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cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 749
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 11:14 am: |     |
From the Chicago Tribune:
"Wherever they were killed, many were blindfolded and shot in the forehead. Saddam Hussein's whole country became a killing field.
Mass graves "are everywhere," said Sandy Hodgkinson, a U.S. State Department attorney who has been working with Iraq's Human Rights Ministry, the agency in charge of investigating the mass graves. "You follow reports, and they turn up in places you would never suspect."
Iraq is littered with bodies stuffed dozens at a time into cemetery plots, bodies shoved over cliffs, tossed in lakes or hidden in farm fields where vegetables still grow, said Saad Sultan, 32, a lawyer and detective with the Human Rights Ministry's mass graves research team.
So far, 282 possible mass grave sites have been identified, 55 have been confirmed and 20 have been explored. But nine months after Hussein's fall, the total number of graves is unknown. So, too, is the number buried, though the figure is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Among Kurds alone, for example, there are at least 182,000 people missing, 8,000 of them from one clan, the Barzanis.
Count incomplete
The incomplete count of mass graves is partly a result of searchers' putting a high priority on exploring the known sites that may aid in the prosecution of Hussein and other top officials. But it also is attributed to a shortage of Iraqis trained to do such work and the few resources available to them. Teams from the U.S. and several European nations are helping train Iraqis and search for graves.
Most of the graves have been found in the center of Iraq, leading experts to think that the dead are Shiites, victims of Hussein's onslaught against those who rose up in 1991 at the end of the first Persian Gulf war.
But the regime apparently shipped bodies across the country, which would explain why those of Kurds killed in the north have shown up in the desert southwest.
Iraqi officials also tried to cover their tracks by forcibly moving neighbors so as to eliminate those who might identify mass graves. In many places, a deep hole was dug with heavy equipment; then bodies were dumped from trucks and the site was covered with earth."
Who on this board said there was no genocide in Iraq?
Oh....I know, I know. Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh....but where are the WMD???!!!
Yes....as Dr. Dean said -- "Saddam was a bad man." |
tjohn
Citizen
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 2112
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 12:19 pm: | |
By the calculus of Joseph Stalin, the death count you described amounts to a tragedy. The deaths attributable to Joseph Stalin reached the level of a statistic, yet it was appropriate to contain Russia and invade Iraq. Where is the consistency here?
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/josephstal129227.html
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bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 4391
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 12:36 pm: | |
How many of the deaths in Iraq were Shites and Kurds encouraged to revolt against Sadaam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War and then abandoned by Bush the First? |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 751
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 12:50 pm: | |
Stalin didn't kill millions. The New York Times did a Pulitzer prize-winning piece about that. Why would "The Nation" endorse Stalin if that were true? Let's ask FDR about taking out Russia before they had nuclear capability. Unless, of course, you advocate invading a nuclear-tipped enemy?
bobk, I don't know how many were those who rose up against Saddam in 1991. Perhaps Saddam did all his killing at that time and no other. Maybe most of his killing was at that time, and the rest was just garden variety mass murder? A Stalinesque 'statistic'?
And I think you'll agree with me that Bush the Elder shouldn't have cowtowed to the tyrants at the UN and in the Middle East who forbade the US from marching into Baghdad as a pre-condition to allowing the US to toss Saddam out of Kuwait. |
Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Citizen
Username: Casey
Post Number: 468
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 12:50 pm: | |
I know you'd prefer to believe that everyone who disagreed with the war is a big, fat hypocrite, but some of us don't understand why we would launch a full scale invasion in March 2003 because of killings that took place over 10 years ago.
According to Radio Free Europe, the victims in those mass graves date back to the end of the first Gulf War and earlier.
http://www.rferl.org/features/2003/07/07072003165402.asp |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 752
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 1:06 pm: | |
Some of the graves, not all of them as per that report you cite. We still have to learn how many he killed after those wars. Couldn't be many.
Maybe he just killed them 10 at a time. Or less than 10. Let's get all the videos -- like the ones where Saddam was tossing them off buildings -- and compare notes with the surviving families.
As for launching war -- we launched a war for killings we THOUGHT were taking place on a mass scale in 1999, and that was a 'good thing.'
I don't think everyone is a hypocrite. I think some people are honest about it, and opposed all forms of war down the line. Others are stupid, still others are purely political to the detriment of this country. |
tjohn
Citizen
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 2114
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 1:16 pm: | |
Let's not get caught of in this humanitarian justification for our invasion.
We have a graduated humanitarian standard as opposed to a principled standard.
1. Humanitarian missions are worthy if the cost is very low (e.g. Somalia before the nation-building silliness).
2. Invasion if the cost is low to moderate (e.g. Iraq).
3. Containment if the cost of war is prohibitive (e.g. Soviet Union pre and post nuclear weapons).
This graduated standard is pragmatic and not cynical. Most of us will lend a acquaintance a few bucks. Most of us won't lend an acquaintance a few thousand bucks. |
Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Citizen
Username: Casey
Post Number: 469
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 1:34 pm: | |
cjc,
"some" of the graves? the report clearly says the "bulk," and gives absolutely no evidence that there are mass graves dating from any other time period. and this is Radio Free Europe, not some wacky anti-Bush conspiracy site.
and yes, the number of executions and when they occurred does matter in the justification for war. did we kill 15,000 Iraqis and unleash hundreds of insurgent guerillas to blow up a dozen or so more Iraqis every day in order to save several hundred dissidents? I don't think that's a clear-cut rationale for military intervention.
and you can't justify it by saying we intervened in Kosovo and turned out to be mistaken about the degree of atrocities. if anything, that's a good reason to make sure of our intelligence before proceeding and potentially making a bad circumstance worse.
of course all this is beside the point. The central justification for war was that Iraq threatened the US, and there was no evidence to support that claim, not then and certainly not now.
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cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 753
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 2:16 pm: | |
Right. We were wrong to go to Kosovo, and we were wrong to go to Iraq, because the intelligence was off. Everyone lied. No, Bush lied, we were mistaken in Kosovo.
Clark was also lying in testimony to Congress that Saddam was a threat. He didn't say Saddam was a threat to the point that he thought we should invade, but he was a threat and was willing to wait. And he was proud of Kosovo -- where does he get off?
And now all this was done for less than 1000 dissidents.
Your source is dated July. The Tribune was last week, and we'll have to wait to see if people were killed in sufficient numbers at the right time to justify this on a humanitarian basis for you. |
Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 2763
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 2:36 pm: | |
quote:Most of the graves discovered to date correspond to one of five major atrocities perpetrated by the regime:
The 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens belonging to the Barzani tribe, 8,000 of whom were rounded up by the regime in northern Iraq and executed in deserts at great distances from their homes.
The 1988 Anfal campaign, during which as many as 182,000 people disappeared. Most of the men were separated from their families and were executed in deserts in the west and southwest of Iraq. The remains of some of their wives and children have also been found in mass graves.
Chemical attacks against Kurdish villages from 1986 to 1988, including the Halabja attack, when the Iraqi Air Force dropped sarin, VX and tabun chemical agents on the civilian population, killing 5,000 people immediately and causing long-term medical problems, related deaths, and birth defects among the progeny of thousands more.
The 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi’a Muslims after the Shi’a uprising at the end of the Gulf war, in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in such regions as Basra and Al-Hillah were killed.
The 1991 Kurdish massacre, which targeted civilians and soldiers who fought for autonomy in northern Iraq after the Gulf war
Source: Coalition Provisional Authority. |
Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Citizen
Username: Casey
Post Number: 470
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 2:52 pm: | |
cjc,
although you never budge an inch, I'll try again anyway.
with regard to Kosovo, I was not in favor of dropping bombs on people to get them to stop killing each other. What Wesley Clark believes about it is not relevant to the points I was making about Iraq (I never cited him, so I don't know why you bring him up). Regardless, Kosovo was a situation that was underway at the time.
On the other hand, the evidence seems to show that by far the worst of Saddam's atrocities were at least 10 years in the past. and I didn't bring it up before because it's not necessarily relevant to the question of whether this war was right, but most of those atrocities happened with either US backing (the Iran - Iraq War), the US turning a blind eye (attacks on the Kurds in the '80s), or with US encouragement (the post-Gulf War uprisings). to use those events years later as justification for a US invasion seems disingenuous at best.
but hey, as far as your concerned, people like me would applaud if a Democratic president launched this war. |
Michaela May
Citizen
Username: Mayquene
Post Number: 48
Registered: 1-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 3:34 pm: | |
This is trying to use the ends to justify the means -- there are lots of horrible dictators who do terrible things to their people, and our government only cries "human rights violations!" when it suits us, such as when the initial reason for invading a country proves spurious. The rest of the time, this government becomes ally to those autocrats. |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 754
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 4:18 pm: | |
Maybe you are the one Quaker in the bunch here, Doc, who wouldn't have supported any of the conflicts in the 90s. Can't say that about the rest of this board. To me, any atrocity from the failed uprising after the first war or the garden-variety killings that continued after that is fair justification of ending Saddam's tenure.
The atrocities we took a 'blind eye' towards were during the Cold War when the gameboard was entirely different and people were supporting terrible regimes to offset a menacing adversary. Those days are gone, and thank god they are, though I think Michaela sees those days continuing even now.
That Bush listed WMD foremost, but in addition to the ongoing slaughter and repression, the UN resolution violations, sealed the deal for me. And I was consistent in my support of the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts though I disagreed with the manner the war was conducted but not to the point of tossing presidents on that basis.
Saddam, Slobo - they were the bad guys. Not the US president at the time. |
Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Citizen
Username: Casey
Post Number: 471
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 4:47 pm: | |
I suppose it would be nice to see the world as black and white, in which a person either supports all wars, or is a complete pacifist.
I can't argue with that reasoning.
and once again I'm left wondering why I even try to. |
tjohn
Citizen
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 2115
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 5:00 pm: | |
Cjc,
It would be naive to believe that the age of the double-standard ended with the implosion of the USSR. Our standard for humanitarian interventions has been and will continue to be low cost, particularly in terms of the lives of our soldiers.
Bush would not have been able to sell his invasion of Iraq on purely humanitarian grounds. He knew this - or more likely Rove did - and an imbalanced view of the evidence was deliberately presented in order to justify the invasion.
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Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 2767
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 5:16 pm: | |
The President will be running on a lie - his claim that people who disagreed with him, didn't want to do anything about Saddam Hussein. Since that is not the case, that makes it a lie. Ten-to twenty-year old mass graves provided a reason for international action and inspections. They do not provide a justification for the military action which was taken.
The real issue, for the election, should be whether this "preemptive war" policy, even without any indication of an immediate threat to "preempt", should continue to be followed by the United States. Since there is a real disagreement about whether that policy actually makes us safer, it's a legitimate question.
And anybody uncomfortable with the Bush Administration's approach, who is concerned that the approach will make us less secure, should seriously consider voting for someone else. |
wharfrat
Citizen
Username: Wharfrat
Post Number: 926
Registered: 6-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 7:15 pm: | |
And speaking of containment and the "axis of evil", this appeared in todays NYT. Are we going to march into Pyongyang, also? I doubt it. It's become clear that the Iraq WMD ruse was an excuse for Richard Perle and company to whip some ass (paraphrasing Tom Friedman).
What I Saw in North Korea
By JACK PRITCHARD
WASHINGTON — "Time is not on the American side," Kim Gye Gwan, vice foreign minister of North Korea, told me a few weeks ago. "As time passes, our nuclear deterrent continues to grow in quantity and quality." Those words are an indictment of United States intelligence as well as a potential epitaph on the Bush administration's failed policy in North Korea.
On Jan. 8, North Korean officials gave an unofficial American delegation, of which I was a member, access to the building in Yongbyon where about 8,000 spent fuel rods had once been safeguarded. We discovered that all 8,000 rods had been removed.
Whether they have been reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, as Pyongyang claims, is almost irrelevant. American intelligence believed that most if not all the rods remained in storage, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue and worked laboriously to devise a multilateral approach to solving the rapidly escalating crisis.
But events of the last several years show that this approach is not working. In December 2002 North Korea was suspected of having one or two nuclear weapons that it had acquired before agreeing in 1994 to freeze its known nuclear program and to allow it to be monitored.
More than a year later, North Korea may have quadrupled its arsenal of nuclear weapons. During the intervening period, the Bush administration has relied on intelligence that dismissed North Korean claims that it restarted its nuclear program at Yongbyon with the express purpose of reprocessing previously sealed and monitored spent fuel to extract plutonium to make a "nuclear deterrent."
Now there are about 8,000 spent fuel rods missing — evidence that work on such a deterrent may have begun. It is just the most recent failure in a string of serious North Korea-related intelligence failures.
When North Korea claimed in 1998 to have launched a three-stage rocket to put a communications satellite into orbit, American intelligence initially denied the rocket had this capacity — and then, days later, confirmed the North Korean claim. That same year United States intelligence insisted that Pyongyang had embarked on a secret underground project to duplicate its frozen nuclear weapons program. Eight months later, an American inspection team visited the underground site to find that American intelligence was dead wrong. Then there was the intelligence in the summer of 2002 that indicated the North Korean regime was on the brink of collapse. That reporting was later recalled as faulty — but not before the damage was done.
American policy in North Korea is hardly better than American intelligence. At best it can be described only as amateurish. At worst, it is a failed attempt to lure American allies down a path that is not designed to resolve the crisis diplomatically but to lead to the failure and ultimate isolation of North Korea in hopes that its government will collapse.
Having a discussion with North Korea does not mean abandoning the multilateral framework agreed to in 1994. Nor does direct communications mean capitulating to North Korean demands. It simply means serious exploration of what is possible and acceptable to all parties.
This administration must step out from behind China's diplomatic skirt and take the lead in resolving this crisis before Pyongyang creates a real nuclear deterrent. As it is now, North Korea is calling the shots.
The Bush administration needs to reassert itself — but responsibly. It should appoint a North Korean policy coordinator of the stature and integrity of former Defense Secretary William Perry to bring sanity and adult supervision to the administration's infighting.
I take President Bush at his word that he desires a peaceful and diplomatic solution to this crisis. He deserves someone who can articulate his vision for the Korean Peninsula and make policy decisions while holding off the worst impulses of some within the administration.
I am concerned that the next round of six-party talks will fail and Pyongyang will withdraw from the diplomatic process. It may then declare that it has developed all the nuclear weapons it needs and that it does not intend to make any more.
China, South Korea and Russia (and perhaps Japan) may well accept this new status quo, arguing that the actual threat is minimal and further nuclear activity has been suspended. And it is easy to see why this new status quo would appeal to them, given the instability that could result if the worst-case scenario of United States policy — which is to say, isolation, sanctions and possible military confrontation — comes to pass. The fragile multilateral coalition on which the United States is relying would dissolve.
The result would be a region even more dangerous than it is today — and America and Asia are even less secure now than they were a year ago. How many nuclear weapons does North Korea have to make before this administration gets serious about its policy in East Asia?
Jack Pritchard, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, resigned as special envoy for negotiations with North Korea last August.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 755
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 9:05 am: | |
I don't blame Pritchard for resigning because his NK policy of failure was discontinued. The hilarious part of this is his claim that NK calls the shots. Yes they do as far as it's own future -- or lack of same. But hopefully the days of paying off a murderous crackpot in the hopes that THIS time he'll really live up to his promises is over. And gee --- that beautiful framework of 1994 kinda put invasion out of the question, didn't it, now that NK glows from it. Thanks Jimmy Carter, and Clinton for going along with it. Horrors -- we want NK to collapse. They'll think we're mean and everything, Wally.
And as for low-cost intervention -- we bailed in Somalia after 18 deaths. It strikes me what now passes for too many casualties in the modern era of war. 300 dead due to hostile fire in Iraq is given the same weight as 55K in Vietnam. (Disclaimer -- any death is 'too many' and doesn't mean 300 dead is easy for anyone - -the country, the families, the communities).
Walter Russell Meade - no neocon he -- in yesterday's WSJ opined that the only war that wasn't selective was the two World Wars. And this "new" policy is also a hoot. What do you think the "shores of Tripoli" comes from? We've been doing this sort of thing since the days of Jefferson. I'd be interested to see what wars the US participated in that you did endorse, Doc, especially in this light. |
Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 2772
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 9:24 am: | |
Cjc: Whoever told you that Jefferson's actions with respect to the Barbary Pirates (who preyed on shipping off the coast of Africa and demanded ransome and tribute) is the same as Bush's "preemptive war" policy, was blowing smoke up your nether regions. |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 756
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 9:38 am: | |
I wasn't aware we declared war at the time, Smokey. As I recall, we shelled the city of Tripoli as their govt would no nothing to disrupt the harbor being a terrorist cell for pirates. |
bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 4399
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 10:15 am: | |
Actually the Pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States after we refused demands for additional tribute. The pirates, or more politely corsairs, were under the control of the rulers of the various Barbary coast states. In a sense this was the first case of "state sponsored terrorism", if you want to insert modern sensitivities into the discussion.
Incidentally, we continued to pay tribute until after the War of 1812 when a strong squadron was dispatched and a new treaty "negotiated" under the guns of said squadron. Steven Decatur commanded the post War of 1812 squadron after winning fame asw a young officer for leading a party during the earlier altercation that burned the USS Philadelphia which had been captured during the earlier engagements.
A petty officer named Ruben James was another hero, saving Decatur's life during the burning of the Philadelphia. The USS Reuben James, a destroyer, was the first war ship lost to enemy action by the United States in WWII, during the period of "armed neutrality" prior to our entry in the war. |
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