Leigh, you know nothing about the Sh'ia uprising in the wake of the Gulf War in which the Ba'athists, after Gen. Schwartzkopf gave them permission to use their helicopters (betcha sold to them with the same Reagan admin. Commerce Dept. permissions that sold the Ba'athists the bio-chem that rained on Halabja in '87) to crush the uprising, led to at least 100,000 deaths. Read Patrick Cockburn's book on Saddam Hussein.Leftist journalist Frank Smythe who has reported from El Salvador and other war zones is writing a book on the Sh'ia uprising. Read the HRW reports on Ba'athist Iraq and the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/#Table of which killed, by the estimate of the PUK, something like 187,000. To use your fave word in your post, quoting the Ba'athist Party official in charge of the Anfal operations, http://slate.msn.com/id/2063934/ http://slate.msn.com/id/2111888/ http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3745/is_200307/ai_n9301459
"I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them."
A book I just started by Anthony Shadid, " Night Draws Near : Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, " w/ leftish politics, blurbed by Sy Hersh, of the WaPo, one of the few mainstream media journalists who has reported from Iraq who speaks Arabic, has material on the extent of the fascist repression of the Ba'athist regime.
I know it is difficult for the Leigh's to hold two ideas/historical facts in their head at the same time that 1)Bush 'es war s/b opposed 2) The previous support for the Ba'athists from the time of the 1963 assasination attempt on Kassam by CIA asset Saddam Hussein, onwards, is what real anti-warriors oppose. Used to be that the left-liberal/radical case against US foreign policy was built on a long enumeration of the coups and counter-insurgency against left/nationalist regimes/movements and a demand to stop supporting repressive rightist regimes.
-- Michael Pugliese