Editor’s note: This commentary is by Gary Shattuck, of Shrewsbury, who is a graduate of Vermont Law School and former Vermont federal prosecutor who recently obtained his master’s degree in military history. He is currently researching and writing on issues relating to the state’s early history from a legal perspective, most recently describing Vermont’s first opium epidemic in the 19th century.

[O]n Oct. 12, 2003, a horrendous explosion occurred in downtown Baghdad, immediately in front of the Baghdad Hotel where I was staying, sending up a huge plume of smoke and debris visible from many miles off. Fortunately, I was several blocks away at the Ministry of Justice attending a meeting, but the blast triggered by a suicide car bomber caused significant destruction and the deaths of several of the Kurd guards stationed in front. This building represented an unwanted symbol within the Iraq capital because it is where civilian representatives of the U.S. government stayed as they sought to bring order out of the growing chaos taking place in the months following the invasion.

My work in Iraq focused on standing up a crumbling legal system, virtually absent in the years of Saddam Hussein and struggling to regroup in these pivotal months. As a member of the U.S. Department of Justice Judicial Assessment Team, I headed efforts in Baghdad and surrounding governates to gather critical information that Washington officials would then use in developing future programs to further the process. As a part of that, I had significant involvement with Iraq’s various ministry officials, members of the judiciary, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Guarded closely by troops from the Third Infantry Division, many visits were made to the city’s several burned out and destroyed courthouses where I also met with various functionaries to gather additional information.

Once work on the overall assessment was completed, I was appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Ambassador Paul Bremer as one of three international attorneys, together with three Iraqi judges, to the Judicial Review Committee. The JRC was charged with vetting the credentials of the country’s 850 judges and prosecutors in order to consider whether they could participate in the country’s new legal world. We obtained much information on each, recovering records from throughout Baghdad and I set up a system to coordinate it all, together with the help from several interpreters. Many interviews were then conducted and we made our best assessments of who should stay and who should go. We dismissed some of Saddam’s killers, but I know it was not a perfect system and that some who had no right to maintain their particular position managed to remain in power. Regardless, it was an honor for both myself and members of the team to have our hard work recognized by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and then relied upon by later legal advisers arriving to take up our work.

My time in Iraq followed several months work in Kosovo in 2000 where I was seconded by DOJ to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to set up the Kosovo Judicial Institute. This effort involved working closely with Albanian and Serbian judges, prosecutors and attorneys, together with Kosovar legislators, in order to establish a functioning legal system following that vicious ethnic conflict. It was an intense period that required learning many new things and bringing those with boiling and divergent interests together. In another aspect of the work, I headed the effort in creating a procedural law enforcement manual that could be understood and used by indigenous police and prosecutors, international police, the U.N. and NATO troops all struggling mightily to comply with the applicable law.

Each of these experiences in Iraq and Kosovo had a profound effect on my understanding of foreign cultures and how complicated societal, political, economic and religious factors affected their views on a particular legal system. I knew that coming from Vermont, where I worked in Rutland as an assistant U.S. attorney and coordinator of the district’s Anti-terrorism Task Force, that things would be different. However, it was only through hands-on involvement with these processes that I came to appreciate their many nuances, many of which could only barely be understood by even those who were present. It was one of those cases where nothing that anyone from outside said meant much and only experiencing the sights and smells of war brought home the true nature of things.

Transition now to the situation in Rutland where the mayor seeks to introduce a large body of Syrians from the Middle East into the community in the near future. It is unquestionably an honorable thing he wants to do, but as the evidence has unfortunately shown, one conducted in secrecy and without the input of important stakeholders now scrambling to have their voices heard. Many have understandably rallied to the mayor’s side presenting admirable, altruistic arguments in favor of his decision, ones that certainly no person of feeling and compassion could deny. Meanwhile, others left out of the decision seek to gain additional time in order to more fully understand what it is he wants to do and to see if their community can withstand the influx and still provide for itself in its traditional manner.

These are not easy questions to formulate and there are certainly no easy answers to any of them. This is not a case of slow assimilation taking place over a period of time, such as past instances in our country’s and state’s history have experienced that have allowed for graduated accommodation by different cultures occupying the same place at the same moment. Rather, it is a sudden and stark shift that is proposed seeking to bring an Eastern people with a wholly different history and culture into an environment founded on Western tradition. There is little in this scenario that resembles the arrival of groups in the past from Ireland, France, Germany and Italy, all of whom shared a centuries-long common heritage and it presents a challenge deserving of deep and reflective consideration. It certainly gave me pause to consider the cultural differences between us when an Iraqi judge I greatly respected told me in all seriousness that the World Trade Center towers fell because of a Jewish plot. Forgive the analogy, but the Rutland situation is akin to trying to ram a square peg down a round hole.

Many do not want to recognize these fundamental differences, believing that humankind basically possesses all of the same kinds of needs and will eventually fall into a uniform way of obtaining them and that we can then live in peace. Unfortunately, that was not the case in Kosovo where Serb hunted down Albanian and in Iraq where Saddam’s murderous Ba’ath Party held sway over the population and Sunni and Shia went at each other’s throats. The daily news continually tells us of Muslim extremists, including Syrian asylum seekers, threatening the safety of Europeans in many different ways that are every bit as vicious as those employed in Kosovo and Iraq. The FBI now advises that the United States is a ripe target for a diaspora of terrorists with the dwindling presence of ISIS taking place. It is a dire picture they paint and one that needs to be fully considered. These are not your father’s times and from what I have seen, relying on the effectiveness of any vetting process of arrivals is something that can only be accepted with great skepticism.

This is not an easy thing to say, but the Rutland Syrian relocation initiative has been, as they said in Kosovo and Iraq when the situation changed unforeseeably, OBE, or “overtaken by events.” Too much has happened since the mayor’s April announcement that raises serious security and safety concerns and it needs to be halted in its tracks to see if it even remains a viable project. At this point, his push to put into place a “Resettlement Cabinet” to remedy the flawed manner in which his proposal unfolded smacks of a late-arriving attempt to gain some level of legitimacy. Further, asking it to do as much as he wants in such a short period of time will inevitably only call into question the validity of whatever findings it does offer. Finally, pushing for its hurried input in advance of the November elections makes little sense when it is conceivable that our national immigration policies could change radically from what they are now. As I recently wrote to Rutland’s mayor and board of aldermen, “Feeling good about doing good will be of little solace should we stumble and afford an opportunity for others to take advantage of our good will and inflict harm not just in Rutland, but anywhere in the country.” This is not a game with a timetable dictating a beginning and an ending, but a life changing event affecting the Rutland community and beyond, and the Syrians themselves. None of them, or the country for that matter, deserves a rushed decision and to do otherwise constitutes a great disservice to all. It is also an affront to the democratic process itself turned on its head at the very onset by good intentions, but unfortunately swayed more by heady enthusiasm than in anticipating its potential for untoward consequences.