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| quote: | Originally posted by Audigy7
Thank you George Bush for unjustifiably invading Iraq resulting in the pointless deaths of thousands of Americans, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands more of coalition members. |
| quote: |
SADDAM Hussein's conviction for the massacre of 148 Shiites in 1982 in the Iraqi village of Dujail was the first in an expected series of such trials. It was also only one small episode from the former Iraqi tyrant's blood-soaked years.
In his 1989 book Republic of Fear, the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya told anyone prepared to listen about the depraved regime of the Iraqi Baath party under Saddam. Makiya's Iraq Memory Foundation documents the multiple crimes and personal stories of Saddam's victims, their relatives and friends (www.iraqmemory.org).
Iraq's democratically elected President Jalal Talabani recently reminded us that Saddam's Baathist Iraq was the longest lived fascist regime in history. It has rightly been described by Christopher Hitchens as a "charnel house above ground and mass grave below".
The most comprehensive work on Saddam's crimes, the French Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein), has yet to be translated into English. But those with the desire to know have had the means, through Makiya and others, to appreciate if not comprehend the scale of Saddam's atrocities.
Just last month, two Kurdish witnesses at Saddam's trial for the massacre at Anfal, in Iraqi Kurdistan, gave harrowing accounts of surviving killing fields where guards executed hundreds of detainees at a time.
Saddam's henchman and cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid – the gruesome "Chemical Ali" – was asked in 1998 how he would deal with the Kurds. He said: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? F-- them!" He did as he threatened, and the international community did nothing.
Saddam and his genocidal family had it nailed. The odds were well and truly on their side. Just ask the people of Darfur.
From February to September 1988, 100,000 to 180,000 Iraqi Kurds died or disappeared. Saddam's Baathist tyranny used chemical weapons at least 60 times against Kurdish villages during the Anfal campaign.
Of course, the Kurds were not Saddam's only victims. Saadoun Kassab, a Shiite engineer who in 1957 helped build Abu Ghraib (designed to hold 4000 prisoners), himself became an inmate. Mr Kassab told the editor of The Black Book: "When I was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib in 1985, there were 48,500 prisoners. I was imprisoned for eight months in a space 1mx1.5m, a box. All that because I said hello to (the son of a former Shiite prime minister from the time of the monarchy)."
Because of periodic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. Next the warders visited the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their loved ones off the list.
The English novelist Ian McEwan observed that there were, in relation to Iraq, two kinds of people: those who recognised the words Abu Ghraib before 2004 and those who only did so afterwards.
Another of the numerous examples of Saddam's genocidal gestures was the ethnic cleansing between 1991 and 2003 of the Marsh Arabs, who have lived since ancient times in the marshlands of Mesopotamia. About 400,000 Arabs lived in the marshes of southern Iraq 30 years ago; today there are only about 83,000. Thousands were murdered by Saddam's soldiers, who drained the marshes on his orders; many more fled.
Reflect on this and imagine for a moment what Saddam's Iraq would have looked like in 2006 had he been left in place. By now the corruption-ridden sanctions would have been abandoned and the French and Russians would have been finding new excuses for a complete return to impunity for the dictator.
Iran's nuclear ambitions would be met by Saddam's nuclear plans (which, as we learned last weekend, were still intact in late 2002) and a new arms race would have commenced as each sought either the other's nuclear destruction or to become the undisputed regional kingpin by the annihilation of Israel.
And if Saddam had been laid low, all this would have been handed down to his deranged sons.
All those "realist" proponents of "stability" should chew on this.
Bernard Kouchner, the French leftist activist and politician, said Saddam himself was "the first weapon of mass destruction. Preserving the memory of the arbitrary arrests that Saddam's police conducted every morning, the horrible and humiliating torture, the organised rapes, the arbitrary executions and the prisons full of innocent people is not just a duty. Without that, one cannot understand either what Saddam's dictatorship was or the urgent necessity to remove him."
Of course, the pious hand-wringing among significant parts of the Western Left about the war curiously and conveniently passes over the fact that their ideological brethren in Iraq – represented principally, but not exclusively, by the Kurds – were the subject of this most ruthless repression. In July 2003, the Iraqi Communist Party renewed its call for the UN Human Rights Commission and international human rights organisations to support efforts aimed at revealing the fate of tens of thousands of disappeared Iraqis who were victims of Saddam's anti-leftist repression.
As if deaf to this history, only minutes after the announcement of Saddam's death sentence there were tendentious blogs that called for the trial and sentencing of those other "war criminals" George W. Bush and Tony Blair, confirming yet again, if confirmation were needed, that new depths of moral obtuseness not seen since the Hitler-Stalin pact are resurgent.
The critics of the removal of Saddam should recall George Orwell's message to his contemporaries in another, not unrelated, context: "The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it... There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British government now drew attention to them." Reminding his appeasement-minded comrades of the atrocities in pre-war Europe, Orwell said: "These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened."
And so it was for Saddam, for whom the words genocidal butcher and tyrant have real meaning. It's just a shame that so many so-called progressives discreetly and eagerly look the other way. |
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