The friends we left behind

'Let's be perfectly coldblooded about it," President Richard M. Nixon mused to Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. "South Vietnam is probably never going to survive anyway."

It was August 1972, and Nixon was worried about the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam after American forces withdrew. Kissinger concurred.

"We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two," he said. "If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn."

This formula became known as the "Decent Interval," a period of time after a withdrawal that would be long enough for Americans to go from war fatigue to amnesia. Thirty-two months later, when Saigon fell, there was no chance that the American public would countenance military re-engagement. Indeed, congressional concerns over being dragged back into conflict even threatened efforts to address a spiraling refugee crisis.

It's hard these days to escape the cold shadow of the Decent Interval. Throughout the long withdrawal from Iraq, my organization — the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, which helps Iraqis who are endangered because they once worked alongside Americans as interpreters, drivers and advisers — implored the Obama administration to draw up a plan to protect them.

This White House always has maintained a degree of detachment from Iraq, however. The Obama team campaigned in 2008 on getting out, and in 2012 on the fact that they had gotten out. They had convinced themselves that Iraq was in better shape than it was, seemingly secure in the knowledge that the American public wouldn't give them too hard a time if Iraq unraveled.

Bipartisan legislation did create a category of special immigrant visas for Iraqis who had helped us. But bureaucracy strangled their distribution. Thousands of Iraqis who worked with our troops, diplomats and aid workers remain in limbo, desperate for a visa allowing them to reach safety. The same story is playing out in Afghanistan.

Several months later, an Iraqi who had operated a forklift on a U.S. Army base was decapitated. For more than a year, he had tried desperately to get the refugee bureaucracy to process his application. I found it impossible to tell his widow and son that the Obama administration thought they should be less subjective in their fear.

Two-and-a-half years since our last troops departed, perhaps 1.5 million Iraqis have been uprooted by new fighting that may shatter Iraq as a nation. Dozens of families e-mail me with subject lines imploring: "Please Help Me," "Need Support Please" or "Please help!!!!!!!"

There is next to nothing I can do. Anne C. Richard, the assistant secretary of state in charge of refugee issues, has informed me that the embassy in Baghdad has evacuated the few staffers through whose hands refugee petitions had to go. That means that the cases of the applicants for refugee status remain frozen wherever they were when the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) began to take over northern Iraq.

By the time the assault began, of the 90 Iraqis with whom I worked during my time in Baghdad and Fallujah, 85 had been chased from Iraq and three had been assassinated. When I last heard from one of the remaining two, he was holed up in his apartment with his wife, his 5-year-old daughter and a Colt pistol — not much protection against ISIL if the militants find them. The other, named Jalal, fled to Turkey last week with his wife and three daughters. He was lucky, in a way, since now all flights out of Baghdad are booked solid until July 15. His voice carried only defeat when we spoke by telephone, however. His life, he said, already is ruined.

"I've lost all the hope in everything," he told me. "I left everything back there — my car, my house, everything. We have to run away for how long? One year? Two years? For how long? I'm 37. I have been in this drama for 10 years. I'm fed up with everything. I need to raise my daughters. I need to secure their lives, secure their future."

"I sent them e-mails and e-mails and e-mails," he told me. "The last interview was October 2010. We are now in 2014! Four years you're doing administrative processing? What the hell have you been doing for four years? We're being killed here, kidnapped and tortured.

"They left us behind," Jalal said bitterly. "It's the same story as Vietnam."

In America, the airwaves once again are choked with political bile and finger-pointing, a shabby score-settling over who was right a decade ago and who really lost Iraq. Once again those who helped us, and now need our help, are ignored. A decent interval has passed, and Americans don't really give a damn.