We would all do well to aquaint ourselves with Iraq's history

[CatWoman]

This is an excellent link/resource: http://www.angelfire.com/nt/Gilgamesh/history.html

as Spock says, "Fascinating"

[KoKo]

1. Thanks! Looks good. I've bookmarked it for later.

:-)'s

[On the Road]

2. Yes, "Fascinating...

...but highly illogical."

The articles look very good in their own right. They do not deal with US involvement in coups or other changes in government. I've seen some things about our early support for Saddam or his predecessor, but would like to understand the whole story.

[CatWoman]

3. feel free to add more links/resources to this thread

reading is fundamental

:hi:

[wittsend]

4. Yeah ,It's amazing to think of Iraq as.....

Something other than our own little Bomb receptacle. Did you hear?They actually had stuff going on there before 1991. It's really a shame. What a world treasure.

[clonebot]

6. protecting ancient art

at least the army is trying to protect the ziggarauts and other mesopotamian temples - hopefully they won't do such a bad job as they did at the iraqi museum.

[CatWoman]

7. I can't tell you how painful trashing that museum was to me

It really made me hate this administration.

They can post guards at the Ministry of Oil, but couldn't at that magnificent museum.

[TacticalPeek]

5. First use of WMD in Iraq? The Brits after WWI, against the Kurds.

Churchill was in no doubt that gas could be profitably employed against the Kurds and
Iraqis (as well as against other peoples in the Empire): 'I do not understand this
squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against
uncivilised tribes.' Henry Wilson shared Churchill's enthusiasm for gas as an instrument of
colonial control but the British cabinet was reluctant to sanction the use of a weapon that
had caused such misery and revulsion in the First World War. Churchill himself was keen
to argue that gas, fired from ground-based guns or dropped from aircraft, would cause 'only
discomfort or illness, but not death' to dissident tribespeople; but his optimistic view of the
effects of gas were mistaken. It was likely that the suggested gas would permanently
damage eyesight and 'kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people
against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply
antidotes.'
snip

Churchill remained unimpressed by such considerations, arguing that the use of gas, a
'scientific expedient,' should not be prevented 'by the prejudices of those who do not think
clearly'. In the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with 'excellent moral effect'
though gas shells were not dropped from aircraft because of practical difficulties…

Today in 1993 there are still Iraqis and Kurds who remember being bombed and
machine-gunned by the RAF in the 1920s. A Kurd from the Korak mountains commented,
seventy years after the event: 'They were bombing here in the Kaniya Khoran …
Sometimes they raided three times a day.' Wing Commander Lewis, then of 30 Squadron
(RAF), Iraq, recalls how quite often 'one would get a signal that a certain Kurdish village
would have to be bombed…', the RAF pilots being ordered to bomb any Kurd who looked
hostile. In the same vein, Squadron-Leader Kendal of 30 Squadron recalls that 'if the
tribespeople were doing something they ought not be doing then you shot them.'

Similarly, Wing-Commander Gale, also of 30 Squadron: 'If the Kurds hadn't learned by our
example to behave themselves in a civilised way then we had to spank their bottoms. This
was done by bombs and guns'.

snip

http://www.internationalism.org/wr/265_terror1920.htm

[anarchy1999]

8. I agree completely.

Here are three articles I found last spring in a journal called the Wilson Quarterly. Just looked it up and they can be found on line. Should be required reading for everyone! If anyone thinks anyone is going to win this "war", think again.

http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=32217

The Making of Modern Iraq
by Martin Walker

In the early spring of 2003, a quarter of the British army was based in Kuwait, advancing north into familiar territory. In 1916, these soldiers’ great-grandfathers had first advanced up the river Tigris, to defeat and humiliation at Turkish hands. The following year the British returned, advancing to Baghdad and beyond. With General Edmund Allenby’s forces thrusting north through Palestine, aided by an Arab uprising, the British toppled the Ottoman Empire. They stayed on for another 40 years, briefly interrupted by a pro-Nazi seizure of power in Baghdad in 1941. It was a period marked by considerable social and economic progress in Iraq—and by a tangled, painful, and often bloody series of political events that demand the attention of anybody contemplating the Iraqi future.

Related Articles

Broken Promises by Amatzia Baram

The Glory that Was Baghdad by Jason Goodwin

Be sure to read all three, it is a fascinating albeit, long read.

[anarchy1999]

9. kick to the top!

n/t

Everyone, turn off the TV and read up on your history of the country, we as Americans, have decided to bring Democracy to. See you in the morning, maybe.

[coda]

10. I'll dump what i have here (as well as articles)

Can't vouch for any sites, it's just what I've tossed in the files over the past year and a half and of course there's obvious duplication.



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http://www.informationwar.org/imperialism/how_the_cia_put_the_baath_in_power.htm

How the CIA put the Baath in power


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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N15254718.htm

17 Apr 2003 12:00:34 GMT
FEATURE-Former U.S. official says CIA aided Iraqi Baathists



-----


By David Morgan


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http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r

Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
From the International Desk
Published 4/10/2003 7:30 PM


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http://home.achilles.net/~sal/iraq_history.html


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http://home.columbus.rr.com/lfairban/Pages/Liberal.htm#Iraq

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http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/info/usdocs/usiraq80s90s.html

U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationships with Iraq, 1980 - 2 August 1990
Prepared by Nathaniel Hurd.
15 July 2000 (updated 12 December 2001 by Nathaniel Hurd and Glen Rangwala).


====


http://www.communityforpeace.net/becker.htm

Skulduggery since the 1920s
U.S. corporations and Iraqi oil
By Richard Becker


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http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Nightline/iraq_jews_040125-1.html

Dying History
Baghdad Once Had Thousands of Jewish Residents; Today, About 21 Survive

By David Wright


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http://www.startribune.com/stories/1762/3626448.html

A history of Iraq, the cradle of Western civilization
Eric Black, Star Tribune

Published February 2, 2003 HIST02


====


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,939608,00.html

Our last occupation

Gas, chemicals, bombs: Britain has used them all before in Iraq

Jonathan Glancey
Saturday April 19, 2003
The Guardian


====
SOME BATH PARTY HISTORY



http://www.damascus-online.com/se/hist/baath_party.htm

Baath Party, formally the Baath Arab Socialist Party. political party and movement influential among Arab communities in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iraq. The Baath Party was from the beginning a secular Arab nationalist party. Socialism (not Marxism) was quickly adopted as the party’s economic dogma: “Unity , Freedom , and Socialism” are still the watchwords. From its earliest development, the motivation behind Baathist political thought and its leading supporters was the need to produce a means of reasserting the Arab spirit in the face of foreign domination. Moral and cultural deterioration, it was felt, had so weakened the Arabs that Western supremacy spread throughout the Middle East. Arabs needed a regeneration of the common heritage of people in the region to drive off debilitating external influences.

Articulated as the principle of Arab nationalism, the Baath movement was one of several political groups that drew legitimacy from an essentially reactive ideology. Nevertheless, Baathist ideology spread slowly by educating followers to its intellectual attractions. The three major proponents of early Baathist thought, Zaki al-Arsuzi, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and Michel Aflaq, were middle-class educators whose political thought had been influenced by Western education. During the 1930s Arsuzi, Salah, and Aflaq expounded their vision of Arab nationalism to small audiences in Syria. By the early 1940s Salah and Aflaq had taken the initiative to extend the movement’s operations in Damascus by organizing demonstrations in support of Rashid Ali al-Kailani’s government in Iraq against the British presence there. By 1945 the word baath (Arabic for “resurrection” or “renaissance”) had been applied to what was then officially a party rather than a movement. The official founding of the party may be dated from its first party congress in Damascus on April 7, 1947, when a constitution was approved and an executive committee established. However, significant expansion beyond Syria’s borders took place only after the war of 1948, when lack of Arab unity was widely perceived as responsible for the loss of Palestine to the new state of Israel. The Iraqi branch of the Baath party was established in 1954 after the merger of the Baath with Akram al-Hurani’s Arab Socialist Party in 1952, to form the Arab Baath Socialist Party. In February 1963 the Baath Party came to power in Iraq and one month later, in March 8, it came to power in Syria after the March Revolution. Inter-party disagreements were one of the major factors that led to the Correction Movement led by Hafez al-Assad, the movement ended years of conflict within the party. A new constitution, approved in 1973, stated that the Baath Party is “leading party in the state and society”. In 1972, the Baath also became the leader of the 7 Syrian parties forming the National Progressive Front NPF. The national committee of the Baath is the effectively the decision making body in Syria. Number of members in Syria exceeds million.


====

[struggle4progress]

11. kick!

:kick: