Freep Help Needed: When did the Iraq "slaughter" occur?

[linazelle]

I keep getting the "yeah-he-lied-but-Saddam-was-slaughtering-people" reply when I discuss THE LIE(s). The freeps want to say that the lies about weapons and attack capabilities weren't the only reason we went to Iraq. Does anybody have a good reponse for this? Does anybody have any links? I would appreciate anything you can provide.

[wuushew]

1. To my knowledge Saddam had been bottled up by no fly zones for a decade

I too would like an answer as the topic comes up debating conservatives frequently.

[Loonman]

2. From the 1991 Shi'ite uprising

That Pappy Bush urged on and promised support but left the Shi'ites twisting in the wind.


http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/05042003_iraq_massgraves.html

http://archives.tcm.ie/breakingnews/2003/05/04/story97711.asp

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/03/iraq/main552195.shtml


It's because of Pappy Bush that these people were murdered.

[arcane1]

3. well, he slaughtered the Islamic Fundementalists in the north

after we encouraged them to attempt to overthrow his gov't, AGAIN.


not says it was right but a little context helps... I can assure you if the Kurds had the same ideas and were running the north of the US, we (meaning politicians) would be much less sympathetic to them


and recall that when Clinton got involved in E Europe, it was on 'humanitarian' grounds, and the Repubes condemned him for this unprecedented use of military power

I DARE them to justify their actions by saying "Clinton did it too"

[Richardo]

4. MY response would be to ask THEM when the slaughter occurred...

...since they are just parroting wingnut radio and have done no research of their own, they won't be able to give you an answer.

What I've heard about "mass graves" indicate that they are are filled with the unfortunate Kurds who were encouraged to rebel by GHWB, who then left them twisting in the wind for Saddams retribution. So those are 12 years old.

Was there ongoing murderous oppression by Saddam? No doubt. But the Freeps lie when they say that was a reason for war. That was nothing but a last-moment rationalization for war, which is a massively different thing.

We heard nothing about Saddam's torture chambers during the presidential campaign, or late last summer when Andrew Card's "war marketing product" was introduced. It's just another slot on the "Wheel of Justifications" that Rove is continually spinning.

[linazelle]

11. Ricardo I agree and did ask them WHEN it occurred but I still need to

be sure as well so that I can respond intelligently.

[wuushew]

18. Asking them won't help

conservatives and middle of the road types believe three things

A.(Iraq has weapons of Mass destruction) solution = congressional reports


B.(Saddam was a butcher of unparalled ferocity) Solution = point out numerous countries in central Africa, combined with the history of no-fly zones and annual amnesty international reports.


C. (Iraq and nation states in general support terrorism.) Solution = declassified CIA report + compare contrast with Saudi Arbia information + Bush business connections

[ermoore]

26. Yeah.

A. Iraq did have WMD. No one denies that Saddam used chemical warfare against Iran and Iraqi Kurds in the eighties (5,000 Kurds massacred in Halabja alone). In the last month or so Bill Clinton himself has said that there was no doubt that Iraq had WMD and WMD programs when he left office. So we know Saddam had them. That begs the question of what the hell happened to them. A good question. Either they're there somewhere, or Saddam destroyed them himself and then just didn't tell anybody about it.

B. Just because everybody else is doing it doesn't make it ok. The no-fly zones didn't really help so much (ask the Marsh Arabs) and we all know Sanctions to be a disaster. Yeah, there are places in Africa and Asia where people are suffering just as badly, but you also have to realize that there are political realities that limit options in any circumstance. I'd love it if Clinton could have done more to help in Rwanda, but I don't think it was really possible at the time. You gotta start somewhere and you gotta do what you can, when you can.

C. Iraq does support terrorism. No doubt. It is a fact, not speculation. While a link to Bin Laden is not much more than a suspicion Saddam openly gives (I mean gave) money and support to Palestinian terrorist organizations and encouraged suicide bombers. I know some of you may not want to count that since they're attacks against Israeli civilians, but terrorism is terrorism and murdering innocents is always wrong (though regrettably, sometimes unavoidable).

[wuushew]

28. I am aware of all of the above, but what you point out

does not help refute the arguments pro-war people cling to.

[ermoore]

29. Sorry,

How so? I'm missing something here, that's all.

[wuushew]

31. my points are to illustrate hypocrasy and how hypocrasy is bad policy

Pro war types who claim to be motivated soley by humanitarian goals must be questioned when a great or greater needs arise such as the plight of Africa.

Pro war types who claim that Iraq had WMD's must be made to realize that Iran and North Korea both are much farther down that road and that by taking out Iraq(which was very weak militarily)the U.S. has cemented those countries reason to develop WMD even further.

Pro-war types who claim that the war in Iraq is a war against terror must be shown that be invading a sovereign Arab country we in the long hall have increased the terrorism threat to ourselves. Pointing out that the various Arab countries begged the United States to play a positive role in first helping stablize the Israeli/Palestian conflict.

[treepig]

30. you might not believe it

but it is inaccurate to say "No one denies that Saddam used chemical warfare against Iran and Iraqi Kurds in the eighties (5,000 Kurds massacred in Halabja alone)."

read the link i supplied in post #23 and you will see that the there are people out there who deny that saddam's (actually our) gas killed the kurds. their evidence seems more credible to me than the right wing party line.

furthermore, just because clinton said something, then it's true?

:eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

[salin]

5. Actually, I believe that refers to something that our earlier policies

set into motion.

When we pulled away from "marching into Bagdad" in 1991, we gave many public speeches encouraging "the oppressed" to "rise up against Sadam". Claiming that Sadam had been weakened - but overthrow should come from within. Thing is, that we encouraged an uprising, and suggested that we would provide support. But we didn't. We did nothing.

So there were some uprisings. And Sadam brutally put down the uprisings. Yes it was awful. And yes he could have captured and imprisoned rather than slaughtered. But the setup was almost inevitable - and sadly US policy and pronouncements set the stage. I believe that the uprisings would not have occured without our encouragement and suggestions of support. Without the uprisings, it is less likely that the slaughters would have happened.

I believe these are the slaughters to which you refer.

[ermoore]

27. We stopped . . .

. . . short of Baghdad because the UN would not authorize the Coalition to go any further.

[Loonman]

6. Also---Halabja gassings were "collateral" damage

Gas supplied by Reagan and Rummy and manufactuerd in the Good ol' USA.

http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pfvs/2003I/msg00470.html

[Brian Sweat]

13. I read somewhere that the Kurds in Halabja were actually

killed by Iranian nerve gas. Supposedly, there was a battle in the area and the Iranians used a nerve agent that Iraq didn't even have and that the Kurds were "collateral" damage.

[Loonman]

15. Yeah, Halabja was an important strategic location

For Both sides, the Kurds just "happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time", and Pappy Bush obviously couldn't have cared less.


This is important to know.

When a Freep or Bush-bot says, "but he gassed his own people", ask them who got gassed, why it happened and who let it happen.

I guarantee you they will not know the whole story.

[treepig]

23. a pertinent link

http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Middle_East/gassings.htm

[SoCalDem]

7. After Poppy's war "ended", we sent mixed messages

to the people in the south..and the Kurds in the north.."Rise up, depose Saddam, and we'll help you"... They did...we didn't..

We allowed Saddam to keep certain weapons (like the helicopter gunships)..

I can rmemeber watching in horror as he "restored order".. We did NOTHING..

Poppy Bush was afraid that if soldiers got killed, he would lose the election.. This had to have been April or May .. Too lazy to google now..


So when the c-span people were filming the "mass graves" and wringing their hands last month in their documentary, I was livid.. Not a single person spoke up about how those graves originated..

We taunted the people into rebelling, and then we sat by and watched them get slaughtered..

We did the same to the Kurds, but they managed to re-group , far enough into the no-fly zone to get their act together..

The massacre was OUR fault..

[StandWatie]

12. it wasn't casualties he was concerned about

They didn't ask for US troops or even US weapons, what they asked for was captured Iraqi tanks and armaments but Bush was afraid they might actually win so they were denied those.

[Trajan]

8. ALSO ....

Some are probably casualties from the Iran/Iraq War, which was FULLY supported by the GOP administration in the 80's ...

Without evidence: ... the occupants of those graves cannot be declared as a specific group, and therefore claims they are the victims of Baathist massacre are without an evidentiary foundation .... It could be that MOST of them were killed during the era when Reagan/Bush ADORED Saddam and made him their favorite tyrant ......

They SURE as hell are dead though .....

[TlalocW]

9. My take

There was something that happened in 1988 I think between Iran and Iraq, and the Kurds got caught in the middle. One intelligence officer recently wrote a column where he said that the autopsies performed on the Kurds who were killed showed signs of being killed by the Iranian chemical weapons and not Iraq's - one was mustard gas based, and the other not. If you google for this, you can find it.

But what everyone else is mentioning is good too... Reagan and Bush were the ones that armed him and then winked at him whenever he went out and did something inhumane.

TlalocW

[LoneStarLiberal]

10. Mission Creep

Mission Creep is what happens when you set out to do something and then end up doing something else, then yet something else, until you're doing stuff that is so far removed from what you set out to do that you find yourself confused and usually in trouble. In the military, mission creep is one of the most dreaded phrases around because when you have mission creep in the military, soldiers die. Our Iraq situation is a perfect example of mission creep.

The Bush administration is currently engaged in rhetorical mission creep. Look no further than the WMD arguement: We went from "Saddam has WMD and is an imminent threat to our security" (which signifies a high threshold of armaments and delivery mechanisms) to "Saddam was working on WMD programs that could threaten us" (which has almost no threshold and is completely vague). This is rhetorical mission creep at work; the contemporary justification for WMD is an absolute joke and completely indefensible.

When Saddam was at the height of his attacking his own people, he was our buddy because he was fighting the Iranians. He used nerve gas on the Kurdish town of Halabjah on March 16, 1988 killing roughly 5,000 people and crippling many others. Note here: This took place 15 years ago during President G.H.W. Bush's administration. We did nothing. Using this to justify attacking Iraq now is, pardon my English, an absolute fucking joke. By this standard of selectively reaching back into history to justify action in the present, I'm expecting Germany and Japan to sock it to the United States any moment now for murdering hundred of thousands of their civilians in deliberate campaigns of bombing civilian concentrations during World War II (fire bombing Dresden and Tokyo, for example).

These are only two examples of the vast amount of rhetorical mission creep our administration uses to try and justify its foolish actions.

[Trajan]

14. A kewl article .....

I found this yesterday .... a good find : ...


http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg00776.html

U.S. and Iraq's Weapons (LA Times-23 Feb 93)

BYLINE: By DOUGLAS FRANTZ and MURRAY WAAS, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; Frantz is a Times staff writer and Waas is a special correspondent.


-snip-

Washington's supportive policy toward Iraq began in 1982. Hussein was in the second year of his war with Iran and the conflict was not going well for Baghdad. The Reagan Administration, while officially neutral, decided to help Iraq as a means of containing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

U.S. relations with Iraq had been severed in 1967 after the Arab-Israeli war, but the biggest obstacle to renewed ties was the fact that Iraq was on Washington's official list of countries supporting international terrorism. That meant that most forms of U.S. aid were prohibited by law.

The State Department responded by removing Iraq from the terrorism list in February, 1982, an action opposed by some within the Administration. Four former officials said in interviews that there was no evidence that Iraq's support of terrorists had waned.

"All the intelligence I saw indicated that the Iraqis continued to support terrorism to much the same degree as they had in the past," said Noel Koch, then in charge of the Pentagon's counterterrorism program. "We took Iraq off the list and shouldn't have. . . . We did it for political reasons."

-snip-

There is supposedly two other related articles that followed this ....

[bread_and_roses]

16. I wouldn't try to defend SH but you can...

...remind people that he was a slaughtering, torturing, viscious tyrant when we supported him too...and that the American people were not crazy about the idea of this "war" until we were told he was an "imminent" threat to US...and that invasion of a soverign nation who hasn't attacked violates international law...and that maybe the Iraqi people don't consider their dead children a fair trade for SH, even though we do...etc.

[linazelle]

22. Excellent points

I don't understand how people can present information about events that happened years ago--even decades ago--as justification for the rush to murder by us.

We are now living in Bizarro World for sure. Bye Toto.

[Skittles]

17. SEND HIM THIS LINK

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030806/index.php

[lfairban]

19. Maybe my Iraq links can help

Here are my links to articles on the History of Iraq:

http://home.columbus.rr.com/lfairban/Pages/Iraq.html#History

Scroll down to the Halabjah section.

There are some more at:
http://home.columbus.rr.com/lfairban/Pages/Newly%20Discovered%20Links.html#Iraq

The claim was raised by Human Rights Watch, I believe, and refuted by a Pentagon study, probably bogus, which claimed the Iranians did it.

Nobody mentions that Iraq was at war with Iran at the time, and the Kurds were on the side of Iran, and trying to break off a piece of Iraq for themselves.

Most of the mass graves probably came from the Shiite revolt, or the Sunni response, or the Iran/Iraq war..

According to:
http://www.angelfire.com/ga/wkb/resacagrave.html

. . . you can't even put in a parking lot in the South without running across mass grave sites from the 1860's. Does that make Lincoln a mass murderer?

[myrna minx]

20. Frontline has great resuorces...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/trainor/8.html

[radwriter0555]

21. Ask them to show you a single so-called mass grave NOT pre-dating

1992 and NOT attributed to various tribal wars.

I've done the research. There are no findings in the past 11 years attributed to hussein.

Also, lacking between 1990 and 1998 is any information or research and findings from orgs such as the CIA on goings-on in Iraq. This is why clinton didn't make any moves on iraq... while a select few people were clamoring for oppression on iraq, the clinton admin had nothing to substantiate invasion or attack.

Until 1998. Then a select few members of congress commissioned don rumsfeld to formulate a report on iraq.

Why rummy and not the CIA?

It was based on this report that clinton wagged his dog, so to speak.

Based on RUMMY'S INFO, clinton bombed iraq.

NOT on the CIA.

Go figure.

Google Rumsfeld 1998 Iraq Commission Security.

[linazelle]

25. Excellent information Rad et al...I'm bookmarking this thread

for future reference and preparing a reply to one particularly annoying person right away. I wish you could read some of this stuff:

If you (or anybody else) wants to: visit a few of these sites and see what I'm up against...I'd love to have your support:

http://pub146.ezboard.com/flipoliticsmessageboardforumsfrm8
http://forums.ibsys.com/viewtopics.cfm?sitekey=chi&Forum=79
http://community.wlsam.com/community/scripts/directory.pl

You won't see me using the same screen name as I do here but I'm there nonetheless. Hope you have time. And if anybody has any boards they'd like to share, I'd love to go. I believe these type of forums are important and I've definitely seen some change their minds based on our irrefutable facts.

Thanx again.

[treepig]

24. did somebody say mass graves in iraq?

here's a fairly precise date for the slaughter: February 24/25, 1991

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14633

read the story! (hint: not all the mass graves in iraq were filled by saddam)

[damnraddem]

32. It depends on which slaughter is referred to:

1. That of Iranis and Iraqis both, after Saddam invaded Iran with U.S. blessing and with U.S.-supplied weapons, including WMDs. Rummy was important in supporting that slaughter.
2. That of Kurds and Shias, after they were urged to rise against Saddam in 1991 by Poppy Bush, then abandoned when they did.
3. That of thousands of Iraqis by the effects of over a decade of sanctions that prevented the importing of chemicals needed for water treatment, of sufficient food and medicines, and in earlier years of most food and medicines.
4. That of thousands of Iraqis by the U.S. invasion of Iraq this year -- oh wait, Saddam didn't do that one.

Well, after all, Saddam hadn't been able to do much slaughtering in recent years, what with the sanctions, the no-fly zones, UN inspections, and U.S. bombings. I'm sure he wanted to do more, but someone was always interfering -- without needing to invade, by the way.