Just in case you have forgotten


A new book details the crimes of Saddam Hussein

Rebecca Weisser reports in The Weekend Australian.

WITH the trial of Saddam Hussein under way, those in the God-damn-America camp find themselves uncomfortably wedged. Should they justify their opposition to the war by downplaying Saddam's crimes while sheeting home blame for the present turmoil to the US and its allies? Or do they opt for the defence of moral equivalence, conceding that Saddam was indeed a monster but those US presidents who once backed his regime, including George H.W. Bush, are the real monsters.

The best riposte to this warped analysis is a scholarly and sober 700-page volume recently published in France, of all places. Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The writers - Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have produced the most comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi president's war crimes, assembling a mass of evidence that makes the anti-intervention arguments redundant.

"The first weapon of mass destruction was Saddam Hussein," writes Bernard Kouchner, who has been observing atrocities in Iraq since he led the first Medecins Sans Frontieres mission there in 1974. "Preserving the memory of the arbitrary arrests that Saddam's police conducted every morning, the horrible and humiliating torture, the organised rapes, the arbitrary executions and the prisons full of innocent people is not just a duty. Without that one cannot understand either what Saddam's dictatorship was or the urgent necessity to remove him."

The obsession of many journalists and commentators with the fruitless hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has meant much of the evidence of Saddam's atrocities in liberated Iraq has been under-reported. Sinje Caren Stoyke, a German archeologist and president of Archeologists for Human Rights, catalogues 288 mass graves, a list that is already out of date with the discovery of fresh sites every week.

Two hundred and eighty-eight mass graves. So far.

The frightening thing is that Saddam's government was hardly alone in terrorizing it's own people. Tyranny and the Middle East go hand in hand in large part because the West decided to overlook atrocities in exchange for the ability to bottle up the Soviet Union.

The only reason that liberating Iraq was justified under international law was because Saddam had not honored the surrender treaty of the Gulf War.

That is why it had to be Iraq, it couldn't be just any nation.

Watch what is happening. Behind all the violence and the turmoil, there are positive changes taking place.

And the changes are happening with the people, not with the tyrannical governments.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - December 5, 2005 at 04:38 AM  Tag


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