> Leigh is guilty of THOUGHTCRIME! Let the NKVD sword fall!
Comrade Fourth Sword of M-L-M-Gonzalo Thought Hang Dogs From Lamposts Gonzalo here had a sword once. Ordered from box tops from Captain Crunch cereal. Heh, you laugh at my mighty sword as the Randy Newman song put it ;-)
> Just out of curiousity, what should Saddam have done
> with the Shia uprising? Let them take over? Hit them
> with NERF balls? We're talking about a civil war here.
Cf. argument of pro-war liberals, centrists and neo-cons."What should Talabani do w/ the Sunni, al-Qaeda uprising? We're talking about a civil war here." Or a presumed lefty, on the speakers bureau of a Orange County, Ca. Peace and Justice coalition adament on defending the crushing of the '91 uprising, whose only source on Iraqi history was the bio. of Hussein by right-wing Zionist E. Karsh. "He did what was neccessary to keep the country together." A country whose artificial lines were drawn by the British Empire after WWI. Though I'd prefer, and I think polling and other data from Iraq shows most Iraqis agree, that the interests of Iraqis are much better served by as the formula goes, "a democratic, federal state."
On to put up or shut Leigh.
Re: 100,000 killed in the '91 uprising. From , "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Midst of America's War, " by Anthony Shadid, pgs. 144, 163-164, 188, 351, 379. HRW report, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/Iraq926.htm too early afterwards (and given the lack shall I say of procedures like "discovery" and open archives of the Mukharabat) we'll get corroboration soon enough from Iraqi docs in the S.H. trial. Though abundant oral evidence has existed since the War and before, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~irdp/ .
I'll re-read the relevent portions of Andrew and Patrick Cockburn's
, "Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, " on the '91
uprising. Think the Cockburns say 100,000.
http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2001/msg00002.html
>From pp22-23 "Out of the Ashes - the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein"
by Alexander Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, HarperPerennial, 1999:
A fatal miscalculation [?!? - see note below] by the U.S commander in chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf, had allowed the bulk of Saddams most loyal and proficient military units, the Republican Guards, to escape an allied encirclement twenty-four hours before George Bush called his cease-fire. [...]
'The biggest reason for the intifada is that they [the rebels) thought the Americans would support them," says Sayid Majid. "They knew they couldn't beat Saddam on their own. They thought they could get control of the cities and that the Americans would stop the army from intervening." On March 9, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's cousin and son-in-law, began the counterattack on Kerbala, the other great city of Shia Islam, sixty miles from Najaf. He used Republican Guard units that had escaped the allied offensive almost intact. Brigadier Ali and other rebel officers went there to help the resistance, but as the Republican Guard tightened its grip around the holy city and terrified civilians fled to nearby villages, he realized that it was the beginning of the end. On the roads out of the city, Iraqi army helicopter crews poured kerosene on the columns of fleeing refugees and then set it alight with tracer fire. American aircraft circled high overhead.
"We had the message that the Americans would support us," lamented the brigadier as he relived his escape back to Najaf from Kerbala in a quiet North London office seven years later. "But I saw with my own eyes the American planes flying over the helicopters. We were expecting them to help; now we could see them witnessing our demise between Najaf and Kerbala. They were taking pictures and they knew exactly what was happening."
[… T]hrough the towns and villages of anarchic southern Iraq… people clamored for arms. The Americans, they said, had stopped the rebels in the river town of Nassariyah taking desperately needed guns and ammunition from the army barracks. In other places, U.S. army units were blowing up captured weapons stores or taking them away.
[?!? Note: the authors have no evidence that it was a miscalculation. A few pages later (p37), they quote the real policy of the US warlords, baldly stated by Richard Haass, then the National Security Council's director for Middle East affairs. Admonishing a Senator for suggesting support for the Kurdish uprising, he said: "You don't understand. Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime." The real policy of the US was "Saddamism without Saddam". They wanted a military coup, not an uprising. The last thing they wanted was for the Iraqi people to overthrow the regime. The failure of the US generals to target the Republican Guard was no miscalculation. Schwartzkopf was terrified that, if he didn't leave enough of Saddam's forces intact, US soldiers might have to do the job themselves… -JS]
Leigh>... I figured out who the real murderers are a long, long time ago(14, 1968).
When I was half that age, in 1968, I wasn't allowed to watch the nightly Huntley-Brinkley NBC news after asking, "Why are we killing babies in Vietnam?" After My Lai massacre was exposed, pro-war neighbors heard alot from me. Viet Cong, Jr. one called me.
-- Michael Pugliese