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Anyone?
Posted by Stephen Green · 8 November 2003
What's the No War Crowd's answer to this story? Saddam Hussein's government is believed to have buried as many as 300,000 opponents in 263 mass graves that dot the Iraqi landscape, the top human rights official in the U.S.-led civilian administration said Saturday. Murder on the same scale in this country would be over 3.5 million people. Or 78,000 Israelis, a million Germans, or almost two million Russians. The Arabs, in other words, are much better at killing their own than they are at killing us decadent Westerners. Anyone still think there's nothing in the Middle East in need of fixing?
Comments
They don't care. While human rights violations might have all that was needed to justify the war against Slobodan Milosevic, George Bush must some nefarious plan in "his" war. Besides, this is all just CIA misinformation, isn't it? Anyway, thanks for the Friday recipe. I am trying it tomorrow night. Posted by: John Rogers at November 8, 2003 03:03 PMWe were right all along about the deadly U.S. sanctions, weren't we? Posted by: Eric Scheie at November 8, 2003 04:19 PMRe: Eric Scheie Those people will be just as dead without the US Sanction. Posted by: BigFire at November 8, 2003 04:56 PMEric Isn't it amazing, that sanctions cause bullets to the head of children? Must be spontaneously lead induction casued by starvation. Listen, idiot, read before you mouth is in gear. You are a living advertisement for birth control and why Michael Totten is disgusted by the dems. Posted by: larry at November 8, 2003 06:36 PMEric was kidding. (Sometimes I think we need to bring back the blink tag, just to unscore sarcasm.) 300,000 dead: astonishing. And the number would be double after a quarter century rule by either of the brothers. Posted by: Lileks at November 8, 2003 07:15 PMI'm finding it harder and harder to differentiate between sarcasm sociopathy. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children shot through the head and buried in mass graves and we're still talking about the legality of invading Iraq. Posted by: erp at November 8, 2003 07:42 PMAnyone still think there's nothing in the Middle East in need of fixing? No, and like I said today I'm beginning to think the only answer is to nuke them all. Posted by: Venomous Kate at November 8, 2003 07:55 PMMaybe the anti-war crowd will say that we still should not have gone to war in Iraq. Now that we have gone into Iraq the area has turned from a stabled area with limited movement available to terrorists into a terrorist bastion. The anti-war people say that as President Bush says there was no immediate threat and no immediate reason to go into Iraq. Always remember the law of unintended consequences. Posted by: Cal Ulmann at November 8, 2003 08:14 PMYou can forgive Larry for not getting the sarcasm. The loony left is so whacky they now parody themselves. It is hard to tell the sarcasm from the actual delusions. Posted by: Paul at November 8, 2003 09:51 PMYep. Gotta remember the law of unintended consequences, like: ignore the terrorists and they won't fly planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and who knows what the other plane would have hit; treat terrorism as a crime rather than an act of war and the terrorists will recognize your mercy by not killing 3,000 innocents in one day; ignore potential weapons of mass destruction and we won't wake up with NYC and DC smoldering under a radiation glow curtesy of the terrorists. I used to think 9/11 opened eyes and minds. Now I think some people, like the German citizens forced to tour the concentration camps immediately after the war who claimed "we did not know," simply refuse to open their eyes and minds. But the rest of us, of course, can readily ignore these fools. Or suffer the consequences. Posted by: Tim at November 8, 2003 09:57 PMAgreed, Paul. But when someone leaves a gen-u-wine URL to their site, I usually check it out before assuming they're a bloody moron. Unless the URL is bushbloze.com or Iheartqusay.com, of course. Posted by: Lileks at November 8, 2003 09:59 PMUm, agreed with James Lileks. If someone missed Eric's sarcasm, they might as well belong to Republican Underground. Surely the right-wing needs an idiot repository just like the left, no? Paul, one need only watch the far right to see that idiocy isn't solely the domain of the left. I think it is fairly safe to assume that somebody, somewhere, will assert that at least 299,999 of those dead Iraqis were from our carpet bombing of schools, hospitals, old folks homes, and puppy farms in 2003. We're just hiding our air piracy war crimes in plain sight, right? The only suspense is wondering whether Pelosi, Chirac, or Democratic Underground will raise it first. Take it easy everyone. I am happy that two major a**holes (Qusay and Uday) caught their share, with interest. To Paraphrase, 'So many tyrants, never enough Americans.' Posted by: Mike Orris at November 8, 2003 10:16 PMMany or most of those in mass graves were put there after the 1st Gulf War, a reason not to abandon our effort now. Posted by: DaveC at November 8, 2003 10:29 PMIdiocy knows no country, and is registered with no party, and history shows that neither the right nor the left have a claim to knowing all the answers. When more than a quarter-million corpses lie under sand in mute testimony to the inaction of the world, it's not a loony left or radical right issue. Who cares which party is pointing its pious finger at the other? The finger points at us all. My take on political fighting is that it's a lot like marital fighting: it focuses on fixing blame instead of fixing problems, and is therefore worse than useless. In the nineteenth century, medical doctors perfected the art of diagnosis...but still treated illnesses with laudanum and bitterroot. In the twentyfirst century, it seems we have likewise perfected the art of political diagnosis, but are as clueless as the doctors were in trying to cure problems. Meanwhile, fever rages in the body politic, unchecked. 300,000 dead people bring clarity to the debate. Bloodthirsty megalomaniac dictators are the disease, and we are the cure. All that's required is that we avoid doing nothing about it. Posted by: Mark H at November 8, 2003 10:40 PMFrankly, I'm surprised nobody has trotted out the old "well, we used to support Saddam" nonsense to pin the blame for the dead on us. I've run out of patience with all of the political pandering - note to Democrats: Americans want grown-ups in charge. Grown-ups can acknowledge (with some grace on occasion) when their opponents are right about something. Has even one of the luminaries running for the Dem ticket admitted that yet? Can one of them stand up and say Bush was right to end Saddam's rule, and applaud him for having the guts to do it in spite of all the Euro and Demo resistence?
It's interesting to bring up the law of unintended consequences, because its natural opposite is the risk of inaction. And since once you act, you can never definitively prove the consequences of inaction, the advantage always goes to the critics of action. As such it may be fair to ask the small favor of not leaping to conclusions on the matter -- it would only be fair. Posted by: JB at November 9, 2003 12:50 AMDuly blogged. I did some more math and calculated the following: 8.93 mass killings annually (those associated with mass graves) 10,000 bodies interred in mass graves annually 1,119 bodies (rounded down) per mass grave Posted by: Alan K. Henderson at November 9, 2003 05:29 AMTO: Stephen Green How about a nice game of Name That Pundit? Q: Who said, "One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic." A: Joesph Stalin. Hence neither the so-called major media nor the No War Crowd will seriously approach this report. It's only a statistic and, worse, one that doesn't support their agenda. Regards, Chuck(le) Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if I fall down a sewer and die. - Mel Brooks ...it is to laugh.] Posted by: Chuck Pelto at November 9, 2003 06:11 AMYou shouldn't be surprised that the Dems still question the Iraqi war, even in the face of such evidence. After all, this is the same crowd that, thinks that partially delivering a baby in the womb, then sticking a sharp object in his head & sucking out his brains is a constitutional right. Posted by: Shae at November 9, 2003 06:51 AMChuck, you're misquoting Mel Brooks! The correct wording of the joke is as follows: "Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if you fall down a sewer and die." (Emphasis mine.) The point of Brooks's joke is that the magnitude of the harm (cut finger vs. untimely death) is irrelevant; the distinction between tragedy and comedy hinges on whether the harm happens to me (tragic) or you (comic). Posted by: Pat at November 9, 2003 08:38 AMDidn't the Onion cover this best ages ago? It reads to me as though they believe there's 300,000 bodies in the 263 mas graves they've _found_. There may very well be more mass graves yet to be discovered. IIRC, they're still finding NKVD burial grounds every few months in some part of what used to be the Soviet Union. Posted by: Larry at November 9, 2003 09:16 AMSory Eric, I just read James Lileks post. I did a quick scan of your url and could not immediately determine your affiliation so I missed the sarcasm. I had a roustabout with some character on another blog where he/she said that whatever Saddam did was our fault because we supported him. I thought this was more of the same. Posted by: larry at November 9, 2003 09:53 AMEric Scheie writes: "We were right all along about the deadly U.S. sanctions, weren't we?" Those were UN sanctions, enacted because Saddam refused to comply with his disarmament obligations. Also, during the UN sanction period, Saddam's regime was given more than enough money to feed and clothe his subjects via the Oil For Food Program. But instead of using these resources to obtain food and medical supplies for his subjects, Saddam instead chose to focus these resources on developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Lastly, UN sanctions do not cause bullets to enter the heads of men, women, and children before dumping their bodies into a mass grave -- a psychotic dictator is responsible for that. The ignorance and moral bankruptcy of some people is truly startling. Posted by: Read More Books at November 9, 2003 09:53 AM"Read More Books" should Read More Posts before commenting...man that's embarrassing... Posted by: Jeff B. at November 9, 2003 09:57 AMJust finished reading the whole thread, and if people like to make "jokes" about 300,000 dead, I'm not about to provide them with more website traffic before responding. Apologies to Eric, if it was a joke; none if it wasnt. Posted by: Read More Books at November 9, 2003 10:01 AM"man that's embarrassing" Not really. The burden is not on the readers to decipher a poster's intent or agenda... Posted by: Read More Books at November 9, 2003 10:07 AMSomeone ought to do the math and calculate how many Iraqis were slaughtered while the UN became a big circle jerk and couldn't decide whether or not to enforce its own resolutions. There's something here for every human rights and interest group to get behind. Too bad so many of them have been discredited as hipocritical and useless. Sorry NOW and ANSWER...if you guys are so political and narrow minded that you're willing to let kids be mutilated and tortured so a Democrat can go up a few points in the polls, you're adgenda is worth precisely crap and I'd be happy to see you condemned to hell. Posted by: Mike M at November 9, 2003 10:50 AMVenomous Kate said: >No, and like I said today I'm beginning to
If we do get there, and I hope don't, it will be because the the Islamists have taken control of a nation or two and did genocide to fellow Muslims first. Syria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are going to be horror shows because I think Islamist take overs are likely in all three. The only way any of them will avoid that fate is if the USA conquers and reconstructs them first. In this regard Syria might get "lucky," if we don't over run Iran first. Posted by: Trent Telenko at November 9, 2003 11:23 AMThis is a low estimate... 187,000 Kurds are documented already... the Shiites lost more... then you figure the 1.5 million lost in Saddam's attack on Iran and the 170,000 lost in Saddam's attack on Kuwait and you'll see Saddam is ranked right behind Stalin-Hitler-Mao-Pol Pot-Kim Il Sung in slaughter rankings... Posted by: DANEgerus at November 9, 2003 01:15 PMGee, sorry folks. I didn't think it was necessary to do more than answer Stephen's question the way he put it: What's the No War Crowd's answer to this story?While I am not part of the No War Crowd, I tried (satirically) to come up with what I thought would be their answer -- not mine. Glad to see that most of you have figured it out. HT to James Lileks about blink tagging, as this is not the first time I've been taken for a blithering idiot. Posted by: Eric Scheie at November 9, 2003 01:34 PMWhat is the answer to this Question? "PLEASE study a bit and have some respect for all those Iraqis who are living under worse condition now.." Do tell,Linda,who exactly is gassing the Kurds right now?
About the same time as Jaque Chirac started to care,I believe. BTW,what was the Question,anyway?
... and the BBC's John Simpson is calling Saddam a 'saint'... http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2003/11/senior_bbc_repo.html Posted by: The Tapir at November 9, 2003 02:21 PMLinda, You have to have a little historical perspective. At the time we were buddies with Saddam, he was a secular dictator fighting a radical Islamic regieme backed by the Soviet Union. Iraq was a chess piece to counter Iran as the Soviet proxy in the region. We have a history of using lesser evils to defeat a greater one. We shipped a massive quantity of aid to uber-murderer Stalin in WWII to prop up the USSR and defeat the Nazis. We allied with Saddam and Osama to contain and destroy the USSR. Now we have to clean up the leftover mess. Yeah, its not the prettiest policy out there but it works. Given a choice between mopping up after terrorists or still fighting the Soviets or Greater Nazi Germany, I'll take the former. Ah, Linda, you have forgotten that Iran had committed an act of war against the US, one that has yet to be settled. I am referring, of course, to the seizure of our embassy, which is a no-no under international law. No apology or reparations have yet been received for this violation by the Iranian government. We "tilted towards Iraq" as the saying went at the time at the behest of our "Arab friends," especially Kuwait and the Wahhabist Entity. The worry was that the new Shi'a Islamic Revolutionary government would spread it's ideology throughout the Middle East and beyond. My own view of Saddam's idotic war was that we had no dog in that fight, but I had no responsibility for the security of the US and the free world in the last years of the Cold War. Such responsibility changes one's views. In any case, we have no more to apologize for in the strictly limited amount of support we gave Saddam then than we have to apologize for the help we gave Stalin's USSR in the war against Hitler. In war, whether a Cold War of a hot war, you often must aid the lesser threat to defeat the greater one. Posted by: Michael Lonie at November 9, 2003 02:46 PMIf someone missed Eric's sarcasm, they might as well belong to Republican Underground. Really? With people throwing around comments to the effect of Iraq having been better off under the rule of Saddam, and actually believing it, it's not exactly implausible to conclude that someone's sarcasm detector might just have its sensitivity turned down a tad. It's not like the idiotic screaming of the left has been getting much quieter of late. Posted by: Mr. Lion at November 9, 2003 03:19 PMThe article under "Holy Crap" states these corpses are enemies of the state. Please explain to me how children can be enemies of the state and require a bullet to the head and mass burial? What kind of inhuman creatures shot these people and threw them in a pit and covered it over? I can't stand hearing about this. Bush has my permission to inflict the worst on those who could perpetrate these atrocities and on those who are hiding them and their weapons. Words are so banal and these deeds are so horrific, there aren't words to describe my distress. The anti-war crowd has been sufficiently discredited I hope. I live in a remote area where it is unlikely that I would come across any supporters of Saddam Hussein, but if I did come across protestors, I don't think I could just walk away from them. They are aiding and abetting those who commit this crimes. Why can't they see that? I don't give a damn whether or not Cheney or Rumsfeld cares about Iraqis, I care. I wish the left did. There's your answer Stephen: Saddam Hussein IS a weapon of mass destruction. Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at November 9, 2003 06:57 PMI wonder if anyone here can actually point out the link between this mass grave tragedy and the war on terror? Matthew, We went to war against Saddam Hussein because we believed that his removal was a necessary part of the War on Terror--with considerable justification. The mass graves demonstrate that whether or not our belief, and its justification, were accurate, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power was a Very Good Thing. The real tragedy was that we did not act to end his rule earlier, despite the fact that the majority of Bush's legal case for war could have been made at any time during Clinton's 8 years. The blame is not wholly Clinton's--there was no pressure from either side of the aisle to resolve Saddam's outstanding crimes--but when it comes to national leadership, the buck stops with the President. Share our joy, then, Matthew, that this horror has been lifted from the people of Iraq. Reflect that the sacrifices of our men in uniform and yours have contributed to the Iraqis' hope for the future--a future that does not include government-sanctioned rape, widespread torture, and mass graves. Posted by: Sam Barnes at November 10, 2003 08:00 AMMatthew: Because of the War on Terror, there'll be no new mass graves in Iraq. No, that isn't because we're altruistic. Guess it's not a good thing, then? Posted by: JPS at November 10, 2003 08:49 AMTO: Pat "...the distinction between tragedy and comedy hinges on whether the harm happens to me (tragic) or you (comic)." -- Pat Thanks. Chuck(le) Posted by: Chuck Pelto at November 10, 2003 09:04 AMMatthew: Two points. The first is that the Second World War in Europe was not fought in order to save the Jews. But by toppling Hitler, we also ended the death camps. Altruism? No. But a good consequence. Second, with regards to Saddam and terrorism (and I'm glad you phrased it that way, as opposed to "9-11," which is a very different question), consider this: Osama bin Laden's ostensible reason for 9-11 was rooted in three considerations: 1. The UN sanctions on Iraq which were supposedly killing hundreds of thousands of children. Saddam's intransigence meant that those sanctions were not going to end. The US military was going to stay in Saudi Arabia, so long as Saddam posed a threat to the oil fields. Saddam was funding, to the tune of $25K a head, many of the Palestinian suicide bombers. Removing Saddam has already eliminated the need for maintaining US forces in Saudi, a HUGE factor in alienating the Muslim world from us. (We are infidels, after all.) It has ended the sanctions, and as Iraq's infrastructure improves, that means people will be getting better (physically). And it's removed one (of the multitude) of considerations for people to become suicide bombers. No altruism at all. Posted by: Dean at November 10, 2003 09:08 AMHmm. More great rationale about the human rights issue. Unfortunately claiming that we should have gone into Iraq because of it bullshit bacause it cannot be applied consistently. If you take that line we should therefore have gone into Cambodia in the 1970s, Uganda, Argentina, Chile, etc in the 1970s and 1980s, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia & North Korea in the 1990s and Burma any time in the last 50 years but especially since the election of 1990. And that's just a handful. If you don't spport those policies for all human rights abusing regimes now but you're using the "genocide/human rights abuse" line as justification for invading Iraq, you just failed Logic 101. Don't worry though, there'll be plenty more killing in the to-come civil war when the US pulls out. Perhaps you can use that as justification for going back in? Posted by: Matthew Holt at November 10, 2003 01:21 PMInspired by Alan Henderson's post, I did a bit more math. Larry's suspicions are almost certainly correct; 300,000 may be the tip of the iceberg. Posted by: Jay Manifold at November 10, 2003 01:27 PM"Don't worry though, there'll be plenty more killing in the to-come civil war when the US pulls out. Perhaps you can use that as justification for going back in?" Matthew No matthew. That just means we'll stay until we're sure there won't be one. Posted by: Ptah at November 10, 2003 02:03 PMI find it silly that the anti-war side argues that the pro-war side is wrong to think the Iraq War was right because the pro-war side isn't in favor of invading all genocidal maniacs. The Iraq War was fought in our interests. Saddam was a threat even if he never slaughtered a single Kurd or Shia or dipped any less-than-enthusiastic Sunni in plastic shredders. Of course, Saddam's regime did kill 300,000 and tortured and raped for fun and profit. Noting this as a justification for war is mostly useful to refute the ridiculous assertion that the Iraq War was immoral. Though we invaded for national interest, that question is at least a debatable point. The morality is beyond question, we certainly ended a monstrous regime. Posted by: Brian J. Dunn (The Dignified Rant) at November 10, 2003 06:33 PMExcellent Ptah. I was thinking 1980s Lebanon. You've clearly got post WW2 Europe on your mind. Now that I know we're staying in Iraq until it's as peaceful and successful as post war-Germany, I look forward to paying taxes and sacrificing Americans for the next 10-50 years to that end. Pity that we'll have to ignore all the other nations where human rights abuse and near-genocide beomes rampant in the meantime. Or maybe we won't, as the American people as one rise up and demand the reinstatement of the draft and a ten fold increase in military spending so we really can have a Pax Americana just like the Romans did it, by stationing troops in every country in the world! Posted by: Matthew Holt at November 10, 2003 06:39 PMSaddam Hussein Did Not Commit Genocide Claims of Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven Has Blair "Sexed Up" Saddam's Atrocities, Too? Posted by: Young Republican at November 27, 2003 03:48 AM |
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