It must be something in the air today… couldn’t be the smoke from the controlled explosion across the street from me last night… I doubt that could have wafted over London yet. I was intending to write a longish article on the evils of Saddam. Most of what I wished to say has already been said today so I will just point out why I was going to say it.
I finally found time to read the Home Office report on human rights abuses in Iraq. I knew the Iraqi leadership were truly bad news. I knew they tortured some people, beheaded a few are were really quite beastly. I was totally unprepared for the magnitude of it.
Saddam and family don’t quite make it into the first rank with Adolf, Joe and Pol, at least not with the information we have so far. But give them time. They are working on it.
Read it if you haven’t already. You will be thoroughly appalled and ready to volunteer to release the trap door on them… or more satisfyingly, place a .38 between Saddam’s eyes so he can watch while you pull the trigger the first 5 times.
That would be a memory to treasure for life.
Cruel actions are never “a memory to treasure”. Not even against evil scum. Kill them and be done with it.
I was well aware fom the beginning that The Kurdish village of Halabja had been attacked with a nerve gas by Iraq during the “anfal” of the 1980s, causing mass casualties. That was in February 1988.
I was unaware until Itoday that there had subsequently been more such attacks. According to a Human Rights Watch dossier on Saddam’s genocide campaign against the Kurds, that May at least 150 people died in a chemical attack by Iraqi jets on the villages of Goktapa and Askar.
Compiled from eyewitness and other acounts, this report tends to underline the significance of the video footage of an Iraqi spray-equipped MiG shown by Colin Powell at the UN this week.
I am indebted to the Look Back in Anger blog for the link to the dossier (http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFAL6.htm)
Correction: the Halabja attack was in March 1988, not February.
Good one, Dale. By the way, have a look at Jim Henley’s site Unqualified Offerings today. One recent post essentially says that past claims about Iraqi perfidy were exaggerated, or plain lies, ergo, the current claims about Saddam will probably turn out to be the same.
Even if he has a smidgen of truth on his side, Henley, who has always struck me as being one of the most intelligent libertarian anti-war folk, is teetering ever more fully into the realms of idiocy. The general drift seems to be – the problem of Iraq is not nearly as bad as claimed and we don’t have to do everything and have a nice day.
That’s why I think libertarianism as a movement – if we can call it such – is getting damaged by such evasion and moral blindness. And I am afraid to say Henley is increasingly losing my respect.
Cruel acts may not be justifiable… but there are those rare historical cases in which an individual is so truly monstrous and has created such incredible suffering that one would take great pleasure in removing them.
Would you have turned down a chance to use Pol Pot for target practice? Perhaps with a BB gun and all the BB’s you want.
People that monstrous deserve to die horribly and publicly. “Pour encourager les autres.”