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Report from 2003 medical trip to Baghdad (written in July, 2003) In July, 2003, several months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Mel Lehman traveled alone to Iraq and delivered 23 medical textbooks and 9 medical journals to a medical college in Iraq. The trip was a follow-up to our December, 2002, medical delegation to Iraq. The textbooks and journals were a gift from HRH Dr. Princess Nisreen El-Hashemite, granddaughter of King Faisal who ruled Iraq in the early decades of the 20th century. Besides delivering textbooks, he also sought to do an assessment of the situation in preparation for possibly bringing another team of doctors. Because of 12 years of devastating economic sanctions from 1991-2003, it has been very hard for Iraqi doctors to keep up with medical advances in the rest of the world. They are just now beginning the long road of rehabilitating the Iraqi medical education system. Textbooks are still scarce there and I was told that the textbooks I delivered were very helpful and deeply appreciated. And I was told that the textbooks would be photocopied and distributed within the Iraqi medical community. In addition to delivering medical textbooks and journals, I also delivered a number of greeting cards from Americans to Iraqis and also visited some old friends I had gotten to know over the years who welcomed me warmly. This was my seventh and most difficult trip to Iraq by far. I found a city living in real fear – more fear than we grasped in the U.S. in the first months after the invasion. Our news media had told us repeatedly of the problems facing Baghdad after the invasion – lack of security, lack of electricity and phone service, lack of clean water. But until you’ve spent a week in a city in such a state of anarchy as Baghdad is today, it’s hard to fully grasp what people there are going through. A simple thing that we take for granted -- that we can call the police if there is a problem -- does not exist today in Baghdad. The phones at my hotel did not work, and even if they had worked, there was no police for us to call! With reports of criminals released from jail roaming the streets and small groups of homeless teen-age kids wandering on the streets outside my hotel, that was a real concern. The doctors I spoke with in Baghdad had real concerns about their own personal security, too, and they emphasized that I needed to be careful. Because of the very difficult situation, I decided that the October, 2003, delegation of doctors we were planning to take to Iraq obviously had to be postponed until the situation is safer. [As of early 2009 the situation has still not sufficiently improved to return to Iraq so in the mean time we began taking delegations to Syria]. Recently we read that Saddam Hussein’s two sons were killed and now American officials express optimism that they’ll finally get Saddam soon and then the attacks on American soldiers will stop. I very much hope that’s the case, but I’m afraid that after spending a week in Iraq it doesn’t look that simple to me. The sense I got of talking to Iraqis was that we Americans need to announce a timeline of when and how we will turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis. My sense was that Iraqis wanted this to happen in several months, with December, 2003, as a target date, and the U.S. is talking about staying there several years. The result, I fear, will be trouble -- even more trouble than our troops are experiencing now. |