Likewise, whatever the innovations in writing, law, agriculture and village life once pioneered by previous owners of the lot, modern Iraq has squandered them: Writing? Banned. Agriculture? We drained the marshes. Village life? Do what we say or we'll kill you. Law? You gotta be kidding. Mesopotamia may be "the cradle of civilization," but civilization learned to walk and talk and graduated to long pants in Greece and Rome and London and North America and Australia and India and Japan and St. Lucia and Papua New Guinea, and what was once the cradle became, in the last four decades, the toilet of civilization -- a place incapable of inventing the industrial shredder but anxious to import them for the purpose of feeding human beings into.