In the event you have forgotten why American troops are at war in Iraq (four years is a long time to remember anything), we are there, we are told, to set the Iraqi people free, to bring democracy to the region, to have a staging point for fighting terrorism; to prevent Iran from materializing its nuclear ambitions, and to establish an American presence in the Middle East. Any other reasons are “classified.”

Aside from all the back-and-forth rhetoric about the war that is spewed out by the administration, the Congress, lesser officials, and even the general public, the war in Iraq is a lost cause, even if we should win it. That would be a nasty, perhaps even a traitorous statement, even if it were not true.  But it is true, and the history of that region proves it.

You see, Iraq is a geographic focal point for what history tells us was Ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia was a crescent-shaped strip of land 300 miles long and 150 miles wide located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

And the telling fact is that most of Mesopotamia was located where the country of Iraq is today.

This is worth knowing because we are spilling a lot of blood, and spending a lot of dollars in the Iraqi war. If the war-inclined gurus in Washington had done some elemental bookwork on this volatile Middle East region before we foolishly committed American troops there, our young men and women might still be home, mowing the lawn or washing their cars.

The truth is the Mesopotamia region, because of its vast oil wealth and other valuable resources has, from time immemorial, been a perennial hotbed of invasions, conquests, genocide, tribal killings, and generally an area to be avoided at all cost. But, for whatever their motive, this administration has gone in to change all that.  In their dreams.

To clearly demonstrate that some things never change—at least in our time---I offer as evidence this dispatch sent to The Sunday Times in England by T. E. Lawrence in August of 1920;

“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 will 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 he civil authorities.”

Sound familiar? It should. Armies have been fighting in this brutal snake pit of murderous warfare since ancient times.  Some things never change. Some people never learn.

James T. Moore
http://jamestmoore.us/