Deleting Iraq’s
History

by Bob
Allen

ACCORDING to a November 4
Christian
Science Monitor
article the new US-approved textbooks for Iraqi school children effectively eliminate the history of modern Iraq.

According to the article the imperial edition of
Iraqi history deletes “any content considered
‘controversial,’ including the 1991 Gulf War; the
Iran-Iraq war; and all references to Israelis,
Americans, or Kurds.” Another subject written out the textbooks is the UN sanctions on Iraq.

US officials and members of the occupation’s
Ministry of Education worked on the revisions in a series of meetings over the summer at UNESCO and
UNICEF offices. “Entire swaths of 20th-century history have been deleted,” says Bill Evers, a US Defense Department employee who worked on the new edition.

Fuad Hussein, an Iraqi expatriate working for the US in Iraq, headed up the US occupation’s Ministry of Education participation in the project. He says,

“We considered anything anti-American
to be propaganda and we took it out… In some
cases, we had to remove entire chapters.”

Ever mindful to respect the national sovereignty of Iraqis, the article describes the intervention of US State Department and Pentagon in the editing process as playing “a limited role – unless things go in a direction they don’t approve.”

Gregg Sullivan, spokesman for the Near
Eastern Affairs Bureau of the State Department describes it this way: “We’d hope it’s only an advisory role, but if something develops that’s disadvantageous to the Iraqi people, we’d weigh in on a stronger level.”