Former British base in Iraq still a focus of resentment

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4048623.html

HABANIYAH, IRAQ - Lying at the edge of this vast military base, the quiet cemetery of 300 tombstones is a crumbling vestige of the British Empire. Once a Royal Air Force hub, the base now serves U.S. forces.

To historians, the base at Habaniyah, 50 miles west of Baghdad, represents one of many parallels between past and present.

Older Iraqis remember the British base as a symbol of foreign domination that stoked the country's nationalist movement. Today, Habaniyah's American occupants face similar hostility.

Neil Turnbull, who served in Habaniyah as a British corporal and left on the second-to-last plane out, remembers nearby Fallujah as particularly hostile.

Residents were "very anti-British the whole time. They would throw stones at buses and wagons that would pass," said Turnbull, 69.

Arriving after World War I, Britain did not intend to make Iraq a colony in its empire. It wanted access to oil and the port at Basra to protect its interests in India and Palestine.