Please...someone...explain this to me...

[veracity]

The media are all showing Colin Powell 'honoring' the 5,000 Kurds... brutally killed by Saddam with chemical weapons. For the moment, let's forget who supplied those weapons, and who stood by tacitly approving the killings without uttering a word of condemnation all these years...

BUT BUT BUT BUT..... didn't we just kill far more Iraqis in this "war of liberation?" Will someone explain the difference? The Kurds were killed in response to an uprising against Saddam. I'm not really sure why we killed all those innocent people. So.... I'm at a total loss over the logic of all this. Can someone help?

[unfrigginreal]

1. Saddam is Evil...We are Righteous. n/t

[zeemike]

2. It is really very simple

What you are guilty of, accuse your enemy of doing.
If you are making war. call it peace
If you are subjugating, call it freedom
If you lie, call it truth
Make the hard words easy, and the easy words hard.
Learn the art of doublespeak, and never be challenged again.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

3. Appx. 8000 civilians and counting plus appx 2400 Military....

And Bush, Rummy and Powell keep reminding us that it was a compassionate war.

Christ, by compassionate do they mean they went around and shot the wounded to put them out of their misery?


[

[Porcupine]

4. Saddam "killed" civilians. U.S. troops cause "collateral damage"

but if you ask the mother of a dead kid if it makes it better that her child was killed by U.S. bombs she will deny it.

Dead kids is dead kids no matter how you pretty the language up. Last I checked the U.S. was responsible for 500,000 dead kids in Iraq if you count the children killed by sanctions.

We are the terrorists.

[Mz Pip]

5. Let's write Colin's script

"You may not be aware of this but the US actually was friends with Saddam when he gassed the Kurds. We actually helped him by supplying the materials. We don't really like to mention this because it makes us look bad and makes our attack on him look a bit disingenuous. So we leave out the part about our supporting him during this time. He was a brutal guy back then but he was our bitch so it worked for us.

We bring up his gassing of the Kurds now, years later because we don't have a lot of new material on how bad he is. We've had him contained for years, but damn that just isn't good enough. We really wanted to bomb the f*cker. Gassing the Kurds seems to trigger a Pavlovian response. People drool, their eyes glaze over and they yell, "Kill the bastard!" We just leave out the part about how we supported him back then and hope no one bothers to check the facts.

Oh ,yeah, did you hear the part about the Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of the incubators in Kuwait? We made that up too, but ssshhhhh, don't tell anyone."

MzPip
:dem:

[masmdu]

6. Kurds NOT gassed by Saddam...

Investigations into the incident by the Army War College and the Defense Intellegence Agency (DIA) both determined that:

The Kurds were not directly targeted but were caught in the fighting between Iran and Iraq

and

The manner of death of the Kurds that were killed could only have been produced by the weapons in the IRANIAN arsenal. At that time Iraq only had mustard gas.


http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/04/1602606.php

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0218/trilling.php

http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2002/msg00024.html

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/GaseousLies.htm

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/helms.html

[Sweetpea]

7. They need to free their guilty conscious.

[lfairban]

8. Not exactly

"The Kurds were killed in response to an uprising against Saddam."

I believe this was during the Iran-Iraq war, and the Kurds were supporting the Iranians even though they lived in Iraq. They have been trying to carve their own country out of Northwest Iraq and Turkey ever since there has been an Iraq.

Some of the stories estimate 50 to 100 thousand deaths.

Over all, I agree that morally there is little difference between those deaths and the collateral damage by the US in Iraq, or General Sherman in Georgia.

See "Halabjah" in the Iraq - History links:
http://home.columbus.rr.com/lfairban/Pages/Iraq.html#History

[neebob]

9. A "collateral" observation

Others are doing a fine job of explaining. I can't help noticing it's a swell photo-op in support of the new past-tense repeat-o-lie "Saddam possessED and usED WMDs." Never mind it was in 1988.

[Porcupine]

10. He forgot about the Stark incident. Blowing up US naval vessels......

just didn't seem to count as acts of war back then. Strange indeed.