Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, November 26, 2006 9:09:34 PM
From
Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" to a recent episode of
The Simpsons, Hollywood is starting to sneak not-so-subtle
aphorisms about Iraq into their scripts. Hearing a
character say something like, "An occupying force can never be
successful against a determined local population" is one
example of this effort to (at best) bring a sly smile to the
lips of viewers.
However, we suspect that the people
most amused by such a remark might also be the least
knowledgeable. In truth, occupying forces have been very
successful against local populations when given a free hand to
crush local opposition - just ask any locals still left in
Tibet.
Thanks to a near absence of international
pressure, the Syrians also had a good thing going in Lebanon,
until they overplayed their hand by assassinating
Hariri. Of course, you can't blame them for getting
complacent. A decades-old UN security resolution for
them to leave was so meaningless that Syria actually served on
the Security Council while touting a brutal reign in Lebanon
that ensured permanent Muslim supremacy in what had been the
last Christian Arab state.
The most successful
occupiers of all have been Muslims themselves, which is ironic
given their sanctimonious complaints about American
intervention in Iraq. The Arab occupation of most of the
Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia is comfortably
into its second millennium. This includes Iraq itself,
which was the home of Christian Assyrians before the Arab
invasion.
When Muslim armies rolled into a city, they
immediately slaughtered those who defended it. Sometimes
women, children, and other civilians were killed as well, but
most of the time they were taken as slaves. The citizens
left alive were offered the choice of converting to the
peaceful religion of Islam. Those who didn't were
assigned third-class status and forced to finance the Muslim
religion and its on-going conquests of other
nations.
Nothing like this is happening in Iraq, where
the Americans have done their best to give the locals their
own freely-elected government. The credulity of lumping
Iraq with other historical military occupations is stretched
even further by the fact that the Americans have taken
casualties to avoid civilian casualties - not something that
Muslim conquerors were terribly concerned with in their
time. And, rather than mounting a "determined
resistance," the local population is being decimated by
foreign-supported terrorists who are trying to trigger civil
war.
Although the Americans are not taking slaves,
imposing their religion, or showing any interest in governing
Iraq, a true occupation of the country would still be just as
successful if they were to adopt the same practices as the
Islamic armies of the past...
And
what would Muslims think of that?