delanceyplace.com 03/01/06 - bombing iraq in 1919

• 0 COMMENTS

In today's excerpt - a foreshadowing of contemporary (and underreported) bombing in Iraq:

"Just after the Great War (World War I), Britain designed a new system of imperial policing known as 'air control' and applied it in Iraq, lately wrested from the Turkish Empire. In this scheme, the Royal Air Force (RAF) patrolled the country from a network of bases, bombarding villages and tribes as needed to put down unrest and subversive activities.  It was in Iraq that the British first practiced, if never perfected, the technology of bombardment, there that they first attempted to fully theorize the value of airpower as an independent arm of the military."