US to allow former Iraqi General to run Fallujah for them

spongebob

The marines have given up and are trying to pacify the place by proxy now, specifically using the newly formed Fallujah Protection Army under one of Saddams former Generals . The marines intend to stay outside the city limits to assist the former general in pacifying the town, you need an airstrike there head ?

Surreal or surreal or what, the full story is on the BBC Website....and although the Pentagon has denied it , Col Byrne the marine commander in Fallujah has confirmed it.

Meanwhile another General (US actually and not Iraqi) in charge of the US Gulags in Iraq has been removed for not controlling her troops as they tortured Iraqi prisoners when they were bored and wanted some fun.

So much for de-Baathification then . Iraq will have disintegrated, irrevocably, by Christmas .... thats Mucks prediction .

M

Memnoch

is this the same terrorist Bath party and former regime eliments that were part of Saddam's regime... the same evil people that had to be removed from power? now they have been put BACK in power?

plssssss

Down with the occupation !!!

pork99

This is actually history repeating itself. The Brits got Iraq as part of the "spoils of war" from the Ottoman Empire in under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 (They got Iraq, Palestine and Jordan, the French got Lebanon and Syria).

There was the same sequence of events, Western army invades, poses as liberators, tries to build "new Iraq". Within 2 years they were wading in blood in an uprising which killed about 2,000 British & Indian troops, their Arab allies & civilians and about 10,000 Iraqi rebels. The Turks had favoured the Sunni Muslims as local rulers and administrators. The British tried to be more even-handed but found that the only way of running the country was to reinstate the same people who had run it for the Turks, otherwise they would be faced with permanent unrest & anarchy.

spongebob

The Brits had to invade Najaf too. Then they had the honour of gassing the Kurds from the air a few years later. They finally pulled ut in 1930 or so, handing it all to a Sunni King as they left.

This time the Kurds wont go with the scheme, they want a (very) loose federation or they want out .

As the Kirkuk region alone has 10% or so of the worlds proven oil reserves this does occupy minds in the US.

M

pork99

Iraq got formal independence in 1930 but the British did not completely pull out.

The story of Churchill's 1941 invasion of Iraq begins in 1930. In that year, the British accorded sovereignty to Iraq, making it the first of the former Turkish colonies in the Middle East to gain independence. But the British retained an important concession from the newly independent Iraqi government. Because of Iraq's important geographic position as an air link and alternative land passage via Basra and Baghdad between India and British-controlled Palestine and the Suez canal, an Anglo-Iraqi treaty allowed London to transit troops through Iraq, and required Baghdad to "give all aid, including the use of railways, rivers, ports and airfields," in the event of war. Baghdad also undertook to provide internal security, especially to protect the vital pipelines that ran from the Mosel and Kirkuk oilfields of northern Iraq to Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. By 1937, British presence in Iraq had been reduced to two RAF bases, one at Shaibah, close to the southern port of Basra, and the other at Habbaniya, on the Euphrates about twenty-five miles west of Baghdad. Nevertheless, Iraqi army officers, organized into a secret association known as the Golden Square, regarded the residual British presence in their country and the commercial and diplomatic privileges ceded to London in the 1930 treaty as an insulting vestige of imperialism.

There was a Nazi backed coup in 1941 and the British had to invade and reoccupy Iraq

http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/dec02/middleEast.asp