A MORAL OBLIGATION

Slowly, the Bush administration is starting to do something for the thousands of Iraqis who have been helping the American effort to pacify and rebuild their country. Officials seem fearful that any help will sound like defeatism.

These people have been risking their lives to help the American cause as interpreters and clerks but more important as information sources and intermediaries with the warring factions. They often use false names and try to escape detection as they slip into Baghdad’s Green Zone for their day’s work.

Many of their American co-workers consider them indispensable, but Iraqi insurgents and terrorists threaten them as collaborators with what they see as a U.S. occupation. But some U.S. officials are so suspicious of any Iraqi that they have been replacing them with Jordanians.

A 26-year-old Chicago man, Kirk Johnson, an Arabic speaker, who recently returned from a hazardous year as a reconstruction supervisor for the U.S. aid agency, has made a special project of helping these Iraqis, starting with his former co-workers in Baghdad and Fallujah. One of them found a scrawled note in Arabic outside his house: “We will cut off heads and throw them in the garbage.” Nearby lay the severed head of a small dog. Mr. Johnson has presented to the State Department a list of 200 Iraqi employees and former employees who seek refugee status and immigration to the United States.

He has been visiting relatives in Bar Harbor and has told his story to friends here. George Packer in the current New Yorker quotes him at length in a recent article.

These Iraqi collaborators have a number of grievances. U.S. officials have refused to give them special badges that would let them enter the Green Zone through a priority gate instead of waiting in a long line and vulnerable to spies. They are barred from entry into the United States if they ever gave money to insurgents – even if it was ransom for kidnapped relatives. They feel constantly under suspicion. When threatened, they must pay huge sums for escape for short-term asylum in some nearby country.

Above all, many would like to build a new life in the United States for themselves and their families.

In February, Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky promised “increasing opportunities for permanent resettlement” for these most vulnerable Iraqis. As for U.S. visas, she mentioned only the possibility of “additional immigration mechanisms.” The mechanism in some cases is simple: raise the visa limits.

Other officials have bluntly opposed immigration of Iraqis. Mr. Johnson quoted a U.S. AID official as telling him, “You are heading into a horrible holocaust” and warning him that bringing Iraqis to this country would send a defeatist message and hearken back to the rescue of Vietnamese from a Saigon rooftop in 1975.

No matter what you think of the origins and conduct of the Iraq war, U.S. responsibility for the thousands of Iraqis who have helped us in the venture deserve prompt and sensitive action in return.