'Lessons of History in Iraq'

WHEN IRREGULAR Iraqi militias temporarily slowed George Bush's legions back in March, an American anti-war acquaintance of mine declared the Anglo-U.S. invasion a Vietnam-like quagmire in the making, complete with a "credibility gap" created by a delusional president and his equally disoriented secretary of defense. More recently, I've read foreign critics comparing the ragged and violent U.S. occupation of Baghdad and its environs -- American soldiers firing fatal rounds into crowds of demonstrators and guerrilla fighters picking off GIs a few at a time -- to the brutal Russian occupation of Chechnya.

But while both analogies contain more than a few grains of truth -- especially in their self-defeating arrogance -- neither really applies to a land that has been a colony far longer than it has been an independent nation. And given the rich material available, I'm alarmed at how little we've heard from "experts" about the recent colonial history -- particularly the 4 decades of British domination -- of the territory formerly known as Mesopotamia.

Now that Iraq is our colony (with a little left over for Her Majesty), it's worth learning something about how the British came to rule Iraq and, more relevantly, how the British Empire ultimately failed to master its subject peoples and was forced to withdraw from its richest dominions.

--snip--(more, good piece..the Nehru quotes are rather fitting if a word or two is updated to the more modern lingo of professional deceievers masquerading as "liberators")--

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0708-08.htm

In Iraq, we are trying to succeed where the British have failed. In Vietnam we were trying to succeed where the French had failed.

{/sarcasm off}

...The nationalist Indian politician Jawaharal Nehru, while imprisoned by the British in the 1930s, mocked British and French pretensions that the "sole aim" of their takeover of the Ottoman Empire was emancipating its peoples and creating autonomous nations.

"They shoot and kill and destroy only for the good of the people shot down," Nehru wrote in 1934. "The novel feature of the modern type of imperialism is its attempt to hide its terrorism and exploitation behind pious phrases about 'trusteeship' and the 'good of the masses' and the 'training of backward peoples in self-government.' "

"ten rules for managing the world"

What more needs to be said?
Like it was all very simple.

History repeats itself, but they don't tell you that the first time it's a tragedy, the second time it's a farce.

Thanks for posting this.