Dear Keith,
Thank you for the excellent history leasson. And once
again thank you for hosting this listserv. Am I
allowed to forward your article to my peers? Or cut
and paste?
Phillip Wolfe
--- Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1683/
In These Times
November 12, 2004
Fallujah 101
A history lesson about the town we are currently
destroying.
By Rashid Khalidi
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. Things have
been far worse than we have been told, our
administration more bloody
and inefficient than the public knows. It is a
disgrace to our
imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any
ordinary cure.
We are today not far from a disaster. Our
unfortunate troops, Indian
and British, under hard conditions of climate and
supply are policing
an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives
for the willfully
wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad
but the
responsibility, in this case, is not on the army
which has acted only
upon the request of the civil authorities.
T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920
There is a small City on one of the bends of the
Euphrates that
sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It's on an
ancient trade
route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province
of what is today
Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and
Mosul to the north.
It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and
Amman. This city
is a crossroads.
For millennia people have been going up and down
that north-south
desert highway. The city is like a seaport on that
great desert, a
place that binds together people in what are today
Saudi Arabia,
Syria, Iraq and Jordan. People in the city are
linked by tribe,
family or marriage to people in all these places.
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi
Arabia in the
late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi
ideas-those of a man
named Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab-took root in this
city more than
200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where
what we would call
fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been
well implanted for
10 generations.
This town also is the place where in the spring of
1920, before T. E.
Lawrence wrote the above passage, the British
discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior
colonial officer
who had quelled unrest in the corners of their
empire, Lt. Col.
Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of
Iraq. Leachman was
killed in an altercation with a local leader named
Shaykh Dhari. His
death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives
of 10,000 Iraqis
and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To
restore Iraq to
their control, the British used massive air power,
bombing
indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari's grandson, today a prominent Iraqi
cleric, helped to
broker the end of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah
in April of this
year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated
tribal, religious and
national aspects of Iraq's history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world
anew in the Middle
East. It is waging a war in a place where history
really matters.
A change for the worse
The United States has been a major Middle Eastern
power since 1933,
when a group of U.S. oil companies signed an
exploration deal with
Saudi Arabia. The United States has been dominant in
the Middle East
since 1942, when American troops first landed in
North Africa and
Iran. American troops have not left the region
since. In other words,
they have been in different parts of the Middle East
for 62 years.
The United States was once celebrated as a
non-colonial, sometimes
anti-colonial, power in the Middle East, renowned
for more than a
century for its educational, medical and charity
efforts. Since the
Cold War, however, the United States has intervened
increasingly in
the region's internal affairs and conflicts. Things
have changed
fundamentally for the worse with the invasion and
occupation of Iraq,
particularly with the revelation that the core
pretexts offered by
the administration for the invasion were false. And
particularly with
growing Iraqi dissatisfaction with the occupation
and with the images
of the hellish chaos broadcast regularly everywhere
in the world
except in the United States-thanks to the excellent
job done by the
media in keeping the real human costs of Iraq off
our television
screens.
The United States is perceived as stepping into the
boots of Western
colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from
Morocco to Iran.
The Bush administration
