Early in The 9/11 Wars, a magisterial history of the last decade, Jason Burke describes a battle in an Iraqi town called Majar al-Kabir, held in June 2003, soon after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The battle was described by press headlines in the UK as the heroic "last stand" of humanitarian-minded British soldiers against a mob of vicious Iraqi insurgents. Abruptly one morning, a British
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