This is not an original observation of mine. The great historian C. Vann Woodward pointed it out in his collection of essays, "The Burden of Southern History." Writing in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, he showed that the brutalizing experience of occupation has never become an acknowledged part of the American experience, so policy tends to be "grounded on the legends of success and invincibility" and "illusions of innocence and virtue." "We sought no territorial aggrandizement, coveted no 'colony,' desired no subject people," said Woodward. "We came to liberate, not to enslave."

But what Southerners know, if they stop to think about it, is that motives do not matter. It is the fact of occupation, the fact, as Iraqis often put it, that someone is coming into your house and telling you what to do, that leaves such a long-lasting sense of humiliation, with all its concomitant anger. Were the goals of the Federal government laudable? Absolutely: to preserve the Union and to end slavery. And yet, more than 140 years later, in many corners of the South, the resentment remains.

You can get a fine, nuanced and ultimately very disturbing sense of the durable and deeply ingrained anger among the Iraqis from an extraordinary documentary film by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein due for release later this month: "The Prisoner: or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair." The earlier non-fiction feature by this husband and wife team, "Gunner Palace," was a vivid depiction of the occupation in Baghdad during the early days of the war, told mainly from the American soldiers' point of view. This powerful sequel tells the story of one of the men they took captive.

On the basis of very vague intelligence that was never confirmed, much less presented in court, journalist Yunis Khatayer Abbas and three of his brothers were pulled from their beds one night in September 2003. The allegation made by an unnamed source was that they'd somehow plotted to murder the British prime minister during one of his grip-and-grin visits to Iraq.

After lengthy interrogations about everything from their attitudes toward movie star Harrison Ford to their sexual preferences and favorite songs, Abbas and his brothers were transferred to a tent compound at Abu Ghraib prison reserved for prisoners who have not been charged, much less convicted, and have also been classified as having no intelligence value whatsoever. They were held there for eight months, exposed not only to the lousy conditions, but to occasional mortar attacks by insurgents. While their guards had flak jackets and holes to hide in, the prisoners were defenseless.

Abbas speaks good English in measured phrases, and the extended interviews with him in "The Prisoner" are sometimes quite funny. But the irony does not disguise the anger that will likely endure as long as Abbas and his brothers live, or their descendants remember them, "I am not a terrorist or monster," he says. "I am not Dracula. I am not a monkey or a cow. I am a man."
One of Saudi Arabia's veteran envoys and spokesmen, Hassan Yassin, recently tried to define for me the difference he saw in the world as it is today, and the world as it was in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was growing up. "Today history is made instantaneously and forgotten instantaneously," he said. "Before, history was made over time and remembered over time."
I think that's probably true in our era of non-stop news, or the semblance or news. (The theme I was asked to address in Spartanburg was "Iraq Around the Clock: 24/7 News and the Evil of Banality.")  But as I was talking in South Carolina it struck me that there's an important corollary to Yassin's adage, because some people most certainly do remember.