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.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), hit a new low this week when he warned National Review readers that 1,350 of Saddam Hussein’s best friends will be entering the U.S. Though not readily apparent, Krikorian is talking about the State Department’s decision to let a group of Iraqi Palestinians into the country as refugees. The U.S. hasn’t accepted many Palestinian refugees from Gaza or the West Bank in an effort to avoid stepping on Israel’s toes, but Iraqi Palestinians fall in a different category for many reasons. Krikorian writes:

“Besides the specific problem of welcoming to our shores people who danced in the streets at the destruction of the Twin Towers, there’s the more general issue of resettling as refugees people who have somewhere else to go…Resettlement in America, regardless of the total numbers (and I obviously prefer lower numbers), should be reserved only for those who can’t stay where they are and will never have anywhere else to go.”

It’s unclear whether Krikorian’s limited knowledge of the subject is driven more by his xenophobic agenda or intellectual laziness. Iraqi Palestinians are definitely not in a position to stay where they are and they have limited options in terms of where they could possibly go. Iraq’s Palestinian community is largely made up of those who were already driven from their homes in 1948 and others that were expelled from Kuwait in 1991. According to Refugees International, following the U.S. invasion, Iraqi Palestinians have fled killings, kidnappings, torture, and death threats as nearly 3,000 of them were left stranded in three of the “most desolate refugee camps in the world” along the border between Syria and Iraq. Most of the Arab world has shut its doors, as Europe and Canada have already accepted the responsibility of several hundred refugees. For many in the State Department and international community, accepting these individuals is “part of a moral imperative” the U.S. has to “clean up the refugee crisis created by invading Iraq.”

Krikorian’s suggestion that Iraqi Palestinians are terrorists is based on the same shamefully misleading logic that the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq. While it is true that Saddam treated them well, they are a far cry from being Saddam loyalists. Iraqi Palestinians are “apolitical,” and “basically desperate, scared, miserable and ready to just get out of Iraq,” says Human Rights Watch refugee policy director Bill Frelick.

Krikorian doesn’t just think that the U.S. refugee program is a load of crap, he’s also suggesting we dump our “problems” into the backyards of other countries. Krikorian insists that there must be some other country for the Iraqi Palestinians to settle in, preferably somewhere within the Arab League of Nations. Krikorian told the Christian Science Monitor:

“This is politically a real hot potato…[A]merica has become a dumping ground for the State Department’s problems — they’re tossing their problems over their head into Harrisburg, Pa., or Omaha, Neb.”

Krikorian’s perception of Iraqi Palestinian refugees isn’t just cold-hearted and stringent, it’s ignorant. In fact, it’s surprising he’s even recognizing their right to simply exist as individuals seeing as he’s previously described their homeland as having “no past, no distinctiveness, no commonality other than being the negation of Israel, the anti-Israel — anti-matter, if you will, on the periodic table of nations.”

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a national security consultant at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Amid all the self-congratulation among American supporters of the “surge” and the controversy over a potential long-term security agreement between the United States and Iraq, there has been remarkably little discussion about the ticking time bomb of Iraq’s displaced population. Through no fault of their own, these refugees and internally displaced persons have the potential to seriously disrupt Iraqi politics and roll back the security gains of the past six-plus months. And the United States and Iraqi governments are doing next to nothing to find solutions to the status of Iraq’s displaced people or the problems associated with their potential return.

The political dynamics of refugee return were made clear in a weekend article in the New York Times detailing the struggles of a group of displaced Iraqi Shi’a to return to their homes in Diyala province. Their homes razed, these returnees are waiting on assistance from the Iraqi government. As the Times notes, “Whether supplies and compensation are forthcoming could make the difference between the return’s success and its failure.”

More broadly, the issue of refugee return is contentious because the property of many refugees and IDPs has been expropriated by sectarian militias. These militias in turn “resettled” members of their own sect, reinforcing the homogenization created by the expulsion of refugees. As a new report on the plight of Iraqi refugees by the International Crisis Group notes, “militias and armed groups exploited the refugee crisis for self-enrichment and war racketeering.” This sectarian cleansing has created two intertwined political dilemmas critical to any peaceful political settlement in Iraq.

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