Last night on Fox News a retired general who had served in Iraq suggested that with all of Iraq including Bagdad in danger of falling to an Islamic terrorist group named Isis that the United States should put retired General David Petraeus on an airplane for Bagdad to see if he could turn the situation around as he did before during the Iraq war without having to commit "boots on the ground" from the United States.
This sounds very like the situation in the Sudan in 1884. A radical Muslim group under a leader called the Mahdi were terrorizing the Sudan and threating it's capital of Khartoum. An Egyptian army under the command of British officers had been wiped out by the Mahdi and the British people in Victorian England were outraged and demanded that the British government send an English Army up the Nile river to save Khartoum. England's Prime Minister, William Gladstone, didn't want to commit British troops to such a relief effort up the Nile from Egypt so he sent General Charles "Chinese" Gordon, who's exploits in the British colonial empire were well know, to evacuate the Europeans trapped in Khartoum.
General Gordon being the character he was got to Khartoum and mounted a defense of the city that was successful for a number of months. Gladstone hearing of Gordon's defense was then forced to send a British Army up the Nile to "save" Gordon but it was too late. In the end, Gordon and 10,000 people in Khartoum were killed by the Mahdi and Gordon's head was brought to the Mahdi and his body mutilated.
There have been numerous reports that the Isis in Iraq have been beheading their captured foes.
Some things never change in the Middle East!
