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MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
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September, 2004
Don't Tread On Me
By Edward W. Miller
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"If there is one lesson Israel can impart to the
Americans
it is that every occupation is appalling; that it tramples
the occupied and corrupts the occupier."
Editor: Haaretz (Israeli newspaper)
"Don't tread on me" was the message on that gauntlet
flung down to the US and Israel by Osama Ben Laden in his 1998 interview with
John Miller (Assoc. Press.), and repeated several times since in video and
press submissions. "Don't tread on me" was the message in the bombing
of US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, in the bombing of two Marine barracks
in Saudi Arabia in 1993, in the US Trade Center bombing in 1993, the US Embassy
bombings in Tanzania and in Kenya August 7th, 1998, the hole blown in the USS
Cole, the Twin Towers and Pentagon explosions. How many American lives will be
lost before Washington realizes we can no longer trample upon the feelings of a
1.6 billion Muslim peoples?
Many Americans are puzzled by the angry responses of most Iraqis
to the US occupation, having forgotten their forefather's experiences under the
colonial yoke of Britain's George III. Americans also fail to realize those
repeated violent warnings from the Muslim world also represent the resurgence
of a deep distrust of the West, a distrust generated by colonial incursions
into Muslim countries beginning as far back as 1779 when the British East India
Company, backed by British military, first established control over Kuwait. Nobody in Washington seems to have taken a look at the history books.
Back in WW I Britain and France, fighting Germany and its allies, also faced off with Turkey and other remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the Mideast. Iraq's largely Shiite population though oppressed by the Ottoman occupation, when
the British began invading their country in 1915 at first joined with the Turks
against the Brits. The British India Army encouraged by their military success
in Iraq's' southern city, Basrah, advanced north towards Baghdad, only to be
stopped, besieged and then crushed by the combined Ottoman forces at Kut
Al-Amara. Some 3,000 Indian troops were taken prisoner.
The next year a new British offensive was launched, but by this
time, following a series of thoughtless political and military acts by the
retreating Turks against Iraq's Shiite population, which acts included
multiple, arrests and executions, the Shiites, encouraged by their religious
leaders, switched sides to join the British invaders. (larouchpub.com/2003)*
and on March 11th, 1917 British forces under General Frederick Maude, captured
Baghdad as the Turks, under Kalil Pasha, withdrew rather than defend the city.
Maude immediately promised Iraqis to "liberate them from Ottoman
tyranny" adding eventual "democracy and independence."
A democratic Mideast however, was not the intent of the British
who were quietly plotting along with the French and Czarist Russia to divide up
the region in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot-Sazanov Treaty. The name Sergei
Sazanov, Russia's foreign minister, along with the Czar's Mideast dreams was
erased from the Treaty after the Bolsheviks, sorting through Sazanov's office
during their Revolution, found copies of those treasonous papers.
In that Sykes-Picot Treaty, Britain, would grab what is now Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and part of Egypt, while France was to occupy both Syria and Lebanon. Our President Wilson was secretly tendered a copy of the Sykes-Pico Papers, with
instructions to keep them secret. The Arab peoples have not forgotten this
political duplicity.
The occupation continued, and it became apparent to the Iraqis
that the British intended to maintain colonial control. In March, 1917
Shia Muslim leaders in the Holy City of Najaf initiated a limited uprising,
which revolt was "swiftly and brutally crushed by the British army, which
surrounded the City and bombed one major quarter of it." *(ibid) ( This is
the same Najaf where today Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadra and his militia are
holding out against US Marines.)
Early in 1920 political groups in Baghdad and Kaballa began to
spring up as Shiites with Sunnis joined forces against the occupier. * (ibid )
At first efforts were made by the Iraqis to deal peacefully with the British.
who had already delayed their promised elections. By early June ,
however, the Brits began mass arrests in southern Iraqi towns, laying siege to Karbala and arresting religious leaders. On June 29th, 1920 Shiite leader, Al-Shiraz
declaredÉ" It is the duty of all Iraqis to call for their rights.
While they do that they should make sure that security and peace are preserved.
but they can resort to defensive force if the British refuse to comply with
their demands." In July the first attack on a British convoy took place in
Al-Diwaniya.
Meanwhile in Italy, on April 20th 1920, the League of Nations,
meeting in San Ramo was deciding the fate of the Ottoman Empire and Mideast peoples. The League accepted with few modifications the Sykes-Picot reorganization
of the region. Our Congress had already voted to keep the US out of the League.
During 1920 insurgency spread throughout Iraq, eventually
involving Kurds in the north. Armed with only rifles, British garrisons
were attacked, rail lines and bridges destroyed and high-ranking British
officers assassinated. The British responded with brutal force on the villages,
bombing at will. Winston Churchill, Britain's Minister of War and Air
"believed that the country could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with
gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops."
(book by David Omissi) The uprising lasted four months during which 10,000
Iraqis and 450 British were killed. The British suffered 2000 casualties.
Just as British reporter Robert Fisk comments on the deficiencies
in our media's ongoing coverage on Iraq, so in London's Sunday Times back on
August 22nd 1920, T.E. Lawrence reported:
"The people of England have been lead in Mesopotamia into a trap
from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been
tricked into a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are
belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been
told, our administration more bloody and insufficient than the public
knowsÉ We are today not far from a disaster."
The 1920 revolt derailed British plans for Iraq. The Brits continued to rule but indirectly through the Hashemite King Faisal and his
successors. In 1962 the CIA organized a coup, killing thousands of Iraqi
"communists." The Bathist Party took over and eventually, one of
their own, Saddam Hussein rose to power.
Today, Washington under Bush, Jr. stumbles along like the British
in the 1920's with increasing threats of terrorism and no clear goals in sight.
Washington should declare: "Victory", remove our armies from both Afghanistan and Iraq, and take Sharon and his marauding Zionazis off our payroll. It will matter
little how Congress and the 9/11 Commission rearrange the CIA, FBI and Homeland
Security unless we stop treading on the Muslim peoples and sowing the dragon's
teeth of violent revenge.
*In 1776 Colonel Christopher Gadsden submitted a copy of a bright yellow flag
with coiled rattlesnake and the words: DON'T TREAD ON ME to the provincial
congress in South Carolina. Commodore Esek Hopkins commander of the new
Continental Fleet carried that flag when his ships put to sea that same year
and succeeded in capturing large stores of cannons and military supplies from
the British in the Bahamas. Our nascent Continental Marine Corps began painting
the design on their drums. (Google.com)