For Iraq, Afghanistan and us, decade of war

It was early April 2003. The city of Mosul in northern Iraq was in free fall.

The holdout units of Saddam Hussein's military had abandoned their posts sometime during the night. By midmorning, looters were helping themselves and vigilantes were beginning their revenge.

In a traffic circle, the garroted bodies of Saddam loyalists were propped up like scarecrows. At the university, libraries and labs were picked clean _ right down to someone wheeling away a model skeleton that jiggled in a noisy dance of flailing arms and snapping jaw.

This is where I made a promise to a doctor I met amid the mayhem.

I had come across Dr. Salim Mohammed …