Four years after the launching of what was promised to be a new beginning for Iraq and a better future to its people after the murderous and devastating years under Saddam and his sickening regime things are no better at all. Things are actually worse now than during the worst years of Saddam, which is a great disappointment and a real tragedy. This is very sad and an extremely painful conclusion, because I have been in the beginning very enthusiastic and supportive of the American move. I must have been very naive to accept the promises of the Bush administration without a less than the necessary inquisition into the honesty and genuineness of those promises, but metamorphosing from the naive I was at that time to the misanthropist I am nowadays needed the frustrations, the tragedies and the pains and agonies we suffered as a nation and as individuals during the last four years to accomplish that metamorphosis. Four years ago when jubilant crowds with the help of American marines hauled down the big statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos square in the center of Baghdad it looked like that the promises of the Bush team prior to the war were going to come true, but the initial jubilation and the toppling of Saddam and the dismantling of his regime was followed by a guerrilla war and then almost a civil war, which left Iraq in a terrible mess.
In the words of one Iraqi which are echoed by many others, "although Saddam was like Stalin the occupation is worse". So what went on wrong? I was planning an update to this blog on the occasion of the anniversary of the launching of operation Iraqi freedom, but I found out that there was nothing to celebrate about. The current situation in our country is beyond my ability to talk about with the necessary objectify and knowledge of what is really going on to make things much worse is the nature and quality of what we are being told by the international and the other famous centers of research and education which I find lacking from sources on both sides of the Atlantic. I started by trying to find out about what went wrong and immediately found myself drowned an incredible ocean of conflicting facts, half lies and very often straight forward lies and deceptions which was a hapless task. So I started to hypothesize about what is going to happen next and what is the future and here again I was on no much better grounds, the situation has deteriorated to such an extent even the expression of a mild hopeful statement is viewed as a sign of impending dementia or worse a hypocrisy. All of this was not much help to my current state of mind and physical health, so I decided to go back to the Hanoudi tragedy, the nightmare my family have been living in for the last years, in fact the 3rd anniversary of the shooting of my son coincides with the anniversary of the launching of the Iraqi operation This is what I wrote few weeks after we were so painfully struck: My son NAZAR who is 37yeras old was on the 29th of March shot by an American soldier, the facts about the incidence and the circumstances under which it happened have never been explained to us by anybody, he was operated at the site and on the same evening was transferred to the American military hospital in the green zone [31st CSH] where he had many operations and many complications during his stay there including one major catastrophe in a leading Iraqi hospital in the capital to which he was sent from the American one for a dialysis which was a complete failure and resulted in a very severe brain damage contributing terribly to his now very serious condition. He was discharged from the American hospital after about five weeks still in an extremely serious condition when we had to take him because of our terrible experience with the local government hospital to a private clinic, he is in a fairly advanced vegetative state, breathing through a tracheostomy, fed by a naso-gastric tube and urinates through a catheter and has to be watched twenty four hourly, his nutritional requirements and his drugs are brought from outside this country because they are very specific and are not available here , all this with the costs of his hospitalization, his nursing care and his physiotherapeutic regime are costing a fortune, we are not rich and I have not been doing any work all these last weeks of the tragedy but we are being supported by some of our relatives and friends and e waiting and hoping for a miracle. Our unfortunate son's ordeal turned our lives upside down, his twenty hours a day care was and still is a full time job to the three of us who are undertaking this care, his mother his sister and myself, I had to stop doing my bit of ophthalmology, my daughter who was on her way to a very promising career in dress designing had to stop working and moved with us to the boy's house to help, Nazar is in a very serious condition which requires constant observation, his position has to be changed every few hours, he is fed from the beginning and still through a naso-gastric tube, he breathes with the help of a tracheotomy but his hearing is excellent, he sees and feels what is going on around him, but he cannot respond, this situation continued until the summer of 2005, then, the situation at home was already on its way to the abyss it has reached now so we moved him to Amman/Jordan were we have been since. I am going to stop very shortly, it is very early morning, my shift start after midnight and it is already 3AM in the new day.
The miracle is yet to materialize and we are still in Amman, I m sure a lot of people are by now fairly familiar with our tragedy some of our friends colleagues and few family members have been very helpful very kind and very supportive but many others including some of our own family have been silent and self centered, had contributed nothing not even a single word of compassion and kindness to the very difficult and expensive care of my son. In spite of my pleas including one on the pages of this very website, and what I was pleading for was at least a nice sincere word, but even a single word was very often absent, but I am not bitter or sour, I have lived long enough to know that one has to accept what life offers without much acerbity or complaining. Happy Easter Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Amman/Jordan
Wed, March, 28, 2007
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