Saddam or not, they just don't want us there

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/16/wchop216.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/11/16/ixnewstop.html

The parallels between the recent US action against Iraq and the British invasion in 1920 are disturbingly close, but nobody seems to have noticed, writes John Simpson

The greatest military power on earth marched into Iraq, utterly confident that the Iraqi people would welcome it. Within weeks, a major uprising had begun and it was forced to start negotiating a way out. Not the Americans in 2003, but the British in 1920. The parallels are disturbingly close, and seem mostly to have gone unnoticed.

At the end of the First World War Britain, brimming with over-confidence, twisted the arm of the League of Nations to give it a mandate over territory carved from the Turkish empire and called "Iraq". The British wanted the new country's oil, and they assumed that everybody there wanted to be governed by them.

With remarkable speed, the British Mandate officials realised that it wasn't going to work, and that they would have to set up a government of Iraqis which they could hand the country over to: the first example - apart from America itself, of course - of a British possession achieving full independence.

The uprising against them affected every part of Iraq. One hundred thousand people died, and the British only managed to hang on to power by rushing in the Indian army.

As the rebellion continued for several years, the British were sometimes disgustingly brutal. Winston Churchill advised the RAF to bomb recalcitrant Kurdish villages with poison gas, which it duly did; thereby establishing a dubious historical precedent.

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