The other day, Donald Rumsfeld, in his efforts to downplay the chaos and growing guerrilla movement in American-occupied Iraq, compared the situation there to that in America in the years following the Declaration of Independence.

Noting the lack of a stable currency and poor economy in the thirteen former colonies, Rumsfeld said "Discontent led to uprisings, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings.[...]The transition to democracy is never easy."

In some ways, Rumsfeld is quite correct. It took one false start and six years after the war ended for the colonies to form what is now the US, and there was a fair amount of turmoil and confusion during that time.

In fact, most people don’t realize just how lucky the colonies were. Nearly all revolutions make life worse, not better, and often involve pogroms, starvation, bloodbaths and widespread starvation. America managed to avoid much of that.

But for Rummy to really equate the colonies with the situation in present day Iraq, we would need to make one minor modification to the historical record; the rebels would have to lose in their efforts to break away from England, and with both sides depleted by war, the Spanish would have swept in and took over the colonies. All the leaders of the rebellion would either be in jail, or hiding in the woods. Franklin, Mason, Jefferson and Arnold might be in prison or "hanging together" while Washington and a band of militia types roamed the woods, ambushing Spanish convoys and occasionally burning an Spanish-held building.

In the meantime, envoys from Charles III would come to proclaim (in Spanish) that they had come to lead the "liberation" of the colonists.

Rummy wouldn’t be representing the colonists. He would be representing the Spanish; an unwelcome foreign invader who spoke a different tongue and had a different religion.

The Spanish would have been worse for the colonists than the English were. Again, America was lucky; the English didn’t mind brutally subjugating "the duskier races", but since the colonists in the North American colonies were mostly transplanted English people, they got generally more benign treatment. The Boston Tea Party shows how strange the revolution was in some ways; the protesters through the tea overboard to protest tea taxes. Every school kid learns that. But what they don’t learn is that the protest was over the fact that the English LOWERED tea taxes, and the protesters were smugglers who were upset that lower legitimate tea prices might cut into their profits on smuggled tea. Oh, the horror. Oh, the humanity.

Yes, Spain would have been worse. The colonists might have expected the same sort of treatment the Indians of South America got.

Hopefully, both for the sake of the Iraqis and the Americans, the US will do better in Iraq then Spain did in its colonies. That the United Kingdom is roped in on this shows that Tony Blair, for all his affectations to an intellect, is a complete imbecile when it comes to knowledge of history, even as recent as the 20^th century. Tony’s parents were alive when England was caught in the morass of Palestine, and most English schoolchildren, even those taught in preparatory schools, know who T.E. Lawrence was. In 1922, Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps the only man in the English army who understood the middle east at all, wrote, "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 communiques 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 may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster."

Turned out – whaddya know? – that he was right.

It’s easy enough to see how a idiot child of privilege could stumble, swaggering and grinning, into the morass of Mesopotamia and say really stupid things like "Bring it on!" and "We (meaning everyone except him) have gotta get tough!" But Tony Blair should know better.

The British have learned that 80 years later, they still aren’t welcome in Mesopotamia, they aren’t welcome in Persia, and they aren’t welcome in Iraq They aren’t welcome in the cities, they aren’t welcome in the sand. It seems the folks in Iraq remember the British quite well, and would just as soon have Saddam back over the stuffy and arrogant morons of Britain who drew the drapes on the empire, and no great bloody loss.

While the American troops in Iraq have figured out that the natives are NOT happy to see them, Rummy is bleating nonsense to the American people.

To pretend that America is leading a brave band of revolutionaries to freedom against a foreign oppressor is fatuous in the extreme. In Iraq, we are seen as the foreign oppressor, and unfortunately, America has given the people of Iraq ample cause for that opinion. In Fullajah alone, there have been not one, but two incidents equivalent to the Boston Massacre.

Indeed, the soldiers have pulled out in Fullajah, a situation that suggests that someone over there has some frigging sense. I don’t know if Rummy knew that was in the cards when he made his happy babble about bringing democracy to the lesser peoples of the middle east.

Back home, people seem to be figuring things out. A majority of people think that Putsch lied his way into the invasion of Iraq, and want to know why he did that. Further, they are split evenly on whether the war was (is) justified. Most still think the attaq was justified, which isn’t surprising, really. People don’t like to admit that they were wrong when they rationalized actions that got thousands of people killed and destroyed cities. If nothing else, they’ll cling to the rationale of "good intentions" long after the venality and inhumanity of the Putsch junta lies exposed.

George Tenet took a bullet for his boss on the lie that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Uganda, and everyone in the GOP is running around pretending that the CIA writes the SOTU speeches for the president, and the poor, inept little bum is wholly reliant on them for good information. But even as they stomp on that political brush fire, a group of former intelligence analysts came out the very next day and reported that Putsch deliberately exaggerated and fabricated links between Saddam and al Qaida, and the America media, which had utterly disgraced itself over the past few years, seems finally to be paying attention. And the Washington Post is reporting this morning that the CIA told the White House to delete a reference to Ugandan uranium in a speech given in October, three months before the SOTU, a clear demonstration that the White House is lying about not knowing the information was bogus in January.

Doubtlessly, Karl Rove has his next PR masterstroke set. Perhaps he’ll have the happy idiot leave the Oval Office and stride down some very carefully cleared streets in Baghad, wearing a swagger stick, jodhpurs, and a pith helmet.

He could explain how his benign role is to get tough for the white man’s burden.