Iraqi Sunni Sheikhs are beside themselves. Their cash-rolling masters, U.S. occupation troops, have left are years of collaboration and the Sheikhs know not what to do. It is so sad. They thought they were seen as equals and even friends by their American occupiers, but then the occupiers didn’t even bother to say goodbye:

“The Americans left without even saying goodbye. Not one of them,” Sabah said in his villa in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, once the cradle of Iraq’s insurgency.

How sad. This is so touching. I think I am going to cry. But the Sheikhs were so eager to say goodbye they even tried calling:

“Even when we called them, we got a message that the line had been disconnected.”

Disconnected. I guess they never really carried, huh? All that talk about the beauty of occupation was just words to get the Sheikhs into the collaborationist bed. Those bastard Americans!!!

This subservience of love of occupiers is, unfortunately, not new but goes back generations in Iraqi history:

The descendants of some sheiks jealously guard pictures of their forefathers posing with British potentates. One of them bragged that Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer, wrote about his ancestor, the powerful sheik Ali Sulaiman.

I hope for consolation today’s Sheikhs got their photos. As for writers, there is no American Gertrude Bell and thus no references to the Anbar Sheikhs. Americans overseas are seldom romantic, especially when they’re heavily armed.