are leaving Iraq by the end of this year. I've received dozens of emails from desperate Iraqi interpreters (some with glowing recommendations from senior U.S. military officers) who have all received death threats. Some 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 "traitors" 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." Does President Obama intend to honor that promise?

If he doesn't intervene, the SIV logjam won't budge. That's because the SIV issue is caught in a bureaucratic thicket; nothing will move without a push from the White House. 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 -- two rotten apples who did not have SIVs.

Too many agencies are involved with the SIVs, and no senior White House official seems seized with this issue. Where is the push from the National Security Council's Samantha Power, who once wrote so eloquently on Iraqi refugees? There's only one solution. In the words of Kirk Johnson, who runs the List Project, an organization dedicated to helping these Iraqis: "If President Obama said this was a moral obligation and we're going to save these people because they saved U.S. lives, do you really think there would be an eight-month wait?"

But presidential eloquence alone won't save these Iraqis. There is one obvious way to clear the logjam: an airlift to remove our Iraqi friends from danger.

There is plenty of precedent for such an airlift. In 1975, after initially abandoning massive numbers of our South Vietnamese allies, Gerald Ford finally authorized a massive airlift to evacuate them to Guam and, eventually, to the United States.

In 1996, Bill Clinton ordered Operation Pacific Haven, which flew 6,000 Iraqi Kurds and other opposition activists from Iraqi Kurdistan to Guam, after Saddam Hussein's troops invaded the region. The operation took only two weeks, and security checks were conducted in Guam. Obama could order a similar maneuver, with security checks again in Guam.

There are more recent precedents, too. The Poles, Danes and Australians airlifted their Iraqi staff out of the country. After the massacre in Basra, the British returned and flew out endangered staff.

Are we less honorable than the Poles, Danes, Australians and Brits?

Perhaps the Obama team fears the Vietnam comparison will make it look bad. It will look far worse if Iraqis we pledged to save are slaughtered because they didn't get their visas in time.

Administration officials say that efforts to clear the backlog will become more intense as the end of the year approaches. But if those efforts fail, it may be too late to organize an airlift.

In 2007, Obama said we had a "moral obligation" to those Iraqis who helped us. History will judge him on how he honors it.