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Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

A Modern-Day Crusade Looms
(Robert Fisk, The Independent March 7, 2003)
General Maude, of course, was the General Tommy Franks of his day, and his proclamation - so rich in irony now that President George Bush is uttering equally mendacious sentiments - was intended to persuade Iraqis that they should accept foreign occupation while Britain secured the country's oil. General Maude's chief political officer, Sir Percy Cox, called on Iraq's Arab leaders, who were not identified, to participate in the government in collaboration with the British authorities and spoke of liberation, freedom, past glories, future greatness and - here the ironies come in spades - it expressed the hope that the people of Iraq would find unity. . . . How many times has the West marched into the Middle East in so brazen a fashion? General Sir Edward Allenby "liberated" Palestine only a few months after General Maude "liberated" Iraq. The French turned up to "liberate" Lebanon and Syria a couple of years later, slaughtering the Syrian forces loyal to King Feisel who dared to suggest that French occupation was not the kind of future they wanted. . . . What is it about "liberation" in the Middle East? What is this sacred trust - a ghost of the same "trusteeship" the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, now promotes for Iraq's oil - that the West constantly wishes to visit upon the Middle East? Why do we so frequently want to govern these peoples, these "tribes with flags" as Sir Steven Runciman, that great historian of the 11th- and 12th-century Crusades, once called them? Indeed, Pope Urban's call for the first Crusade in 1095, reported at the time by at least three chroniclers, would find a resonance even among the Christian fundamentalists who, along with Israel's supporters, are now so keen for the United States to invade Iraq. . . . Once more, we, the West, were going to protect the Middle East from tyranny. Anthony Eden took the same view of Egypt, anxious to topple the "dictator" Gamal Abdul Nasser, just as Napoleon had been desperate to rescue the Egyptians from the tyranny of the Beys, just as General Maude wanted to rescue Iraq from the tyranny of the Turks, just as George Bush Junior now wants to rescue the Iraqis from the tyranny of President Saddam. . . . So what happened to all these fine words? The Crusades were a catastrophe in the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Napoleon left Egypt in humiliation. Britain dropped gas on the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq before discovering that Iraq was ungovernable. Arabs, then Jews drove the British army from Palestine and Lloyd George's beloved Jerusalem. The French fought years of insurrection in Syria. In Lebanon, the Americans scuttled away in humiliation in 1984, along with the French. . . . What will be the price of our folly this time, of our failure to learn the lessons of history? Only after the United States has completed its occupation we shall find out. It is when the Iraqis demand an end to that occupation, when popular resistance to the American presence by the Shias and the Kurds and even the Sunnis begins to destroy the military "success" which President Bush will no doubt proclaim when the first US troops enter Baghdad. It is then our real "story" as journalists will begin. . . . Here I will make a guess: that in the months and years that follow America's invasion of Iraq, the United States, in its arrogant assumption that it can create "democracy" in the ashes of a Middle East dictatorship as well as take its oil, will suffer the same as the British in Palestine. Of this tragedy, Winston Churchill wrote, and his words are likely to apply to the US in Iraq: "At first, the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet."

posted by Lorenzo 11:19 AM