Eight decades ago, British commanders called in punishing airstrikes to put down a fierce insurrection in one of its most unruly colonies. After pumping money into Iraq to support a deeply unpopular occupation, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was fed up. "We are paying 8 millions a year," he fumed, "for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano, out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having." America now finds itself struggling to control the same volcano, a nation of 25 million still deeply ambivalent about the U.S. role in its "liberation." Coming off the deadliest month yet for U.S. soldiers, the Bush administration is combating two smoldering insurgencies with the same tactics-a combination of over whelming force and millions of dollars-yet Iraqis seem only to grow more angry at the occupation with each passing week. America, it turns out, is not very good at occupation. This one has been troubled from the start, when the administration followed up its "shock and awe" military strategy by failing to deploy enough troops to control Iraq in the aftermath and without much of a plan to plant the seeds of democracy in such infertile soil.
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