There is a big difference between potentially ambiguous information and lies. For example, the claim that Saddam maintained a terrorist training camp for hijackers was a "lie". Figures on civilian casulties may often be ambiguous, but since we know a great many of these people would be alive without the invasion, even low numbers are far too much.
Bush's Iraqi Platitudes
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There is a big difference between potentially ambiguous information and lies. For example, the claim that Saddam maintained a terrorist training camp for hijackers was a "lie". Figures on civilian casulties may often be ambiguous, but since we know a great many of these people would be alive without the invasion, even low numbers are far too much.
Ziggurat
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You can find their mortality numbers here:
http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/population.htm
"The number of deaths of civilians and military personnel in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion is another set of figures that has raised controversy. The Living Conditions Survey data indicates 24,000 deaths, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 18,000 to 29,000 deaths."
Dig around on that site and you can find out more info about the survey, including sample size, which is MUCH larger than the Lancet survey. Note that the mortality figure, as in the Lancet case, does not distinguish between military, civilian, and terrorist deaths.
Ziggurat
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The ONLY source for 100,000 deaths in Iraq is the Lancet study. That study has been frequently mischaracterized as refering to civilian casualtes, not total casualties, starting with the editors of the Lancet itself. The study explicitly does NOT characterize the deaths. Saying that this number refers to civilians constitutes a lie, since the truth (the number is total deaths: military, civilian, terrorist, insurgent, all of it) is unambiguous and easy to find in the study itself. Mark repeated this lie. There's no ambiguousness about it.
A John Hopkin's study also used the figure 100,000 unless the Lancet and JH study were done in concert. Still, the only thing that matters is that nearly all of these deaths were needless, as where the hundreds of thousands of deaths under the sanctions.
Ziggurat
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They are one and the same. Here is the study:
http://www.topsy.org/mortalityIraq.pdf
"Lancet" refers to the journal in which the results were published: the journal itself has no role in performing the study. The authors, however, are indeed from Johns Hopkins, which is what you are refering to. So there aren't two sources, there is only one.
They were indeed needless, in the same sense that Saddam's existence was needless. But those sanctions were in place for a reason. Without them, Saddam would almost certainly tried to rearm with chemical weapons and restart his nuclear weapons programs. The argument that Saddam was under control and so we didn't need to invade to topple him depended on the sanctions being in place. And yet, as you correctly point out, the sanctions were responsible for many Iraqi deaths. There was NEVER an option to lift sanctions which wouldn't also likely result in lots of deaths of Iraqis: do it with Saddam in power and he'd probably start another war down the line. The other option was to solve the problem of Saddam as permanently as possible, by toppling his regime. Yes, it cost lives. But doing nothing would cost lives too. There never was an option where blood would not be spilled.
I guess the USA should have never put him in power then huh?
As I have pointed out the sanctions were in place to DISARM him of the NBC programs. UNSCOM oversaw the destruction of about 96% percent of the arsenal, the rest destroyed without their presence. The US deliberately fought to keep the sanctions in place, in order to increase the suffering of the Iraqi people in hopes that they would revolt. As early as 1997 several nations including France, Russia, and China sponsored a resolution to acknowledge that he was in compliance with the sanctions and thus they should be lifted. Naturally the US thwarted every effort to do this.
The failure to remove the sanctions is proof positive that International Law is not working. The UN forbids the use of sanctions to "starve" a people into submission. Yet because the US was the primary backer of the sanctions, they got away with using the sanctions for something radically different then they were intended for.
Nonsense, one could pick from numerous leaders around the world and make the same claim about them. The idea that Saddam is some kind of perpetual war-monger is just nonsense. As you may notice, we've invaded and/or bombed far more nations than Saddam's Iraq has. The Saddam-as-warmonger is nothing but a charicature that ignores all the crucial details that exist in his history. Second, the United States was behind a great deal of Saddam's activities in the first place. If Saddam is then worthy of international military intervention then perhaps his former masters are too.
Do you enjoy citizenship in any country?
Mine may not be coherent, but at least they are not patently idiotic.
How often does your new comintern meet?
Yes, everyone that criticizes the Iraq war is a Communist.
What lie?
Ziggurat
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Yes, we never should have. And we never did.
No, they weren't. That doesn't even make any logical sense. Whatever weapons he already had would not be affected by sanctions. It is only future weapons he might try to aquire which sanctions could affect.
All hope that the Iraqis could successfully revolt against Saddam died in 1991 when the Shia uprising was brutally crushed. After that, nobody expected the Iraqis to be able to revolt.
And you've got your history backwards, anyways. It wasn't the US which was trying to deprive the Iraqi populace, it was Saddam. He was the one who refused the oil-for-food arangement when it was first offered by the UN, with US backing, because Iraqi suffering made him seem the agrieved party. Looks like you fell for it. And it was Saddam who perverted the program into one of the biggest scams in history, with enormous kickbacks, bribery of politicians and journalists, buying rotten food, and even RESELLING food bought under oil-for-food to Iraq's neighbors in order to turn a proffit for the regime at the expense of Iraqi civilians. Sorry, but if you want to blame someone for the suffering that went on under the sanctions, that blame rests primarily on Saddam himself.
France and Russian politicians were being bribed by Saddam. France was promised huge oil concessions for Total-Elf once sanctions ended. China has no scrupples and never considered Iraq's misbehavior a problem to begin with (they're also blocking even the threat of sanctions in Darfur). Those three countries were Iraq's main weapons suppliers in the 1980's, and France was the one who first got them started in their nuclear weapons ambitions. And you're holding THEM up as having acted better regarding Iraq than the US did? I'm sorry, I just can't take your opinion on the matter seriously.
Oh yeah. Complete nonsense. That Kuwait thing? Complete accident, I swear. Those republican guard divisions just got lost in the desert on a training mission and took a wrong turn. And sure he attacked Iran, but they were just ASKING for it. Anfal campaign? Never heard of it.
Woo-woo time. We were never his masters. We backed him a little in a conflict he started ON HIS OWN, because we thought the Iranians were worse than he was. But we didn't ask him to start that or any other war (no, we didn't try to get him to invade Kuwait either, Tariq Aziz has killed that myth rather publicly). We didn't put him in power either. People sometimes do things without the US controlling them, you know. Not everything is about us and who we support. And quite frankly, the issue has never been who supported someone in the past, it's who's supporting someone NOW. And that wasn't the US.
Ziggurat
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Are you developing Alzheimers or something? The lie I've been talking about from the start: that 100,000 civilians died in Iraq as a result of our invasion. No source for that claim exists other than your own backside.
We agree that's not so. The masses remain useful idiots.
Sorry to inform you, but the CIA backed Saddam's coup. So yes we did put him into power.
You need to read the terms of the sanctions. They were to DISARM Saddam of the current arsenal he had and the nuclear program. Maybe your memory is short but the President and Co. REPEATEDLY asserted that he HAD THE WEAPONS at that time and that "the world could not wait".
No, that hope was not extinguished. Certain individuals believed that the uprising failed due to lack of popular support. They believed that sanctions would lower the standard of living for the whole Iraqi nation, thus laying the groundwork for revolution. The REAL reason why the '91 uprising failed was because the Americans allowed Iraq to fly its helicopter gun ships in the no-fly zone to put it down.
Wrong.
The oil-for-food program was dreamed up because the world was getting sick of seeing the suffering of Iraqi people, but the US refused to end the sanctions even when prompted by allies like France. So this was dreamed up as an alternative.
No I think I'll blame the US who deliberately extended the sanctions despite several efforts to declare him in compliance by other UN security council members. The "Oil-for-food scandal" is a complete joke, used to cover up the massive abuses that have gone one in this "regime change".
Right, and the US has NEVER supported dictators, and has ABSOLUTELY NO ECONOMIC INTERESTS IN IRAQ? The French and Russians were not "bribed" by Saddam. Saddam has often made such offers to several countries including the US.
Also AREN'T YOU FORGETTING SOMETHING? The Russians, French, and others wanted to declare Iraq IN COMPLIANCE with the sanctions based on the reports of UNSCOM inspectors. We NOW know that they were correct, after several thousand lives have been lost. So they were right to remove the sanctions.
Kuwait: Mitigating circumstances. You should read up on that in detail.
Iran: Right, you care so much about Iranians, that's why you support a president who has been threatening Iran for several years now. Conservatives "care" about people when it's convenient to do so.
Anfal campaign: Total ********. Nobody can confirm the use of gas, total lack of evidence. I also didn't know you were so concerned about Kurds. Where is your outrage at Turkey, who has killed far more Kurds than Saddam ever did. Iraq treated Kurds far better than Turkey, which had actually tortured and imprisioned Kurds for speaking or writing in their own language.
Turkey has historically gained about 80% of its military support from Uncle Sam by the way.
1. Yes we put him in power.
2. The support we gave him in the Iran-Iraq war was vital. Had he not been able to buy his chemical weapons from British and US corporations(Reagan gave special permission to certain corporations to trade with Iraq), and had he not had the intelligence information we provided his armed services, he may have lost that war.
3. We did not ask him to invade Kuwait, but it is a fact that we told him the US would not intervene.
4. You say the issue isn't who is supporting someone in the PAST. Well you're wrong, it IS an issue because what happens now is the product of history. Until Americans learn the importance of history and begin to understand why they need foresight, they will never understand why people hate America. Believe it or not, but America is actually subject to the same laws of any empire.
Your thoughts on this matter illustrate the central problem of historical debates- when attacking a "villain", everything is black and white. No excuses, no mitigating circumstances, no context, no need to go back and see what might have led to these things. Saddam is bad bad BAD!!! But when one looks at the other side, the US, suddenly the air is filled with mitigating circumstances, excuses, projections, rationalizations, etc.
Saddam Hussein is no friendly guy. However, he is no different than other leaders in most of the world today. In fact, his secular views and support of modernization makes him far better than the Saudi royals and other monarchs. One day the US will look at what is happening in Iraq, and they will understand who Saddam really was, and why he did those things that he actually did.
They may find themselves one day fighting a war against the government we are currently propping up right now. What will we say then? Will the Hannities and O'Reilly's admit that we made a mistake in creating that government? Or will we just pass that off too with some handy rationalizations?
RandFan
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