manifest destiny (not unlike deja vu) all over again...

Pottersville deftly draws a comparison between the Iraqi occupation and the genocide perpetrated by the white man on the native Americans not so long ago:

Many Middle Eastern peoples, principally the Iraqis, had long since learned that lesson during our own gold rush, this one on their oil fields. As with the native Americans, the Iraqis would come to be viewed by the foreign invaders as being in the way, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As with the Lakota Sioux, who had had their food rations cruelly cut by the federal government, a quarter of all Iraqis are now on some kind of food subsistence program, food rationing that is all but unconditional.