On the 20th of last April, I was jotting few notes about Paul Bremer, these notes were made for the second edition of My Book, The Hanoudi Tragedy which I am contemplating in few months’ time after its release few weeks ago.  In these notes I was commenting on George Bush’s viceroy’s efforts in creating the post war political structure, which was part of the administration’s experiment in nation building in Iraq and especially what is called Bremer’s political reforms which I said were one of his one year management of occupied Iraq’s most terrible blunders. Four days after arriving in Baghdad Bremer did away with any semblance of national unity and informed the 7 member Iraqi leadership council [the group of exiles who were chosen during the London meeting in December 2002 as representatives of  Saddam’s  opposition], that there would be no interim government and no early handover of power and went ahead and appointed on  the frank basis of ethnic and sectarian identities a 52 member advisory group which was called the Iraqi Governing Council. This precedent continued under subsequent Iraqi administrations and was replicated in the lower government institutions with the terribly disastrous results that would later on characterize all the other aspects of the post Saddam life in Iraq.

On 9th of March 2003 the Bush administration started an adventure which was to become an appalling fiasco to which the United States and its people paid a horrendous price in blood and cash.  They invaded Iraq, ostensibly to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and save the world from his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and many other prodigious promises which they disremembered the moment their occupation of the country was accomplished.  The bush administration’s failure to honor their promises to the Iraqis and the ill-advised manner with which they conducted their occupation of Iraq provided the soil and energized a very tenacious opposition which gave birth to a very destructive insurgency which  plunged the United States and its people into a  dreadful quagmire for ten years which cost them a great deal in blood and treasure before the current administration was able to disengage from this appalling adventure on December 21,  2011.

March 19, 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, the war was started by the Bush on March 19, 2003, March also marks the ninth anniversary of the shooting by an American soldier of my son Nazar in Baghdad on the 29th of March 2004. The bush administration started the war, they said, to save the world from the menacing stockpiles of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and to free the Iraqi people from the jaws of his murderous regime to be followed by some kind of a Marshal plan to help the Iraqis rebuild their country which was crumbling after the long years of Saddam’s cruel dictatorship. The Iraqi people have always been dreaming about a miracle like that, but were never in a position to realize their dream because of the paralyzing fear which was inculcated in them by the police state which Saddam has created, very sadly the dream turned into ordeal and the hopes became a cruel deception. But I am not talking about the anniversary of the nightmare, into which we were plunged as a result of that terrible incident now, because I have already written a book about it which is gone into my blog for some time now as a link, My Book: The Hanoudi Tragedy.

Many friends and colleagues have noticed that I have been updating Hanoudi Letter for the last few months with inserts about only one topic and that is the book.  I have been working on recounting the story of the mistaken shooting of my son Nazar by a young American soldier on the morning of march 29, 2004 and the terrible nightmare we were plunged into as a result of that unfortunate incident when we had to take care of him after he was discharged from the American hospital in Baghdad where he was taken care of for six weeks after he was injured when they decided that they could not do anything more to help him  that we could either let them stop his life saving devices and allow him to pass away or take him home and take care of him ourselves which could be for a very long time, so we took him home and started the very complex task his condition required.