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=> I take exception...

I take exception...
Posted by St. Pancho (Guest) - Saturday, January 14 2006, 2:43:45 (CET)
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>The Sumerian word "lugal" meant "big man," and "the cult of the 'great man,' once firmly fixed, has endured in the minds of Iraqis ever since." Legal codes first emerged in Babylon (Hammurabi's is the most famous, but it wasn't the first or the only one) and Iraqis have always embraced rigid codes of conduct. Saddam Hussein – or Husain , as Polk prefers to spell it and which he explains in a foreword – invoked ancient rulers constantly to reinforce his power and demonstrate his reverence for the concept of the "great man."
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>This doesn't suggest fertile soil for democracy or a deeply rooted desire for freedom. Indeed, many Iraqis today, though they don't yearn for Saddam himself, compare the stability of his rule favorably with the chaos of U.S. occupation.

...hold on there...as I recall the majority of Colonists did NOT want to split from THEIR big man...that nutso King George III. And that was barely 300 year ago...so let`s watch out for this Eurocentric twadle about how Europeans YEARN to be free while the rest of us dimwits long for a Bush over us.
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>British Iraq
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>Polk's discussion of British rule, directly from 1918 to 1933 and indirectly until 1958, is most relevant to the current situation. The British invasion in 1914 was based on bad intelligence and little knowledge of the region. Sound familiar?
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>The British expected the Iraqis to be grateful for their good administration, but "[t]he Iraqis did not want Britain to run their country," and a vast insurrection emerged against the 133,000 British troops (number sound familiar?). The anti-guerrilla campaign eventually cost six times as much as the entire World War I campaign in the Middle East. When the ground war became a stalemate, the British used air power, as the United States is doing now. Its effectiveness was limited.

...they did NOT go to make friends...they did NOT "miscalculate"...it is BUSINESS interests who run the show and to them the military arm as well as the diplomatic are mere to be used by corporate Barons to line their bottom lines...the Haliburton of the Brits scored BIG...as our`s are doing now...if you believe their crap, you MIGHT assume they "misjudged"...but if you KNOW that they`re about...you`d realize they did it JUST RIGHT.
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>The revolt that eventually (inevitably?) emerged in 1920 horrified the British government:
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>"This was no tribal revolt. It was a national war of independence. Tribesmen did much of the fighting, no doubt, but they were led by respected men of religion, both Sunni and Shias, doctors, teachers, merchants, journalists, and even those 'tame' Iraqis who were being trained to be government officials."

...right...and our dumbass Levies fought AGAINST the integrity of Iraq and FOR the Brits...even though Iraq had taken their Christian ASSES in to save them from OTHER Muslims...these people know only treachery...look at what they do to each other.
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>Interestingly, T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), who had actually spent time in the Middle East, understood the problems better than most of those deputed to solve them. In August 1920, he wrote a letter to the London Sunday Times:
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>"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. … We are, today, not far from a disaster."
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>Lawrence compared British rule unfavorably with the despotic Ottoman regime:
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>"Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied and killed an average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armored cars, gunboats, and armored trains. We killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely populated."
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>He also noted the unsustainable costs of the occupation.
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>Foreign Rule
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>The British replaced their first governor with a second one. Sound familiar? Then they decided to create a quasi-independent state under mandate from the League of Nations – and couldn't understand why many Iraqis distrusted their intentions:
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>"As a sort of fig leaf to cover the nakedness of whatever Iraq was to be, the new civil commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, decided to set up a handpicked, provisional 'Council of State.' In a move that again was to presage American actions eighty-four years later, he appointed the Iraqi members."
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>The British decided to work through the Sunnis, as had the Turks, without thinking much about the consequences, rejecting offers from Shia clergy to negotiate a settlement:
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>"Cumulatively, his [Cox's] early moves would alienate the Shia community both from the British government and, subsequently, from the Iraqi government. The trend it set in motion has had profound implications down to our times."
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>Looking for a leader, the British chose Faisal, from Mecca, whom the French had deposed as king of Syria, and who was little known in Iraq:
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>"So just as the Americans in 2003 focused first on Ahmed Chalabi and then on Iyad al-Allawi, neither of whom had been in Iraq for decades, the British imported Faisal."
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>Then the British decided to have the Iraqis write a constitution. Sonorous phrases were borrowed from as far away as New Zealand, but when serious revolt emerged in the 1930s, it proved to be a scrap of paper. In practice, the British controlled who ruled by having indirect elections:
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>"One of the reasons that Iraqis reacted so sharply against the American-controlled Iraq Provisional Authority of 2004 was that in it they – but not the American authorities who were ignorant of Iraqi history – heard an echo of this early British system."
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>On to the Americans
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>Polk takes us through the Saddam era to the U.S. invasion, the cluelessness of the first U.S. administrator in Iraq, Gen. Jay Garner, and the arrogance of proconsul L. Paul Bremer. Polk says that "staying the course" in Iraq is a slogan, not a policy, but one that could cost several thousand more American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, while "the society that survives will be wounded, distorted, and far less than now likely to achieve a reasonably free and peaceful future."

...exactly...Rove and his type are good at SLOGANS...but you can`t govern or run a country with slogans...all you can do is dream up new slogans..and then some more.
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>How might the United States leave? Polk discusses an Iraqi version of "Vietnamization" – training Iraqis to handle things – that is proving even more difficult than it was in Vietnam: "The best America might gain, if the process could be drawn out for several years, is a fig leaf to hide defeat." So what might be less harmful?
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>"The better form of 'getting out,' the second variety, involves choosing rather than being forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed."
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>Polk does note something I have not read elsewhere. "Still undeveloped," he writes, "is a vast sea of oil believed to be under what has recently been nicknamed 'the Sunni triangle' around Baghdad." Making a deal with the Sunnis to develop that field, so that Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds will all have independent oil revenues, might be the most constructive thing the United States could do.

..."constructive"? You mean like after I rape your young son..I make a deal with him to mow my lawn? I give him a JOB?
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>Whatever you think about the Iraq war, this small, readable book will help you better understand what's at stake.



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