Saddam killed billions of Iraqis!! Human Rights Watch says...

[dpibel]

Check out http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=14708

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has left President George Bush and Tony Blair claiming that the invasion was on humanitarian grounds, said a hard-hitting annual report of Human Rights Watch. It said that the West had done nothing when Saddam massacred Kurds and Shias in the past, and there was no evidence of any continuing mass killings at the start of the war in March 2003.

. . .

However, Human Rights Watch said the US-British attack on Iraq failed to qualify on a number of grounds normally used as a test of justified humanitarian military action.

There were no mass killings going on; war was not the only option - legal, economic and political measures could have been taken; there was no evidence that humanitarian purpose was the main one for launching the invasion; the attack did not have the backing of the United Nations or any other multinational body, and the situation in the country has not got better.


I've always been fascinated by the gnashing of teeth over the meeelyuns and meeelyuns of people the US saved by going to Iraq and killing only a few thousand.

An interesting exercise is this: Go to the Amnesty International website. You know, those guys who are always screaming bloody murder and overamping a few random killings here and there. Read their reports on Iraq for the five years leading up to the most recent invasion of that country.

Here's what you'll find (although there are a number of people on this board who won't believe me): For 1998-2001, Amnesty International notes that the number of political killings in Iraq numbered in the hundreds. That all changed in 2002. Then the number became "dozens."

For those who wish to pat the US on the back for saving all those lives, I submit that, according to Amnesty, the number who died in the five years leading up to the invasion was less than 5,000, which is about half the number of civilians who have died in the invasion, some small fraction of the number of Iraqi soldiers who died (call me simple, but I consider Iraqi soldiers to possess human lives), and an infinitesimal fraction of the number who died under the sanctions regime.

For those who would like to trot out the "Saddam lover" label, feel free. Then feel free to explain to me that <5,000 lives taken by the evil dictator is intolerable and justifies killing some multiple of that number.

[Terwilliger]

1. I've always wondered just how many "hundreds of thousands" Saddam killed

since that seemed to be the biggest justification for the war

[dpibel]

3. Grammar attack!

Edited cuz I cain't type.

Don't you mean "seems to be"?

"Seemed" would be past tense, whereas the justification in the past (at least during the runup to the invasion) was WMDWMDWMD.

;-)

[Terwilliger]

5. oh, I agree

but now, of course, the argument is "Well, don't you think the world is better off without Saddam Hussein?"

Somehow, an actual justification for war is still a ways off.

[camero]

2. How much of that

was due to the sanctions?

[dpibel]

4. I've always suspected

That getting into the massive numbers that get bruited about, you have to include the Iraq/Iran war casualties (c. 800K) and the BushDaddy Iraq war (c. 100-200K) and the sanctions (c. 1M, I think, or is it a half-mil? I mean, what's 500K Iraqis amongst friends).

If the deaths claimed were just the result of Saddam-directed purges there are two things: (1) It would require some massive death factories of some sort--a million is a lot of people; and (2) between that and the numbers in the first paragraph, it would have represented the death of nearly 10% of the population of the country.

[camero]

6. And they would have found them by now

There more than likely are not any.

[corporatewhore]

7. Sanctions killed at least 1.5 million iraqis

so says unicef