FALLUJAH -IN MEMORIAM
On this road on an autumn day in 2004, the soldiers came.
They stayed only a few days.
When they had gone, a community that had lived for thousands of years was dead. (1)
“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities.” (2)
(1)Paraphrasing and adapting the opening lines narrated by Laurence Olivier in the documentary series "The World At War"
(2) Report by Colonel T E Lawrence about civil unrest in Fallujah to The Times, August 1920.
M-Theory
