That worked out well

That worked out well

by digby

I wondered what was going to happen to these people:

The name of this dusty little village means falcon in Arabic, a reference to its history as a residential community for workers at a nearby airport. But most people in Iraq call it Traitor Town.

“It’s not fair, but it’s true,” one market vendor here said about the nickname, pointing down the street to the walls of a now-empty American base just beyond.

Years ago, the residents of this town formed an alliance with the Americans who had moved into the airport and renamed it Speicher Base.

Nearly every young man in the town worked at the base, making this place an illustrative, if extreme, example of the unfortunate turn of fate for Iraqis who took jobs with the United States military during the nearly nine-year war, and who are now being left behind.

A United States visa program for them is stalled in red tape, while the Iraqi government has no formal program to help. Though these workers were laid off months ago, they are now, finally and irrevocably, deprived of their job opportunities, off the bases and being shunned, or worse.

Nice. The good news is that the US isn’t telling them they should be paying back the US for their freedom like Michelle Bachman says. Well sort of:

“The opportunity to help Iraq with Iraq’s problems is not to move everybody who worked for us to the United States,” Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the military’s top spokesman in Iraq, said in an interview. “We gave them a means of employment for as long as we could.”

“The opportunity to help Iraq with Iraq’s problems.” That’s an interesting way of saying “invade their country”.

The US used to allow those locals who made enemies by helping them invade and occupy their country come to the US. I’m guessing that fear of the Muslim Menace precludes that outcome this time. But we “gave them employment” for a while so it’s all good.

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