Evil Uncounted - Third Superpower

« In Memory of Keiko | Main | And So It Ends »

Evil Uncounted

Authored by Michael Pate on December 13th, 2003 at 10:07 PM

As many as 300,000 Iraqis killed during Saddam Hussein’s 23-year dictatorship are believed to be buried in more than 250 mass graves found so far around the country, the top human rights official in the U.S.-led civilian administration said Saturday. - Andrew Hammond

Coalition forces generally tried to avoid killing Iraqis who weren�t taking part in combat. But the deaths of hundreds of civilians still could have been prevented. Every death of a civilian in wartime is a terrible tragedy. But focusing on the exact number of deaths misses the point. The point is that the U.S. military should not have been using these methods of warfare. - Kenneth Roth

In other words, even though there were so few civilian casualties, and even though HRW doesn’t know how many there were, it knows that we committed war crimes because HRW thinks it could have been even fewer. The distinction between “extraordinary efforts” and “everything feasible” doesn’t just sound small, it sounds like sophistry. It’s word games. - Steven Den Beste

What is new is the open attack on the legal and institutional structure of human rights, a system established after two horrific world wars to protect the powerless from the predatory. Who is leading the assault? Not the scattered bands of terrorists, who rely on fear and chaos to magnify their threat and disguise their essential weakness. It is the world’s sole superpower—the primary architect of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration—that is now shaking off all legal constraints to unleash the most destructive military machine in history. - Roger Normand

Is our military more destructive than that of Saddam Hussein�s? In what sense, precisely? Is our military more destructive than the Nazi war machine of World War II? You know, the one that engineered the Holocaust? Is our military more destructive than the Red Army that enforced the starvation of the Ukraine that killed millions? Is our military more destructive than the Khmer Rouge, which murdered almost a quarter of the population of Cambodia in the 1970s? Are we more destructive than the Japanese in their murderous occupation of China, Korea, and the Philippines in WWII? Are we more destructive than the Mongols, who may have killed up to 800,000 people in what is now Iraq alone? - Jason Van Steenwyk

The contortions are almost funny. In the Eighties, when the US and Europe were the de facto allies of Saddam, the Left wept rivers for his Kurdish and Arab victims. The concern dimmed when Saddam spoilt everything by invading Kuwait and turning himself into America’s enemy. In the Nineties, the tyrant of Iraq was no longer responsible for conditions in the tyranny of Iraq. Its suffering was the fault of UN sanctions. By the spring of this year, evasion had reached outright denial as the reflection in the looking glass completed its about turn and opposed the only means of overthrowing Saddam. - Nick Cohen

Links in this entry:

By the left... about turn
Expert: 300,000 in Iraq's Mass Graves
Facing the Human Rights Abyss
Human Rights digital watch
The Nation, Divided
U.S.: Hundreds of Civilian Deaths in Iraq Were Preventable

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

TrackBack URL for this entry:

http://www.patetech.info/cgi-bin/mt/mt-doubleback.cgi/244

.:.

.:.

.:.

.:.

.:.

.:.