To our American Friends!

[satinfun]

Although the British colonial empire era has some disadvantages, it also has a lot of advantages, talking about the Middle East, and generally speaking the Brits played significant role in taming the wildness of the Middle East.

The Brits used a sort of behaviour correction as part of civilisation mission. They tried to break the "aggressive" spiritual and cultural heritage of the Arabs. So they proposed to replace many countries' old educational systems and cultures with it's own. The idea was to make the Arabs think that all that was British was better than Arab's own heritage. This would then cause the Arabs to lose their aggressive and resistive behaviour.

The British used to manage the Middle East in an efficient way, they have put a great effort to civilise the region, from the British Empire era up till now. This without doubt has contributed to the peace of the world, and should be respected. I will give two examples, one from the past, and another more recent one.

The British know the Middle East region very well, they have experience in managing indigenous anti-occupier rebellion, see for example during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the coalition forces met with unexpected resistance in Basra and environs. After a few days of combat, most of the invading American troops moved northwards, leaving Basra for the British to deal with, since they are considered more experienced because of their history as colonial administrators of Iraq. Finally, Basra was totally under control.

Another example is from the British Empire days. Yemen was considered an extremely rebellious and difficult to occupy and manage. In fact, before the British Empire, many Arabs used to take pride in that Yemen is the only territory that has never ever been colonised by any foreign country, they say that this is due to two reasons: unbeatable fierce anti-colonial resistance, and the geographical difficulty of the country. The Brits took control of Aden (south Yemen), it was under full British control 1839–1967, until 1937, and was governed as part of British India ... known as the 'Aden Settlement'.