The 'liberation' truth is unmentionable in America

Abstract

Commentary: In Baghdad, the rise and folly of rapacious imperial power is commemorated in a forgotten cemetery called the North Gate. Dogs are its visitors; the rusted gates are padlocked, and skeins of traffic fumes hang over its parade of crumbling headstones and unchanging historical truth. Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude is buried here, in a mausoleum befitting his station, if not the cholera to which he succumbed. In 1917, he declared: ‘Our armies do not come...as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’ Within three years, 10,000 had died in an uprising against the British, who gassed and bombed those they called ‘miscreants’. It was an adventure from which British imperialism in the Middle East never recovered.