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To the Editor:
During my UN human rights work in the l980s, Saddam Hussein's atrocities were well known and documented. I worked with Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Iraqi Communists who were in forced exile and whose families had been tortured and killed. The nadir was 1988, when Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurdish villages and Iranian soldiers in the north. At every step of the way, the Reagan, then Bush administrations blocked every resolution.
I resent the accusation in Juan Cole's essay in your May/June 2003 issue that "the anti-war movement" did not properly address Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses. Had the United States not blocked all diplomatic measures in the 1980s, Hussein would have been toppled, just as the apartheid regime in South Africa was. The problem is the United States, and that's what we need to deal with.
DR. ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ
http://www.fpif.org/papers/0409progiraq.html
FPIF Policy Report September 2004
Who Are the Progressives in Iraq? The Left, the Right, and the Islamists www.fpif.org
>...Resistance to Saddam's rule took many forms from 1979 to 2003, with anti-Saddam groups organized largely along Shiite Islamic, Kurdish nationalist, or Communist Party lines. Each of these groups lost tens of thousands of adherents to brutal counterinsurgency sweeps conducted by the Ba'athist government. Some American leftists apologized for Saddam's government, saying it was no worse than many others in the world. But Saddam Hussein's behavior deserves a category for itself, employing vicious repression and often including the torture and rape of family members of suspected dissidents. Few rulers anywhere in the world were so brutal, with one exception of the CIA-backed government in Guatemala during the l980s. (Both that government and Saddam's, it is worth noting, were clandestinely aided by the United States during the Reagan administration.)