The List Project

The Iraq refugee crisis is a disaster of astounding scale--a disaster in which our government has fallen pathetically short in its moral imperative to protect the people whom it once said the invasion would "liberate".

One in five Iraqis had been displaced in 2007, according to Refugees International, with some 2 million now in flight outside Iraq and 2 million displaced internally. Late last year, you may remember, the blogosphere saw Riverbend of Baghdad Burning report, after a worrying four-month silence, that she was now one of those millions, people who left home in fear after having lost all semblance of stability or safety in their lives.

The statistics on resettling beggar belief, with the U.S. consistently falling far short of its commitments (settling 1,608 Iraqi refugees in FY2007 when the government had set an already rather modest goal to settle seven thousand in that fiscal year) and the mass of refugees currently attempting to build lives in neighboring countries, where there is no resettlement infrastructure designed to help them and in some cases (i.e. those refugees living in Lebanon) they lack any legal standing.

We have a moral obligation to aid the Iraqi people at all possible levels. And nowhere is our failure in this more glaring than in the case of those Iraqis who actively helped the U.S. and have been rewarded for their service with all the attentive compassion of the Bush administration; that is to say, they've generally gotten the shaft:

They rejoiced at the toppling of Saddam and signed up to serve as interpreters for our armed forces, as civil society experts for the State Department and federal agencies such as USAID, or as employees with the many U.S. companies and NGOs contracted to rebuild the country. Now these Iraqis are the most hunted class in Iraq. The lethal stigma they bear as 'collaborators' transcends sect or tribe, and they are being systematically targeted for assassination. They flee routine death threats, abduction, assassination, torture, and extortion. As of yet, their cries for help have been heard but not answered by the US Government.

That description comes from The List Project, a nonprofit created to bring together private citizens to lend support to "Iraqis who are imperiled due to their affiliation with the United States of America". TLP is currently running four fund-raising efforts for Iraqi refugees and their families: a legal support program, an airfare fund, a job training fund and a general emergency support fund. They also have a nascent site designed to connect people who want to do more in their own communities.

The latter branch of the project is literally about a day old, and, like the main website, is in something of a state of transition at present. It's impossible to say how it will develop--but it evidently exists in part because of the tremendous response that TLP has already seen from people across America who dearly want to be more involved. I've made an account there and plan to be active on this issue locally; I hope you'll consider doing the same.