The week starting Monday the 27th of June 2005 was an unusual week in the current saga of Iraq and its people. I am not suggesting that the previous weeks were peaceful and enjoyable and the people were secure and well provided for, they were all painful and agonizing. Last week was unusually frustrating and extremely worrying. The week started with a really tragic incident, a student of mine a very nice young man recently married who had a few months old daughter was shot dead by the Americans near his house. The incident was doubly traumatizing to me because of its very tragic nature and the similarities it bore to our own 15 months nightmare myself and my family are living the result of the senseless shooting of my son Nazar by an American soldier on the 29th of March 2004. The 28th of the month was the first anniversary of the much publicized handing over by the Americans of the sovereignty of occupied Iraq to its people. The week also witnessed a very heated debate between two factions of the Bush's administration on the future role and the duration of the presence of the American forces in this country, a debate that is going against the Bush administration and is throwing it increasingly into a state of extreme hesitation and confusion.
One afternoon in the middle of May 2004, a young man came to my house in Baghdad and said he was Jacki Lyden's translator. Jacki Lyden who wanted to talk to a mutual friend who was suddenly out of reach. I was unable to help the young man, since I also lost touch with our mutual friend. Jacki Lyden is a senior correspondent and a host to a very popular program from National Public Radio (NPR) and a very talented writer who has already written a most fascinating book about her mother who has suffered sometime ago from a kind of mental illness during one of its crises she has decided that she was the Queen of Sheeba an decided to bequeath three of the kingdoms in her empire to her three daughters. Jacki the eldest daughter received Mesopotamia, whether that has anything to do with her future attachment to Iraq and the problems of its people is very difficult to ascertain, but Jacki has been interested in this country and its recurrent tragedies from the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century and which she covered for NPR for the last fifteen yeas and has been to the country for several times even during the last years of Saddam. Jacki came to know a lot of people in this country who were all impressed by her courage, professionalism and the great sympathy to the long suffering of this country and its people. Jacki is working now on a book about Iraq and the tragedies it has gone through for the last fifteen years, and specifically those we suffered in the aftermath of the American occupation of our country and was coming regularly to Iraq for the necessary research for the book.
The young man was a newly graduated doctor who was working as a junior resident in one of Baghdad's big hospitals. Jacki has met him for the first time when she was doing a story on the emergency room of the hospital he was working in and was greatly impressed by his English and was able to lure him to do a translating job to her, good English language translators are a very rare commodity in this country. The young man was greatly tempted and accepted the offer. The young man's salary from his job at the hospital was absolutely inadequate to support a young wife and a newly born daughter and from then on and in Jacki's words since October 2003, no step I have taken in four long independent journeys would have been possible without him. After my first non-productive encounter with him in my house I came to know him much better and seeing a lot more he wanted to continue his medical education and I was advising him how to proceed and he was a great help to me and my family after fate struck its very cruel blow at as in the form of the shooting of my son Nazar by an American soldier on the 29th of March 2004, which has left him in a very serious condition as a result of the brain damage that resulted from the clumsy and poor management of his injury.
The young man Dr. Yasser Salihee has been killed at a checkpoint by an American sniper on Friday, June 24, 2005.
Next is a quotation from a personal letter from Jacki Lyden, which I received the day after his murder, I am sure she wouldn't mind me quoting her. "One can have a thousand considerations of this war, for me the telling thing is that Yasser as a friend says in my book on Iraq is the kind of Iraqi citizen America wanted to invest in, smart, talented, accepting, religiously observant but open and eager, he had deep skepticism about Iraqi future but he did not let that keep him from living" he was killed only one week before he would have turned 31 years old. In wartimes, the children die before their fathers.
Last week was also very disappointing and frustrating, it was the first anniversary of the handing over of the sovereignty of this country to its people after 15 months of American occupation, which followed its invasion from March 20 to April 9, 2003. On that occasion the 28th of June the American President addressed the people of the United States and the world in his capacity as its unchallenged leader, an address which was purported to inaugurate a new Iraqi policy as a replacement for the current one which has been naiive and counterproductive an exorbitant failure, but the long awaited address a was a colossal failure at least from the point of view of the Iraqis. I was not interested in its reception by the American people or the world at large because instead, the Americans have been conditioned to accept what CNN, Fox News and the New York Times and the other media giants are regularly feeding them and the world has turned upside down with people like Koffi Anan and Jack Chirac and Tony Blair and George Galloway what to believe in.
The long a waited address as no more than a rehash of repeated chatter about the American's great successes in the mission in Iraq and the huge strides they are making to make Iraq the model of our dream of a new democratic free prosperous Middle East, which is governed by decent honest and democratically elected regimes in place of the extant corrupt greedy and useless ones. The President's address was a desperate attempt to bolster his popularity in his own country and abroad and the deteriorating support inside America of his Iraqi policies and an attempt to heal the rifts inside his own administration amongst its most senior members and a desperate attempt to save his own legacy.
America, its people and its administration are facing a real dilemma in Iraq, they are facing a full fledged increasingly guerilla war against a very brutal well organized, well financed and well informed opponent who are going to be very difficult to defeat Mr. Bush's promises of a final victory against them not withstanding. I have always refused to make an analogy between the current situation in this country and Vietnam, but the analogy is forcing itself increasingly on my discussions of the current situation in this country.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad, July 3, 2005
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