An Open Letter To President George W. Bush – `I Was There`

I just read that you had expressed disappointment with what is happening in Iraq and confusion as to why the Iraqi Government and Iraqi people are not `getting with the plan`.

I am an Assyrian Christian, the original people of Iraq, the people of Nineveh to whom Jonah came.

I was in Iraq before the war doing all I could to help my family, having

been against the war, participated in Demonstrations along with the Iraqi Embassy but changed my mind when I looked into the eyes of my family paralyzed with the fear of Saddam.

I had forgotten that evil still exists in the world and Saddam was the embodiment of it.

I was there when the Iraqis looked both ways and said `Let the Americans come! We welcome them! Anything to get rid of Saddam. He has destroyed our lives, the lives of our children.`

I was there going from home to home and seeing the pictures on the wall of one or more family members killed by Saddam.

I was there the night an informer came to our house and told us guns had been passed to all the Baath Party members but they would not fight for Saddam!

I was there days before the war when nobody in Baghdad would lift a finger to defend Saddam, not even the military who sat drinking in their sandbag posts.

Further, I was there when terror gripped Baghdad, not because of the American Bombing, but because to a man, the Iraqi people were desperately afraid of what Saddam Hussein would do with all of his Weapons of Mass Destruction – and they all believe he had every possible kind of weapon he could get his hands on – when cornered!

It got so desperate in the last days leading up to Liberation that people were all talking about committing mass suicide if the Americans did not come. They had waited since the end of the Gulf War to be liberated and if this one was going to fail could not go on.

I was there when our team of volunteers took the first truck to cross the border after the war with 20 tons of food, medicine, 500 letters from family members, 10 Satellite telephones and more.

I was there too when members of the CPA seemed more interested in seeing Iraq fail so they could get John Kerry elected so they could get a job in Washington than working to complete the Liberation of the longsuffering Iraqi people.

I was there and looked into the eyes of Paul Bremer as he said with a straight face `The British have a `Christian` constitution. Why shouldn´t the Iraqis have a `moslem`, one? ` I was there in the Palestine hotel lobby when the first of the Iranian agents descended on Baghdad to the scorn and hate of the Iraqis.

I was there when our people opened their doors to find a paper written in bad, Iranian accented arabic saying `To the women of this house – cover your heads and act like Moslems or you will have three choices – we will either kill you, rape you, burn your house or bomb you. `

I was driving down the main street in Baghdad when three gunmen pointed at our car, dragged me out and through the grace of God let us go.

I was there when our plane taking off from Baghdad International Airport was shot at and we looked over the wing to see the smoke of the bomb that had just missed us.

I was there when my ride did not show up on my way to the UN Compound where I was to have been in the exact place and time when it blew up.

I was there in the Convention center when one, young American woman told a whole room full of angry Iraqi men to`shut up` while an Iraqi woman spoke.

I was there, looking into the exhausted eyes of a soldier, on his way home after a hard days work who replied to my question `why are you here` with the words I have heard hundreds of times `just doing my job, sir – I just want the Iraqis to have what we have . . .`

I was there when one of the members of the Iraqi Constitutional Commission expressed his anger saying `we all worked together and agreed that the Iraqi Constitution should have no mention of religion or ideology. Why do the Americans want to turn Iraq into another Iran? `

I was there when we begged and begged for the border to be sealed so the Iranians could not send their agents across and the 24-hour Iranian channel to be blocked so the progress would be undermined and we were told `no`!

I was there in Baghdad on the day of the handover when everybody was all excited because they expected the Iraqis to dance in the streets at the end of the `hated` American `occupation`.

We waited and waited . . . Baghdad was silent, nobody `danced` and the only things the Iraqis said in terror was`Are the Americans going to leave us. `

I was there, Mr. President when the Iraqi President said `the election will not be free and fair. Iran has sent millions of falsified ballots across the border to skewer the election. `

I was there when the head of the UN Electoral commission smirked when I publicly challenged him on the electoral system that he had designed to ensure that the radicals would be elected and the vote of the Iraqi people would be suppressed.

I was brokenhearted when our people, the Assyrian Christians were turned away from voting centers and the few ballots that came in dumped. `

Mr. President, what America did and is doing for Iraq is much loved and supported by the people of Iraq. They despised Saddam.

At the same time a whole group of people as I have named above have done all they can to make Iraq fail.

The `silent majority` of the Iraqi people are the ones we owe success too.

It is still not too late. While the southern part of Iraq is what we call `western Iran`, the Northern part of Iraq is going gangbusters.

If you can support what both the Iraqi Prime Minister, President and nearly all members of the cabinet have promised me personally as well as publicly and which is guaranteed in the Constitution – an Assyrian Christian Province in the land of Nineveh and Jonah, the last of the four groups in Iraq will have a home and you will see the North of Iraq become even more than you dreamed for the whole of Iraq.

It is the Iraqi people, the `silent majority`, not the current government elected through a fraudulent electoral system designed by the UN to make Iran win and through the use of fraudulently printed ballots shipped in from Iran that are the true voice of Iran.

Your dream for a free, successful and model Iraq to show the rest of the long suffering middle east that they too can be free is correct and the will of the much intimidated, much abused and much used Iraqi people.

Please, stay the course! Don´t listen to the State Department, the UN, the suede Iraqi Government – 30 members of Moqhtada Sadr are members for heavens sake – listen to the Iraqi people!

Job one is to demand that the words inserted against the will of the Iraqi Constitutional Commission by Paul Bremer `Islam is the official religion of the nation` are removed.

Job two is an Assyrian Christian Province, enforced and you will see Northern Iraq blossom, grow and return the trust and the sacrifice of 2,500 brave young men and women who gave of their lives not to see the Islamic Republic of Iraq but as I have heard them say hundreds of times after a hot, dusty day in Iraq `we are here because we want the Iraqi people to have what we have – freedom . . .`

You are right! The Iraqi people are right! Please stay the course and listen to the people who count!

Ken Joseph Jr. directs Assyrianchristians.com and is completing a book on his experiences in Iraq entitled `I Was Wrong`.