Iraq teetered on the edge of the abyss even before the bombs began to drop. While watching war coverage on TV, one is barraged by a numbing litany of appalling statistics showing the number of the victims either because of the oppression of Saddam's regime (confirmed by the disclosure of the mass graves) and by the direct impact of the unprecedented strict sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people for more than long 12 years and most of the prey were children. Also the corruption in the oil for food program which accompanied this blind punishment needs no discussion. During the war the civilians again were the fuel of the collateral damages resulting from the military activities. The chaos of the postwar crippled the rudimentary infrastructure and till now after 3 years, the crisis is unsolved. On the contrary now the killing enemy is unidentified but the target is still the civilians and the situation is volatile and unpredictable. How to end the cycle? Where to begin is a hard question. The best efforts disappear into a gaping maw of endless need. If we take a triage approach then stability and rebuilding are intertwined goals. Before that political chaos disrupts any initiative and in the absence of a national unity government little can be done to create a lasting change. Iraq's most important resource is it's capable resilient people, therefore they are targeted. Specifically to the plight of physicians: many of them abandoned, others are killed and others left the country and the remaining are struggling with poor basic facilities and rudimentary infrastructure combined with outdated information and communication technologies, which continue to bottleneck any thinkable plan for progress. Added to this are the crippling staff deficiency, organizational and administrative failure, minimally supervised professional training, coupled with lack of motivation and incentives. All of these collectively operate on a mosaic of uncompromisable health related cultural dogmas and social ideologies, illiteracy and poverty. Left unchanged the soils of this country will inevitably remain infertile for seeds of raising enterprises to implant let alone to take root and flower. Here, with this background a nagging question spring's to one's mind: How could this multifaceted problem benefit from a multidisciplinary,

multidimensional approach. A caveat at this point is in order. My answer that follows is meant neither to be inclusive of everything that must be carried out nor exclusive of other valid methodologies or tactics. First and foremost it behoves that governments in the developed countries flex their legislative and executive muscles to be more involved in the fullest sense of the word in improving the status quo of physicians to close the gap which is alarmingly growing very rapidly between and them and the rest of the world. They have to run in order to just remain in the same place. Secondly to take the bull by the horn and overcome their conceptual vision which is clouded with uncertainty, skepticism and reluctance. Thirdly the issue which is highly charged and tends to produce more heat than light is the medical research. I call the WHO , THE WORLD BANK and other United Nations agencies to conduct a campaign sponsoring training programs involving large numbers of physicians. It is one of the few activities which when carried out and exploited well, will profoundly transform the health of the entire society. It can provide legislators, policy makers and others involved in the decision making processes. The ingredients to make sound judgment and thoughtful planning, valuable precise and up to date vital statistics will be available to let governments and societies zero in on present health problems and thus devise appropriate courses of actions. Likewise an insight into projected health problems of the society will be additionally gained to allow futuristic health planning and priority setting strategies. Policy makers are further enabled to make better use of the existing health facilities and realistically identify, analyze and quantify existing deficiencies and to figure out workable solutions. Medical practitioners armed by a user friendly, society centered, locally relevant database will be able to deliver better customized care .It is the medical research where by any false sense of health care security based on impressionable and untested assumptions or inflated assumptions could be debunked and eliminated. Otherwise they would readily derail governments and public alike. Now with this bird's eye view, it should be incontrovertible to conclude that medical research is a worthwhile, smart national investment. To ensure these endeavors to autonomously continue and accelerate, policy makers in the developed countries should fully understand that things never get better by being left alone, nor ignoring problems will make them disappear. The daily street violence is limited to a few areas, so we can start in the relatively stable cities to jump on the fears from lack of security. I think that the crisis though, is an opportunity for the pioneers and far sighted people.