Who do you suppose has killed more Iraqis?

[Blue-Jay]

Poll question: Who do you suppose has killed more Iraqis?

Followup question: If you voted for "Gassed his own people", where did he get the "gas"?

[Stand and Fight]

1. I voted Saddam.

I'm perfectly aware of the fact that he got his weapons from us.

[Blue-Jay]

2. You have statistics?

honestly. Are there figures out there that can be relied upon?

[stillcool]

3. no-brainer from....

where i'm sitting. i wonder how the iraqi's see it? Not only have thousands upon thousands been slaughtered and maimed, but their entire country is a war zone, being systematically reduced to rubble.

[Yupster]

4. How about the Iranians?

How many died in that horrible war? Or do those count as Saddam's since he was the one who invaded Iran?

The Iraqi people sure have been through an awful lot.

[Blue-Jay]

11. How about them?

File that under "other".

[Yupster]

17. Btw - got my wife up

to look at your squirrel.

I think it's the best photo on DU.

The look on Bush's face and the caption are perfect. Always brings a smile.

[LibertarianVoice]

5. Stuff like this really doesn't help us...

Implying that Bush is worse than Saddam is another one of those things that just gives ammo to the rightwingers, which they will bandy about on talk radio as a way to alienate moderates from the party.

Let's not kid ourselves here: Saddam killed millions of his own people through war, torture, and policy. Conditions were so oppressive in Iraq than roughly 1/4 of the population over two generations either died or emigrated out of the country.

Yes, the war in Iraq has killed a lot of innocent Iraq's, but we're talking about a realistic figure of around 20,000, and certainly no more than 100,000.
So as bad as it is, the fact is that it's never going to equal or exceed what Saddam did to brutalize his own country.

[stillcool]

6. links?....n/t

[expatriot]

8. I wholeheartedly agree....

It is as if some people have a psychological need to come up with a defense for Saddam just because he was the target of Bush's neocon aggression. Bush's unjust war in no way makes Saddam a "victim" or the "little guy." I am not accusing the creator of this poll of such thinking but it definitely plays into the whole mind set, like you said. There are people on DU here who DO very much make arguments as such and it is, I dare say, like freeper-logic in reverse.

[Blue-Jay]

13. Did I say "worse"?

I don't believe I did.

Still, dead is dead.

[wtmusic]

15. "Saddam killed millions of his own people"?

Got a link for that? Of course not, because it's not true.

:eyes:

[DerekG]

7. This poll should actually read Hussein or Bush/Clinton/Bush

The rape of Iraq, after all, was a bipartisan venture.

[frylock]

9. word!!

sanctions against Iraq has accounted for more needless deaths than anything. And I hate to break it to y'all, but yes, Clinton has a lot to account for in that respect.

[punpirate]

10. There's an "other" listed...

... and it's possible that more Iraqis have died during the sanction period than in other periods. While there were early estimates of 567,000 children under five dying from the Gulf War through 1995, those figures were later called into question. Even so, later estimates put the increased number of children under five dying at 350,000 through year 2000. Add in deaths above that age due to lack of clean water, vaccines and other medicines, lack of infrastructure and continual sporadic bombing through the period from the end of the Gulf war to the increased bombing from Sept., 2002, through the beginning of the Iraq invasion, and that number could well be above 500,000.

There have been arguments as to how much Hussein was responsible for these deaths after the start of the oil-for-food program, but there's no question that the sanctions created significant deaths through 1995. As well, infrastructure was severely damaged during the Gulf War and the embargo severely limited items necessary to repair that infrastructure; for example, chlorine was simply not available to water treatment plants because it could also be used for chemical weapons production. Damage to electrical plants often made operation of water treatment plants a moot point, anyway.

Half a million people?

[Blue-Jay]

12. Good point.

I don't absolve Clinton for continuing the sanctions against Iraq. (Imagine THAT, Freeps!) Dying of hunger is awful business, and doesn't make you any less dead than being gassed or bombed.

[Dogmudgeon]

14. I believe Saddam still holds the title

He had twenty years or more to rack up an impressive record of murder and genocide. The US occupation has taken somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 lives, depending on the source and the method used to count the dead.

This is not to excuse the occupation, of course, and any honest analysis of Hussein's evil must include his funding and encouragement by arrogant American and European plutocrats and political engineers. But Saddam remains the big "playah", even if he is out of the scene.

--p!

[Selatius]

16. I'd vote for "US Federal Government"

The shit in Iraq has gone back to the days of the early 1960s when the Ba'ath Party was helped by the CIA into gaining power in that country. From the Ba'ath Party came Saddam, and in the 1980s, the government sold him tons of weapons, weapons that he used on his own people. Oh, but we should ignore that because his body count also included Iranians.

[RoyGBiv]

18. Gassed his own people ...

I did not answer the question "gassed his own people." I answered the question "Saddam." The "gassed his own people" bit is a somewhat misleading qualifier. One among many incidents that resulted the deaths of people in Iraq at the hands of its government was the gassing of the Kurds, and obviously they got those weapons from the US.

But the question, as written, is who has killed more Iraqis.

The United States government, both directly and indirectly, has continuously been killing Iraqis since the 80's. This in no way absolves Saddam Hussein from his share of the blame for those deaths. Winchester may supply the bullets, but someone has to fire the gun. It's a simple fact that the actions of Hussein resulted in hundreds of thousands, possibly millions if one includes the Iran-Iraq war, of deaths among the Iraqi population while the actions of George Dubya specifically have probably resulted in thousands, possibly tens of thousands.

Having said that, what's the point of the question? The moral stain of causing, whether by direct or indirect intent, the deaths of innocents is not a numbers game. The evil that is our so-called President is not lessened by the evil that is also Saddam Hussein, nor vice versa. Peas in a pod, they are, and Hell can have them both.

[RedstDem]

20. You Articulated That Perfectly For Me

My Thoughts Exactly, They'll Both Love Hell & Fit Right In...

[wli]

19. Dubya gasses his own people

What do you think is going on at the WTO protests?