| Topic Name: |
Question about the war in Iraq |
| Message Name: |
Let's not forget... |
| Date Posted: |
05/25/2005 |
| In Reply To: |
According to the Defense Department and various human rights groups, the mass graves discovered in Iraq (to date) probably contain 300-400,000 bodies, many of them Iraqi Shiites and Kurds murdered by Saddam during his reign.
By comparison, the genocide in Kosovo (usually cited as the reason for our 1999 war against Serbia) resulted in the slaughter of less than 10,000 Kosovar Albanians, a fraction of murders committed by Saddam and his henchmen. Given our intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq, the Bush Administration would have been better off using Saddam's genocide as a justification for military action.
But the list of Saddam's victims doesn't end with the Iraqi killing fields. In 1980, he launched a pointless war with Iran that resulted in at least one million deaths, including 400-500,000 Iraqi soldiers. And, if you include Kuwaiti victims of the Gulf War, and the various political enemies, Shia clerics and military officers purged by Saddam, you'd probably have another 10,000 names to add to the victim list.
All told, Saddam was responsible for the slaughter of 500,000-1,000,000 people, putting him in league with Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and history's other mass murderers. BTW, the number who died at Saddam's hands is obviously lower than the victims of the German, Russian, and Cambodian pograms, but it's also worth remembering that Iraq had a population of less than 20 million during most of his reign. Put another way, Saddam was responsible for the death for about 1 out of every 20 Iraqis between 1980 and 2003. |
| Message: |
The 100,000+ innocent Iraqi civilians...men, women amd children who have been killed during our invasion and occupation of Iraq.
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