The British Pathé archive gives us an opportunity to resist historical forgetting and know a modernizing Iraq that was prouder and more self-determined than the hothouse of anxiety and ruin that latter-20th century U.S. aggression made it today.

“The young people of today know that life for them is going to be different, and better — far better than it was for their fathers,” the optimistic narrator says, unwittingly and tragically.

British Pathé:

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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