so, it's official now

[Lou Minotti]

that not a single suicide bomber was ever directed against him.

Wow, I never thought of that...crazy....

[Scribbler1]

Good point, and one not usually discussed. I would think getting killed by Saddam wouldn't be much of a deterrent if you're going to blow yourself up anyway.
I've always said I didn't think the Iraqi people were worth the huge sacrifice in lives and money we have made for them. I think they are even less worthy now.

[RickSp]

Just an oh, by the way. The WMD didn't exist, the AlQueda ties didn't exist and it appears that the mass graves never existed.

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered. The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'

This is not to say, of course, that Saddam was not a brutal dictator, nor that he wasn't responsible for the brutal killing of many Iraqis, including large numbers of Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign and Shi'ites following the first Gulf War. Nevertheless the story about all the "mass graves" appears to be more legend than fact.

The neocon claims fall one by one, which oddly seems to bother them not at all.

[Comrade]

Quote by: RickSp which oddly seems to bother them not at all.

four more years

[RickSp]

Quote by: Comrade four more years

Four more years, four more wars. More Bush lying, more soldiers dying. And the folks with the "Support our Troops" ribbons stuck on bumpers their smile blankly on.

[rmnunez]

Rick, the retraction on the victims of Saddamite repression found in mass graves relates to the number which have been conclusively established through the most modern means of forensic science to have been victims of a crime against humanity. Early on the EUers objected to providing medical examiners since, it was argued, evidence they produced could be used to sentence those responsible and the EU wasn't assured a death penalty could not result. Hence there are a number of sites where it is known there are bodies in mass graves, but there aren't enough forensic experts to exhume the bodies and document their cause of death and circumstances. The 5 thousand are just the estimated number of those positively documented so far, this doesn't mean there were not 400 thousand executed extrajudicially, just that the incontrovertible proof for 395 thousand has not been obtained yet.

[Zeebadee]

Yeah, we can estimate the total dead from saddam's policies at a bazillion, but no estimates of the "collateral damage" inflicted on Iraq by "coalition" forces are acceptable. Anyone criticizing this administrations by citing Iraqi civilian war dead must prove each and every civilian death and supply documentation to back up their claims. No such proof is required for using whatever figure is desired when claiming the numbers that saddam killed. If the military side of the war had been run with the effectiveness and efficiency characterized by the propaganda and news management organizations, this war would have been over long ago.

[RickSp]

Saddam was a monster. That is a given. His greatest crimes, the deaths of some 100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign and related campaigns in the 1980s, were committed while Saddam was a US ally and received over a billion dollars of US aid. The neo-cons either ignore this ugly factoid or fall back on some lame "RealPolitik" justification."

Human Rights Watch's best guess of the "disappeared" and presumed dead in Iraq during Saddam's reign is between 250,000 and 290,000. Of course this hasn't stopped the War Party from blaming Saddam for slaughting millions and millions, nor from a member of this list to suggest that the "missing" bodies will some day be uncovered. (Just as he also has suggested that the WMD will someday be found.)

The exaggerated body count, the falsified intel regarding both WMD and Al Queda ties are all just part of the web of lies spun by the War Party to justify an unjustified war. And as you so accuratly point out Z, the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians we killed literally do not count, or at least are studiously not counted by those who did the killing.

[rmnunez]

How could even just 100 thousand Kurds have been killed by Saddam when the US can barely produce forensic evidence to show 5 thousand died?

[RickSp]

Quote by: rmnunez How could even just 100 thousand Kurds have been killed by Saddam when the US can barely produce forensic evidence to show 5 thousand died?

So are you saying that the only way to estimate the number killed by Saddam is to count corpses? No one is suggesting that Saddam did not kill many many Iraqis, only that the claims made about mass graves were wildly exaggerated just like the claims that Saddam killed "millions and millions" appear not to have any basis in fact.

[rmnunez]

Rick, do you think Saddam killed enough people to amount to genocide?

[RickSp]

Quote by: rmnunez Rick, do you think Saddam killed enough people to amount to genocide?

The diplomatic definition of genocide is keyed not to the number of people killed but to the group targeted. The Kurds claim that Saddam is guilt of genocide. If that is true Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, the Reagan administration as a whole, should be considered and perhaps charged as co-conspirators as they were personally involved in supporting Saddam when this genocide was taking place.