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Big_Bird

Reading through the following article, I was reminded of British folly in Northern Ireland. It was in fact the Catholics who requested the British army in, and they were welcomed warmly. The army squandered the Catholics goodwill by immediately acting like an arrogant occupying power, and aggravating the Catholic population to such an extent that they made the IRA (until that time not particularly well liked by the majority of the Catholic population) hugely popular.

At least from what I understand, the Iraqi population in general initially felt little rancour toward the US military - but instead of capitalising on this, it was foolishly squandered.

Why we are still getting it so wrong in the 'war on terror'

The ill-conceived and badly executed campaign in Iraq is directly responsible for spawning a new generation of terrorists

Henry Porter
Sunday October 1, 2006
The Observer

When Alexander the Great swept through Asia Minor in 337BC, he came to the impregnable mountain fortress of Termessos, not far from the modern-day Turkish city of Antalya. Termessos possessed a network of huge underground reservoirs and storerooms and, realising he would not bring the city to submission in a short time, Alexander ordered that the olive groves which provided Termessos with much of its income be levelled. It was an unusually spiteful act that was remembered for centuries afterwards.

I was reminded of the story when reading Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation, a vivid account of war and resistance in Iraq which is published by Verso this week. Cockburn describes a visit to Dhuluaya, a fruit-growing region 50 miles north of Baghdad, where, early on in the occupation, the American military cut down ancient date palms and orange and lemon trees as part of a collective punishment for farmers who had failed to inform them about guerrilla attacks. This vandalism will be remembered for generations because it was senseless and to the Iraqi mind powerfully symbolises the malice of the occupiers.

'At times,' Cockburn says of the period just after the invasion, 'it seemed as if the American military was determined to provoke an uprising.'

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