I am an Iraqi. I live in the United States, where, if all goes well, I will soon become a citizen. So it is with decidedly mixed emotions that I've followed the U.S. troop withdrawal from my home country, and the media coverage of what is described here as "the end of the war in Iraq." The war might be ending for the Americans, but for the Iraqis it continues. I worry that it may get worse.
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When I look back on the past nine years, I can't help but think of the dozens of friends and relatives who have been killed or wounded in the chaos that followed the U.S. invasion in the spring of 2003. The one that stands out most vividly is my nephew Iyad. Five years my junior, Iyad grew up in our home. He was as close to me as one of my own brothers. But then, one day in the spring of 2006, he was just about to leave his job in a warehouse in southwest Baghdad when a mortar shell came crashing through the roof and exploded inside, killing him and several of his co-workers.
We found what was left of him the next day. His skull had been crushed, his body shredded to pieces. He was 25 years old. We never learned who fired the shell, or why. It probably came from one of the rampaging sectarian militias that were tearing Iraq apart at the time. The only thing that could be established with certainty was that the warehouse was not the intended target. Like so many of the deaths in Iraq over the past nine years, Iyad's was entirely random. It was just part of the chaos that has reigned in the country for years and shows little sign of stopping.
After all these years, there's still this one thing that I can't quite understand. How could the same people who put the first man on the moon -- people who are so intelligent, so good at politics, so important in international affairs -- have made the mistake of invading Iraq? I can imagine two third-world countries deciding to go to war with each other and failing to plan ahead. But the Americans? Americans are good at business, aren't they? Normally, people in business would do a feasibility study. You'd think that you'd do that too before invading an entire country. You should make sure you have the right tools, alternative courses of action, back-up plans. But that didn't happen. There was no plan at all, as far as we could see. They should have been able to see, in a country with so many sectarian and ethnic divides, what would happen. But they didn't. They didn't understand anything.
I once had a physiology professor who told us something I've never forgotten: "Never change what is functionally acceptable." His saying has come back to me so many times over the years. Don't get me wrong: There were a lot of bad things under Saddam. There were massacres, there were abuses. But it was more complicated than that. Iraq had an education system that was the envy of the Middle East; people came from other Arab countries, like Jordan, to study there. Iraq had high literacy and good health care. There was a campaign that stamped out polio. Today, almost nine years after the invasion, my parents in Baghdad still don't have regular electricity. The hospitals and the schools have fallen apart. The infrastructure is crumbling.
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