-Caveat Lector- >>>Again we see that Hussein was not an original thinker; he only applied the lessons of his mentors, the Engalish, if he applied them at all. A<:>E<:>R <<<
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny- vppin133170674mar13,0,7115860.column Blair’s Churchillian Side Plays Better Here James P. Pinkerton March 13, 2003 Tony Blair may be having problems with his own British Labour Party, but many Americans on the right can't praise him enough. He's another Winston Churchill, they say, standing up to evil, no matter what the political price. Yet while Churchill did indeed oppose both Nazism and communism, there's another side to him - a side that helped plunge his country into a military quagmire in, of all places, Iraq. Strangely, ominously, it's that aspect of Churchill's career that's gotten the most praise. National Review draws Blair in a Churchillian pose, complete with cigar and "V for Victory" gesture. Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) says, "He's approaching the stature of Churchill the Second." But the most breathtaking exercise in neo-Churchillism appeared as an editorial in Monday's Wall Street Journal. Winston S. Churchill, grandson of the original, declared that Blair was "absolutely right" in his decision to stand with President George W. Bush. But the point of the article wasn't just to praise Blair. Its real purpose was to praise colonialism - a colonialism that will bring Brits, as well as Americans, back to a land of previous debacles. The headline of the piece was "My Grandfather Invented Iraq." The author explains, "In 1921, as British colonial secretary, Churchill was responsible for creating Jordan and Iraq." And that's true enough. The British had seized control of the Mideast after World War I, taking it from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had been allied with the Kaiser's Germany. It was great fun for Churchill to be a master geopolitico, sitting in London red-penciling maps, but there was a catch: Nobody had consulted the Arabs. During the war, the British had sent agents - notably T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia" - into Turkish-controlled territory to tell the Arabs that if they overthrew the Turks, they could be independent thereafter. That was a promise that Churchill helped to break. To the neoconservatives who now dominate the political right, such colonialism was all to the good. In the pages of American Outlook, the magazine of the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, author Keith Windschuttle urges the West "to shed the guilt we still harbor for our past and to recognize that our imperial forebears left the world a better place than they found it." Indeed, he goes further, insisting that former European colonies "frankly acknowledge the benefits they gained from the imperial era." Why do the neocons praise colonialism to Americans, a people who every July 4 celebrate their own anti-colonial beginnings? The simplest explanation is that they have to praise all past colonialism in order to justify taking control of Iraq and the Mideast today - and the facts be damned. As the younger Churchill wrote, "Eighty years later, it falls on us to liberate Iraq from the scourge of one of the most ruthless dictators in history ... My grandfather's experience has lessons for us." Well, yes, it does offer lessons. Here's one: Churchill could declare imperial dominion over Iraq, but he couldn't make subject peoples like it. Not long after the British "liberated" them, the Arabs and Kurds of Iraq rose up in rebellion. What happened then is recorded in a 1994 book, "Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam" by Geoff Simons. Churchill, always an advocate of new military technology - he helped invent the battle tank during World War I - was an enthusiast for using another modern invention, air power, to suppress the insurgents. Not long thereafter, one Royal Air Force commander reported, "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within 45 minutes, a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured." Yet Churchill had still more ideas. If aerial explosives were a good idea, wouldn't aerial gassing be even better? As he put it, "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes." Churchill was overruled on this matter, and the British managed to win, temporarily, using only conventional weapons. Yet within a decade, the British had withdrawn from Iraq. The British know a lot of this horrible colonial history. Americans know almost none of it. That's why Blair, the second Churchill, is more popular here than there. Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. Forwarded for your information. 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