Today, “combat operations” operations in Iraq came to an official and momentous end which will be marked by a speech from the Oval Office tonight. However, for the millions of displaced Iraqis abroad, the hell is far from over. In an op-ed published in today’s New York Times, student director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project Saurabh Sanghvi explains that we are also “leaving behind the thousands of Iraqis who worked on behalf of the American government — and who fear their lives and families are threatened by insurgents as a result.” There are currently 15,000 available “special immigration visas” (SIV) made available to the many Iraqis who have “provided faithful and valuable service to the U.S. Government,” however, almost 13,000 have gone unused.

Sanghvi notes that the surprising low participation rates are not for lack of will or interest, but rather, red tape and bureaucratic hoops. SVI applicants must first obtain a letter of clearance from the U.S. Embassy. A mistake as minor as using the wrong letterhead can delay an application for months. Then the applicant must send the paperwork through the unreliable Iraqi postal service to Nebraska before going through two more similar approval rounds that can each takes months to complete.

The SIV program was specifically implemented to bypass the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or “the regular refugee program,” which many displaced Iraqis other than those who worked for the U.S. qualify for. However, at this point, even senior State Department officials admit that “the refugee program administratively is just easier to navigate.”

Sanghvi offers a few recommendations that the agencies involved in determining the fate of Iraqi SVI applicants should implement:

Gather information on Iraqi employees from contractors and internal databases so that they can verify the applicants’ employment records themselves.

Allow Iraqis to submit their applications by e-mail, and then bring their original documents to a subsequent interview.

Provide rejected applicants with sufficient information about why they were denied visas and a fair, transparent process for challenging the decisions.

Retired U.S. Air Force Major Dorian de Wind wrote last week, “As a nation that bears a special responsibility for the Iraq war and for the resulting humanitarian crisis, we can still reflect the ‘character of our nation’ by, as we leave Iraq behind, not leaving behind the helpless Iraqi refugees.” Meanwhile, President Obama has already warned troops in Fort Bliss, TX that “our task in Iraq is not over yet.” And it shouldn’t be considered over until the responsibility we have to those Iraqi men and women who risked their lives to work for the U.S. is fulfilled.

Back in the fall of 2005, the Center for American Progress released a report called Strategic Redeployment, authored by Larry Korb and Brian Katulis. It argued for the redeployment of 80,000 troops from Iraq in 2006 to Afghanistan and other US bases in the Middle East and around the world. They then called for the rest of US combat forces to be withdrawn in 2007. The report concluded that:

By the end of 2007, the only US military forces in Iraq would be a small Marine contingent to protect the US embassy, a small group of military advisors to the Iraqi Government, and counterterrorist units that works closely with Iraqi security forces.

This report essentially laid a two-year timeline and while that timeline would shift up by a year in future documents, the central premise of the argument was that the US should set a date certain to prompt Iraqis to take control of their security and should withdraw its forces deliberately but responsibly in that period. It was the first Washington think tank report calling for withdrawal based on a fixed timeline.

Last year, Laura Rozen in March 2009 Laura Rozen wrote a piece for the Cable asking “Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan: who won the think tank wars?” Rozen concluded that the centrist Center for New American Security, which came on the scene in Washington in 2007, had won the debate largely because they were getting jobs in the Gates Pentagon.

But the CNAS approach was essentially an effort to find a centrist withdrawal strategy. As a result, CNAS advocated a more watered down, or “responsible” version of CAP’s plan with an extended timeline for withdrawal, leaving a very sizeable remaining force. In March of 2008 they released a policy brief titled the “case for conditional engagement,” which held that:

A policy of conditional engagement—a nuanced middle position between “all in” or “all out”—offers a better chance of producing lasting progress in Iraq. Under this strategy, U.S. negotiators would make clear that Iraq and America share a common interest in achieving sustainable stability in Iraq, and that the United States is willing to help support the Iraqi government over the long-term, but only so long as Iraqis move toward political accommodation.

One could argue that the Administration’s plan did include an aspect emphasized in CNAS’s plan to leave behind a large amount of advisors and trainers. But overall the CNAS plan has little resemblance to the plan put forth by Obama on the campaign and the plan that his administration implemented. There is little doubt that the Obama plan to set a date certain and to withdraw more than 120,000 troops in 16 months was essentially what CAP had been arguing for since the fall of 2005. In other words, Obama went with the progressive plan on Iraq.

If one was listening to conservatives over the last half decade, this should have led to disaster. Yet chaos didn’t ensue. The world did not end. Arguments that the enemy would just “wait us out” or would be “emboldened” didn’t materialize. The only thing emboldened have been Iraq’s own security forces.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media have yawned at this achievement and have largely bought the false conservative claim that this is because of the surge. But one should remember that if conservatives were in charge and John McCain had won the presidency the explicit plan was not to withdrawal troops. There was no conservative withdrawal plan. Instead of having just over 40,000 troops, there would almost assuredly be well over 100,000 troops still in Iraq. The reason there are just over 40,000 troops, is not because of the surge, it is because Obama decided to withdraw more than 100,000 troops.

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a report essentially debunking the right wing myth that immigrants steal jobs from U.S. citizen workers. In fact, the study concluded, “immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity.” The study conclusively states, “there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.”

The study produced three main findings:

Immigrants don’t “crowd out” U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run.
In other words, immigrants aren’t taking jobs from Americans. Instead, the “economy absorbs immigrants by expanding job opportunities rather than by displacing workers born in the United States.” Immigrants in the workforce have “insignificant effects in the short run” and a “significant positive effect in the long run.”

The presence of immigrants is associated with increased output per worker.
This is a long-term effect that happens as a result of businesses taking advantage of new immigrant labor. The study estimates that an inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of employment has the effect of increasing income per worker by 0.6% to 0.9%. It may not sound like a lot, but it apparently means that total immigration to the U.S. from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker, or an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker.

Immigration is associated with increases in the efficiency and productivity of state economies.
The increase in income mentioned above is a result of the boost in efficiency and productivity that new immigrants prompt. Once businesses adjust and expand their physical capital (equipment and structures) to take advantage of new immigrant labor, output increases.

Groups like the Center for Immigration Studies — which never find anything good to say about immigration at all — meanwhile insist that high unemployment among less-educated and younger U.S.-born workers should prompt the U.S. to kick its undocumented immigrants out and shut its doors to the world. However, the Federal Reserve Bank’s study explains that, “among less-educated workers, those born in the United States tend to have jobs in manufacturing or mining, while immigrants tend to have jobs in personal services and agriculture.” Also, U.S. citizens tend to have “relatively better English language skills” which means “they tend to specialize in communication tasks.” Immigrants usually specialize in manual labor. “This results in specialization and improved production efficiency,” states the report.

The report doesn’t distinguish between undocumented and documented immigrants, however, other studies that have uncovered similar findings have further concluded that enacting comprehensive immigration reform that puts undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization would amplify the positive effects of immigrant workers cited in this study.

With U.S. “combat operations” in Iraq — which are not to be confused with U.S. combat operations in Iraq, which will continue through next year — coming to an end today, and marked by a speech from the Oval Office tonight, the internets are alight with the war’s advocates and critics fighting to define its legacy.

While that fight will likely continue for decades, it’s worth noting that the American people are now overwhelmingly with the war’s critics. A recent CBS News poll found that 76% of Americans — including 56% of Republicans — don’t think the war was worth it, and 73% believing that the war either made them less safe (18%) or made no difference (55%) against terrorism.

But while the ultimate legacy of the U.S. intervention in Iraq is still to be determined, it is possible — and necessary, given the implications for future interventions — to attempt to tally the war’s costs and benefits to the national security of the United States. Back in May, my colleagues Brian Katulis and Peter Juul and I attempted to do this with our report, The Iraq War Ledger.

As we noted, the end of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, but most of the war’s other benefits very much remain in the realm of conjecture, things that won’t happen — Saddam and his sons can no longer threaten us with WMD they did not have — or things that could possibly happen, if current trends continue in a positive direction, such as a stable, democratic Iraq being a model for the region. (It’s deeply ironic, of course, that a war conceived as part of an effort to combat global Islamist extremism succeeded in delivering Iraq into the hands of Islamist parties, with the single largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament representing the most extreme and anti-American of those parties. But Iraq’s being the first Arab country in which Islamists have been permitted to both compete and govern may eventually prove to be the war’s most important contribution.)

But while a nascent democratic Iraqi republic allied with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future, the costs of the war are very real in the here and now. The financial costs are fairly straightforward, and they are staggering (sources in report):

- Cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom: $748.2 billion
- Projected total cost of veterans’ health care and disability: $422 billion to $717 billion

The human costs, especially in terms of Iraqi casualties, are somewhat more difficult to ascertain, but even using the most conservative estimates, the numbers are deeply troubling:

- Total deaths: Between 110,663 and 119,380
- Coalition deaths: 4,712
- U.S. deaths: 4,394
- U.S. wounded: 31,768
- U.S. deaths as a percentage of coalition deaths: 93.25 percent
- Iraqi Security Force deaths: At least 9,451
- Total coalition and ISF deaths: At least 14,163
- Iraqi civilian deaths: Between 96,037 and 104,7542
- Non-Iraqi contractor deaths: At least 463
- Internally displaced persons: 2.6 million
- Refugees: 1.9 million

Least appreciated, however, are the war’s strategic costs, the implications of which the U.S. will likely be grappling with for decades: Read more