IRAQ: When US administrators purged Iraq's history textbooks of Saddam, instead of rewriting the country's past they chose to leave it out.
Large swathes of the 20th-century have been cut with the US-led coalition government anxious to avoid imposing a victor's version of events.
The result is that though reference to the former leader have been removed from the history textbooks, so too have controversial subjects like, the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War, and all mentions of the US, Kurds and Israelis.
The new textbook will arrive in Iraq's 16,000 schools later this month fresh from the printing press. But will only be half its former size.
"We have been told by the Americans that Iraq's history is a very sensitive topic and it would be better to deal with it later," said Fuad Hussein, the Iraqi in charge of the curriculum for the Ministry for Education.
"We need to have a consensus across the whole of Iraqi society about how to talk about our past," said Hussein.
The downsizing of the curriculum reflects the political challenges faced by the US-led government as it rebuilds Iraq's schools, retrains its teachers, and rewrites textbooks.
US administrators want Iraqis to write their own history, but don't want anti-American or radically religious propaganda in the classroom - which they fear might be popular in the current climate.
"The Iraqis need time to write a history for the country which won't be discriminatory as it was under the former regime," a CPA spokesperson said.
Plans to set up an educational committee to oversee the writing of a history syllabus will take two to three years, Hussein said. Until then, teachers will have to form their own version of such recent events as the American invasion.
Which means what the history students learn depends on their teacher - which may not be to the Americans liking.
Some teachers said if the history is not in the textbooks, the students simply won't learn it at all.
"A teacher can't teach something if it's not in the text," said Mahmood Kadhum Mohammed, a geography teacher at Al Sharqiya School for Boys.
But Huda Shahed Yousiph, who will qualify as a history teacher next year, says, "If the Americans write our history they will put in only good things about themselves. If that's the case I won't follow the book because the Americans destroyed us. That's what I'll teach."