The Staton Jones Report

An old saying says that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. There seems to be a corollary: the depth of your ignorance is proportional to the similarity of the events that are repeated. If you are fairly aware of history, you may do something only vaguely like a previous event. If you are Bush-league ignorant, you'll do exactly the same damn thing.

Everything you need to know about what's happening in Iraq can be found in its history. For example, in the early 20's, Iraq was occupied by British troops who had recently "liberated" the Iraqis from a totalitarian regime, the Ottoman Empire. The Iraqis were quite grateful at first, but turned hostile quickly when the Brits wouldn't leave. The insurgency grew to the point where British troops ended up staging a brutal suppression, which included wanton "shock and awe" attacks on civilians and — you gotta love this — dropping nerve gas on the Kurds.

Only a group of complete imbeciles would make that mistake again, and only the kind of imbeciles that comprise the Bush adminsitration would have staged such a near-perfect recreation of those years.

After Iraq was "launched" and the Brits left, the next thing that pissed off the Iraqis was the government they left behind. Were they upset that it was a monarchy? Not entirely, that wasn't unusual for the region. Were they upset that it kowtowed to British interests? Well, obviously. The final straw, however, was that the newly appointed King wasn't even from Iraq. He was a member of the Jordanian royal family, the Hashemites.

Everyone, including the Bush Administration, expects that the U.N. will take an increasingly central role in Iraq as events progress. An interesting history-sorta-repeating itself event has created an image problem for Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy overseeing efforts in Iraq. His daughter, Rym, announced last month that she is marrying — wait for it — Jordanian King Abdullah II's half brother, Prince Ali.

The engagement was celebrated in an early April gala in Paris; although there is no reason to expect this union to have any effect whatsoever on events in Iraq, the Iraqi's are a little tweaked about it. Why can't they just calm down and trust the nice foreign governments to take care of them? Hmmmm?

It's the Locnar. It has to be the damn Locnar!