Iraq: Who Knew?

“There is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people, but an unimaginable mass of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever. Out of these masses we want to fashion a people which we would train, educate and refine…The circumstances being what they are, the immenseness of the efforts needed for this [cannot be imagined].” -King Faisal I of Iraq, circa 1930

“Evidently we are in for a long, costly campaign in Mesopotamia which will strain to the uttermost our military resources.”

"There is something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian entanglement...It seems to me so gratuitous that after all the struggles of war, just when we want to get together our slender military resources and re-establish our finances and have a little in hand in case of danger here or there, we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts.”

"We have not got a single friend in the press on the subject, and there is no point of which they make more effective use to injure the Government. Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic, warfare marked from time to time certainly by minor disasters and cuttings off of troops and agents, and very possibly attended by some very grave occurrence.
-Winston Churchill, various private communications during the 1920's

“You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a ‘political entity!’ They have never been an independent unity.”
-American missionary warning the British, circa 1920

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia [Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…..We are today not far from disaster.”
-Colonel T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) in the London Sunday Times, August 1920


Apparently, George Bush is not lying when he says that all he reads is the Bible.



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