The Bloody Road Should Not Be Forgotten
- August 18th, 2005
- Posted in SocPol
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GNN and The Independent are reporting that 1100 people died in Bagdhad in July. That’s just 700 shy of the total US casualties so far in this conflict. Many of these deaths are not “official,” just bodies on a slab. The situation is NOT better than it was under Saddam.
While Saddam’s regime visited death by official execution upon its opponents, the scale of anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities is unprecedented. “The July figures are the largest ever recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute,� a senior member of the management told The Independent.
It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Never in recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this city – yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in disclosing the details. The writing of the new constitution – or the failure to complete it – now occupies the time of Western diplomats and journalists. The dead, it seems, do not count.
America has a responsibility to the people of Iraq, and of Bagdhad in particular, where the most thorough-going anarchy seems to have taken hold. They have taken a repressive, sadistic dictatorial regime and replaced it with a Road Warrior, post-apocalyptic “freedom” that makes Saddam look quiant and cartoonish.
And please, don’t give me the line about how you need to break some eggs to make an omelette. This “process” has been an incident of gross and inhuman carnage. No degree of success in Iraq will ever convince me it was “worth it” to kill one hundred thousand civilians to achieve. Let us not forget the bloody and inhumane road, regardless of its outcome.
War on terror? I’m with Cindy Sheehan. George Bush is Terrorist Number One, and his supporters think of Iraqis as Heathens. How is that different from militant Islamists labelling us Infidels?
No, the US does not get a pass on this one. I say prosecute.
Sheehan has allied herself with David Duke which should be troubling to many people. She has lost her mind. (http://wwwjackbenimble.blogspot.com/2005/08/cindy-sheehan.html)
So do you only post things that match your POV. It is universally accepted that Saddam murdered around 300,000 Iraqis.
I find it very telling that you try and say that Bush is a terrorist that Saddam’s regime was cartoonish.
Did you read about how his son’s behaved. Take a look at Sport’s Illustrated’s piece on Uday http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2003/03/24/son_of_saddam/?cnn=yes
Here is an excerpt:
THE BUTCHER’S BOY , as he is sometimes called, is reputed to be the most brutal member of Iraq’s notorious ruling family. As an infant he reportedly played with disarmed grenades. By 10 he was accompanying his father to the torture chamber at Qasr-al-Nihayyah (the Palace of the End, where many political enemies, including deposed King Faisal II, were killed) to watch Saddam deal with dissidents. By 16 he bragged of committing his first murder, telling classmates he had killed a teacher who had upbraided him in front of a girlfriend.
For nearly 20 years Uday Hussein has been the most powerful force in Iraq’s athletic hierarchy. In 1984, when Uday was 20, Saddam handed his son the reins of both the country’s Olympic committee and its soccer federation, hoping Uday could help rebuild the spirit of the nation’s youth while also proving himself a worthy successor to his father. The Iran-Iraq war, which would drag on for eight years and lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis, was demoralizing Iraqi youth. Success in sports, Saddam thought, could lift their spirits and restore national pride.
“Saddam’s plan didn’t work,” says Issam Thamer al-Diwan, a former Iraqi volleyball player who now lives in the United States and carries a list of 52 athletes he claims have been murdered by the Hussein family. “Iraqi sports are worse today than ever. Our teams used to win. There was much pride in playing for your country. But Uday never understood pride, only fear. He was never an athlete. He thought he could use his father’s sadistic approach to improve performance. He has failed.”
In fact Iraq, once an Asian sports force that sent 46 athletes to the 1980 Summer Olympics, now rivals Liechtenstein in terms of athletic insignificance. Iraq sent just four athletes to the 2000 Games in Sydney. “People don’t want to play because they [are afraid] to lose,” says Sabah Mohammed, Iraq’s former national basketball coach, who fled to London in 1999 and claims that nine members of his wife’s family have been executed by the Hussein regime. “Can you blame them? No one wants to speak out against Uday.” (SI’s attempts to reach Uday for comment through the Iraqi permanent mission to the United Nations were unsuccessful.)
Uday’s penchant for violence has long been an open secret among international athletic officials. Amnesty International reported in 2001 that Uday had ordered the hand of a security officer at his Olympic headquarters to be chopped off five years earlier, after the man was accused of stealing sports equipment that was missing (but later turned up). In 1997 FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, sent two investigators to Baghdad to question members of the Iraqi national team who’d allegedly had their feet caned by Uday’s henchmen after losing a World Cup qualifying match to Kazakhstan. The investigators spoke only to people whom Uday had selected. The result: a report exonerating Uday.
“Did the torture of those players happen?” asks Sharar Haydar, a longtime Iraqi soccer star who participated in 40 international matches for the national team and was a teammate of many of the victims. “Absolutely. But when you interview athletes who are under Uday’s control, what else do you expect them to say?
“I know what they went through,” adds Haydar, who escaped from Iraq in 1998 and now lives in London. “I was tortured four times after matches. One time, after a friendly [match] against Jordan in Amman that we lost 2-0, Uday had me and three teammates taken to the prison. When we arrived, they took off our shirts, tied our feet together and pulled our knees over a bar as we lay on our backs. Then they dragged us over pavement and concrete, pulling the skin off our backs. Then they pulled us through a sandpit to get sand in our backs. Finally, they made us climb a ladder and jump into a vat of raw sewage. They wanted to get our wounds infected. The next day, and for every day we were there, they beat our feet. My punishment, because I was a star player, was 20 [lashings] per day. I asked the guard how he could ever forgive himself. He laughed and told me if he didn’t do this, Uday would do it to him. Uday made us athletes an example. He believed that if people saw he was not afraid to beat a hero, that they would live in greater fear.”
There is no equivalency between the two, none. It is sorely troubling that you do not see the distinction.
I’ve allowed these deliberately distortive comments through as an example of how the attack machine operates. Sheehan has not allied herself with Duke. That’s a lie. Duke came out and supported Sheehan. You cannot smear her because of who has supported her. That’s logically fallacious. It simply shows that Bush and his supporters see her as a threat. We know what happens to people who Bush sees as a threat. They get Swift Boated. That’s what they are doing to Sheehan now.
With regard to Saddam, you will note that I said the current situation _makes_ his regime look quaint and cartoonish, not that his regime _was_ cartoonish. There is more than an equivalency if you seek the truth about the situation in Iraq today, as illustrated by the report on civilian deaths I reference at the beginning. Tied up with eyes taped and shot in the head. Hundreds per month. If you can’t see an equivalency there you are being willfully ignorant in support of what you WANT to believe about what’s happening there. That’s more than troubling.