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Today’s update is about a story of a book that I have written about Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime, which is now part of the recent history of our unfortunate country’s very turbulent history. I suppose it is to a very great extent is the result of our people’s disinterest in history and the lessons which could be gleaned from studying it. For this very simple reason I have written a book on Saddam Hussein hoping that having lived under his tyranny for more than 35 years and enduring all kinds of difficulties and deprivations I might be able to say something true and rational about those terrible years. The story of Saddam and his regime is a very important part of the recent history of Iraq, it is a big mistake to put it behind us and forget it. I think it is absolutely necessary to study it in a most rational and objective way.
History is the study of the past to learn lessons for the future.
Over the years there has been over the years a great deal of literature on Saddam Hussein and his regime, some of it was written by hired crooks and charlatans as part of a sickening and a very determined process of creating a hero. They are all worthless and full of lies and fabrications. Others are the work of scholars and professors in first class universities and famous think tanks with a good deal of help from extremely capable assistants and researchers doing their data collection in very large libraries and excellent offices. Almost all of them were not totally acceptable to me, because they lacked the necessary touch with the reality of the situation inside the country except in a small number of cases. Having lived the last 35 years in the hell that this creature has created for us, I have always dreamt of writing about Saddam and his rule hoping that my life in Saddam’s hell might provide some useful insights into this terrible world. Today’s update is the story of the book I wrote on Saddam Hussein and his regime, which is now part of the recent history of our unfortunate’s country’s very turbulent history, which I suppose is to a very great extent is the result of our people’s disinterest in history and the lessons which could be gleaned from studying it. For this very simple reason I have been writing hoping that having lived under unbelievable tyranny for more than 35 years and enduring all kinds of difficulties and deprivations I might be able to say something true and rational about those terrible years. The story of Saddam and his regime is a very important part of the recent history of this country it is a big mistake to ignore it in spite of the pain it arouses. My book is entitled: “Saddam Hussein, the origins the rise and the fall”, it is about sixty thousand words; it begins with an introduction which is a short essay on the history of Iraq from man’s first civilization to Saddam. A time span of more than six thousand years, the three sections I have just mentioned, a short chapter on the final end of the dictator and an epilogue which describes very briefly the situation in Iraq in the aftermath of its occupation. I retired from government service in 1989 after thirty five years of ophthalmology. After retirement, I was still doing some clinical work but not as much as when I was in active service. This allowed a good deal of time for reading and dreaming about starting to write something myself then a very interesting possibility presented itself, a book on Saddam Hussein. Saddam has invaded the next door sheikhdom of Kuwait in 1990 a badly timed and ill conceived adventure which was opposed by a large chunk of the world, a massive opposition which was led by the Americans and President George Bush. President Bush insisted that Saddam’s adventure was illegal and would not last, and that he is going to be expelled from Kuwait, this will not stand he said, he also hinted that Saddam would be finished with once and for all and that the senior Bush is prepared to help the Iraqis deal with their oppressor if they are going to rise against him. What happened afterwards is well known, after Saddam was expelled from the sheikhdom the majority of the Iraqi population rose against him, the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north in a twin uprising which swept the country and within a very short time Saddam was left controlling only a very small part of the country Baghdad and few square miles around it. We in Iraq thought that Saddam was finished, but he was not finished, the American President has changed his mind. Saddam was given a blood transfusion; he remained in power and started a very brutal suppression of the twin uprisings. Now that Saddam Hussein was back at the helm he went back to his old habits of murdering and destroying the lives of his own people. In fact it was now a very brutal vendetta against those who rose against him and even some the ones who didn’t. He flourished in spite of the United Nations and other international sanctions which were imposed supposedly to stop him from damaging the lives of the Iraqis and threatening his neighbors and his other real or imagined enemies. Those who really suffered were the Iraqis themselves. We continued to suffer, I myself and my family had our share of the impoverishment and deprivations, the country was gripped in the claws of a terrible inflation when our currency depreciated to almost nothing, the national currency the dinar was at times worth 3.2 US dollars, now a dollar was worth 3000 dinars and you can imagine what that did tour lives and the hardships we had to endure. I would like to emphasize here that I am not talking now about our difficulties, but about the book I have started on the story of Saddam when we believed that he was going and which I had to put back on the shelf and for a very simple reason, a small hint about what I was doing meant an invitation to certain very serious reprisals. In spite of those dangers, I continued to gather data and information and Saddam and his regime until the Americans arrived in the country in 2003 when I started to write again and with an accelerated pace now that Saddam has finally been removed when I finished the job at the end of 2003. A very reasonable manuscript was ready for publication, but there were no publishers for me in spite of a very active and persistent search in the face of many disappointments and rejections. The writing of the book was not an easy job, but finding a publisher for it was a real problem, an extremely difficult problem and very frustrating. The publishing world is a very arid structure a very well knit family which is very difficult for some unknown mediocre outsider extremely hard to penetrate. I started knocking on the doors of large and small houses immediately after finishing writing and every time it was a rejection sometimes not a very nice one. One of my American friends, a radio journalist and a writer herself suggested that I might start inserting small parts from the book in my blog with the hope that someone might see it and help with the publishing. One of my own brothers also suggested hat I might try one of the new so called on-demand publishers a very recent and a promising development. What has also been a great encouragement and assistance in this adventure was the promise of one of my excellent and extremely capable friends that she was willing to go over the draft for a final reading and edition, in the mean time I am crossing my fingers and praying. Najeeb Hanoudi
Berkley, Michigan
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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