Stop me if you've heard this one before...

[Elidor]

Lest there be any confusion about exactly what is going on in Iraq right now, a brief look back at the recent past gives us a not-so-distant mirror:

Iraq, 1920
"Arnold Wilson (a conservative representative of the British government in Iraq)...proceeded to turn Iraq into a virtual appendage of Britain's colonial rule in India, bringing troops and administrators over from the subcontinent. Nationalist protests increased, and in the summer of 1920, one leader, Imam Shirazi of Karbala, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that British rule violated Islamic law. He called for a jihad, or holy war, against the British - and for once Sunnis, Shiites and rival shiekdoms united in a common cause. The armed rebellion spread from Karbala and Najaf, in the center, to the south of the country, with uprisings by Kurds in the north as well.

"Wilson came down hard, ordering aerial bombardments, the machine-gunning of rebels and the destruction of whole towns. "The British overreaction made things much worse," says Janet Wallach, author of a biography of Gertrude Bell, Desert Queen. An aghast Bell wrote to her mother, "We have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern - and failed." Some 6,000 Iraqis and 500 British and Indian soldiers perished before the revolt was finally put down in October. By then, the British press and public had turned against Colonial Office plans to run Iraq. As the Times of London had put it three months earlier, "How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?"

- From "Iraq's Unruly Century", by Jonathan Kandell, Smithsonian, May 2003

It's absolutely staggering that the men who undertook this invasion didn't bother to inform themselves of events which transpired a mere 80 years ago. Those who forget history, etcetera...