Contemplations...before... Posted by Hello

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"I know what that means!" he remarked, with a hint of excitment. "It says 'Allah'. " I explained. "Yeah! Aalaa !". I wasn't going to argue with a security guard at BWI over the correct pronounciation of the Arabic word. We were in the in the 'High Security' line. "I know why they placed me here," said the lady before me. "It happens every time I don't check in any luggage"... "Well," I replied, "It happens every time they read my name." She gave me a quizzical look. The New Zealanders behind me looked at me. "Do we really have to take off our shoes now?"... "You're better off taking them off now than later." I felt I owed them more explanation. "This is for our security, you know. It's better to be safe than sorry"...I wanted to add, especially with the elections approaching...but I bit my tongue... "So why do you wear it?" I turned to the almost...
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Our Family Doctor in Baghdad Dr. Ihsan or Amu Ihsan (Uncle Ihsan), as we liked to call him had had a tough life. He lost a beautiful wife to cancer, early in his marriage. He was left to raise two boys and a girl, alone. I remember, Ayman, his daughter, at Baghad High. She had inherited her mother’s looks and was as kind as she was pretty. We had a number of ‘Family Doctors’. There was Dr. Khalid, who was also an impressionist artist, a member of the Pioneer Artist movement in Iraq that commenced in the early sixties. There was Dr. Badri, who was the first Iraqi to obtain an FRCS in Heart Surgery in the UK, in 1948. And there was Dr. Ihsan. He later married Aunty Sevem (her name meant ‘fair’ in Turkish), in the eighties. I was in high school then. People mispronounced her name, and often called her ‘Seven’, mistaking it for an English word. She would smile in her own sweet way at that. The most vivid of my memories with Dr. Ihsan was when I overdosed on an anti-spasmodic, I perceived a...
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Letter to the Columbus Dispatch, published in the Editorial page on Monday, September 12, 2005 Bad planning hurt U.S. in Iraq, Gulf Coast As an Iraqi living in the United States, watching the chaotic scenes in Louisiana and Mississippi really explains the mess in Iraq for me. The parallels are overwhelming. Policy-makers knew years ago that something like this would hit the southern coast of the United States. What did they do about it? Nothing. Countries like the Netherlands and Norway have much more technologically advanced levees and dikes that endure winds of 200 mph vs. the 150 mph caused by Hurricane Katrina. Why couldn't the United States, the most technologically advanced country in the world, enjoy the same? Likewise in Iraq, the planning that was supposed to take place before the invasion never happened. The army and police, the only resources for maintaining security in the country, were disbanded in the blink of an eye, without any consideration for the consequences. Th...
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