Word: mesopotamia
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...shrouded in myth. Despite its description by Greek historians as a center of political power, the fables tend to overshadow any sense of what the city was actually like. "Everyone knows the name and the legends of Babylon," says Francis Joannès, a professor of ancient history and Mesopotamia at the Sorbonne. "But what people don't necessarily know is its reality...
...banal, but they mostly entertain in the way that popular history can. For example, he writes that today's sprawling multinational corporations are modeled on the crown-backed trading houses of England, Portugal and Holland, whose empires themselves followed a continuum stretching back to the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. He contends that the silver and gold bullion mined in Mexico and Peru and shipped across oceans in galleons by the conquering Spanish preceded the convertible currencies and credit cards that now keep the world's economy ticking. NGOs like Human Rights Watch, defending the rights of Latino or Chinese workers...
That is not true. The group doing the most spectacular bombings in Iraq was named al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia by its founder, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, now deceased, in an attempt to aggrandize his reputation in jihadi-world. It is a sliver group, representing no more than 5% of the Sunni insurgency. It shares a philosophy, but not much else, with the real al-Qaeda, which operates out of Pakistan. In fact, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been criticized in the past by the operational director of the real al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for its wanton carnage directed...
...reason Bush didn't tout this success is byzantine: If al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is on the run, if we have "turned a corner" against al-Qaeda, as a senior Administration official told me, then an argument can be made that it is time to begin planning our departure. In fact, the departure is already being planned--in two places. There is the plan being devised by General Petraeus' staff in Iraq, which envisions a slow draw-down, paced by the Army's troop-rotation schedule; force levels would begin to ebb in March 2008 and reach pre-surge levels...
...headed by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Now it faces a new threat; the Lebanese army launched its attacks in Tripoli following indications that Fatah al-Islam was setting up an al-Qaeda base in Lebanon similar to the one founded by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia...