Comments on: Saddam’s Black Book

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 17:30:21 +0000

If we’re playing the relative vs. absolute numbers game, East Timor lost about one quarter of its population during Suharto’s (American and British-supported) invasion, putting Suharto in the same relative numbers league as Pol Pot. With respect to his own people, the estimates for Suharto’s mid-60’s killings go from low hundreds of thousands to well over a million, out of about 100 million at the time, I think. So the high end is one percent, like Saddam killing 300,000 out of 25 million Iraqis. But this is a ghoulish parlor game. The point was that Suharto’s biggest killings were in the mid 60’s and late 70’s and Saddam’s were in the 80’s and in both cases they were the allies of the US at the time. So it seems a little odd to hold up these crimes many years later as a justification for a war, when the killing rate has dropped to levels typical of other brutal thugocracies.

By: ahem

ahem — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 07:24:14 +0000

Blair thought (or at least said publically that he thought) France would come along in February 2003, but he was proven wrong. In what sense, exactly? Do you still have problems with the modifier ‘ce soir’?

By: L

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 02:56:31 +0000

Saddam only a bit less bad than Suharto But Indonesia has 10 times the population of Iraq. Do you believe in absolute numbers?

By: armando

armando — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 01:13:41 +0000

““Leaving aside security for now”, yes because that makes sense.” No, I meant that it is a separate issue. I doubt you’ll agree with me but I thought that, moving past the well known rhetoric, the imminent threat of Saddam’s Iraq wasn’t at all credible. I await the next threat to rival Hitler with baited breath. “Short answer, start somewhere. ” Indeed. Military power needs its expression, after all.

By: Gordon G

Gordon G — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 00:24:10 +0000

Why let France, Russia, and Germany corner the market on Iraqi oil? When the US and UK can.

By: Crackhead

Crackhead — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 00:20:27 +0000

Armando writes: “Leaving aside security for now, if the humanitarian reasons for war are reasons that would apply to half the globe, including states supported by the US and UK, then that is simply insufficient. Why Iraq and why then? I think the answer is fairly obvious and don’t for a second think the diplomatic failure with the UN is some kind of accident” “Leaving aside security for now”, yes because that makes sense. But following your silly logic: WHY DO ANYTHING ANYWHERE? Short answer, start somewhere.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 22:34:42 +0000

Tony Blair shared which assumptions? That France would come along if the inspectors found nothing? Blair thought (or at least said publically that he thought) France would come along in February 2003, but he was proven wrong.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 22:27:02 +0000

As recently as a year ago, both those assumptions were shared by Tony Blair.

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 21:20:28 +0000

France acceded to military intervention in Yugoslavia. And she did not ask for WMD in Milosevic hands. “Bush leading a coalition of all the unbribed states of Europe is a pretty convincing demonstration of his belief in multilateral action. Should we instead have tried to outbid Saddam’s bribe-masters to get the French et al on board?” Apart form the UK all the rest of the countries were acting on bribes from the USA, or on menaces. As a Spanish citizen I know too much about Aznar to be a dupe on his personnal viewpoint. He was a member of the Spanish equivalent of the Baath, and it was against his wishes that Spain forged ahead to get some democracy. He never condemned the crimes of Franquism, and whenever there has been demands to do so, he has opposed it. We are still discovering mass graves from the civil war and the repression that followed it. So no, no one who go hand to hand with Aznar cares in any way about human issues. DSW

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 20:41:34 +0000

So, to be clear. You are acting under the foreign policy assumption that after a year of fruitless inspections, France, Germany, and Russia would not have obstructed an invasion of Iraq? Furthermore you are acting under the assumption that the UN could have been convinced to authorize an attack AND that these countries would have helped out (because without their help the authorization is paper only). My assumption would be that France, Germany and Russia would continue their opposition to an invasion of Iraq. This assumption is based on the actual position of these countries as expressed by their ministers. It would also be a continuation not a change (unlike your assumption). Knowing what we know now about the probable results of inspections it is a continuation which would would strengthen an argument for a continuation of their policies rather than strengthen an argument for a change in their policies. For the sake of argument you are of course allowed to make any assumptions that you desire. Lets just be clear about what they are: you assume that after a year of inspections finding nothing, French, German and Russian resistance to an invasion would decrease. You offer no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, for this highly counter-intuitive view. P.S. Your stress on the ‘automatic’ phrase ignores the history of UN ‘threats’ which would always postphone discussion about punishment until the issue dies of neglect. France’s main tactic was to say no by taking a long time saying maybe. I don’t think you are so naive as to be unable to recognize the technique, perhaps you just haven’t thought about it in the context of French opposition.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:40:15 +0000

Sebastian is distorting the record here, although I don’t blame him as he is only repeating a lie which originated with Blair’s office. France’s public position was that they would veto any proposal which included the automatic use of force; in other words, any resolution which took the final decision away from the UN Security Council. And they only moved to this position after weeks of fruitless negotiation during which it was clear that the US and UK were not acting in good faith. Anthony and Sebastian are allowed their views on the relative mendacity of France, Germany and Russia. I would simply make the following two points: 1) The only countries which can be proven to have lied, spied and bribed in the UN discussions were the US and UK (Turkey famously put the US in the humiliating position of having a bribe turned down!), so asking us to believe the worst of France and the best of the US is perhaps counterintuitive. 2) Sebastian and Anthony are nevertheless entitled to their view. They are not, however, entitled to use it as a premis in an attack on me, since I don’t accept it, and haven’t been given any reason to accept it which wasn’t either bald assertion or not true. By analogy, I would defend to the last man the right of Sebastian and Anthony to, if they so wished, lick their arses and call it chocolate, but they are not entitled to insist that I eat it.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:21:49 +0000

d^2, your faith in the good will of the French, Germans, and Russians is rather touching. Those countries opposed an invasion for three reasons – to help establish a principle that the US may not act unconstrained in the world (a principle that none of the three is willing to guide their own actions by), to protect their oil interests in Iraq, and to protect the source of quite a lot of bribe money. Bush leading a coalition of all the unbribed states of Europe is a pretty convincing demonstration of his belief in multilateral action. Should we instead have tried to outbid Saddam’s bribe-masters to get the French et al on board?

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:11:01 +0000

“Actually, I made the not very ridiculous suggestion that France and Germany would not have vetoed a UN Security Council Resolution authorising a war.” That was not France’s publically stated position. They stated they would veto. But if you believe in your deepest of your deep private heart that France was just bluffing I suppose I cannot argue with your instinct. You are effectively ‘arguing’ that France would have vetoed when they thought Saddam had weapons, but would not have vetoed after a year worth of inspections failed to turn up weapons. That makes no logical sense, but since we are reduced to arguing your gut feeling I will defer to your amazingly accurate instincts. I humbly regret my foolishness in mistaking this for an intellectual exercise instead of an emotional one.

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 18:23:13 +0000

I hate citing Rummel on anything—you can dig up your own order of magnitude statistics on any particular atrocity easily enough from the web or from books and it’s not like Rummel is a primary source. Besides, how could one possibly be a genocide scholar? If I want to know what happened in Stalinist Russia I’d read the specialists in that area (and it’d help if the historians team up with demographers). But just collecting death toll estimates and guessing which ones are plausible—heck, I can and have done that. The Black Book of Communism, btw, attributes 20 million total to the Soviet era—that’s apparently Stalin and Lenin combined, and I think it includes the 1920 War Communism famine that supposedly killed 5 million. (Anne Applebaum also cites relatively low figures for Stalin’s era in the appendix of her recent Gulag book). The moral here is that even for supposedly well-studied periods of history the estimates range over factors of three. Possibly in this case it depends on how one classifies deaths. And the number cited for Pol Pot is probably a misprint. There weren’t 10 million Cambodians to kill in 1975-1979. The usual numbers are around 1.5-2 million. Back on Dsquare’s original point, as someone else mentioned Ken Roth has already put forward an antiwar argument of the sort dsquared seems to have in mind. Most of Saddam’s murders (whatever the actual number) were committed in the 80’s,with maybe tens of thousands more added in 1991 right after the Gulf War. According to Roth, you can’t legally justify killing thousands of civilians in a war to overthrow a murderous thug whose genocidal period was 13 years or more in the past.

By: lawnorder

lawnorder — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 17:58:56 +0000

Most neocons cite the “millions killed by Saddam” from articles like Ann Couter’s Jan 2003 criticism of Clark (The Democrats Idea Of A General) Ann Coulter put this doozie on her web site and it seems to be making the rounds, despite being obviously false. Here it is: >> In humanitarian terms, Milosevic didn’t hold a candle to Saddam Hussein. Milosevic killed a few thousand Albanians in a ground war. Hussein killed well over a million Iranians, Kurds, Kuwaitis and Shias, among others. Milosevic had no rape rooms, no torture rooms, no Odai or Qusai. He didn’t even use a wood chipper to dispose of his enemies, the piker. < < I digged out a couple of links debunking it from respected genocide historian Rummel and others. Fell free to use this material to counter Neocon revisionist history ------------------ Not even the White House site exagerates like Ann ------------- Allegations of prostitution used to intimidate opponents of the regime, have been used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women. Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.... According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south." http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030404-1.html ———————————- Saddam not even on Top 5———————————— Stalin – 60 million dead http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM Mao – 35 million dead http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM Hitler – 20 million dead http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE3.HTM Pol Pot – 10 milion dead http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Bosnia, Rwanda, North Korea – close to 1 million each http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM —————————————————- Rwanda According to the UN, at least 250,000 women were raped in Rwanda in 1994. Most are not alive to tell their tales, while others are dying of AIDS contracted through the rapes. There are, according to aid organizations, close to 5,000 children in Rwanda today who were born of the 1994 rapes. http://www.peacewomen.org/news/Rwanda/newsarchive03/ontrial.html Books http://www.holocaustbookstore.net/sections/genocide/genstudy.htm Bosnia http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports.html North Korea North Korea famine It is estimated that the North Korean famine [killed] 2 to 3 million people [since 1995 ] Currently, 15% of children under the age of five are diagnosed as malnourished http://www.worldvision.org/worldvision/comms.nsf/stable/global_hotspots_north_korea Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea’s gulag A series of shocking personal testimonies is now shedding light on Camp 22 – one of the country’s most horrific secrets Antony Barnett Sunday February 1, 2004 The Observer In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 – North Korea’s largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them. Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il’s North Korean regime. Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC’s This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening. ‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’ Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’ He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. ‘At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country. http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,1136483,00.html Major Atrocities and Wars http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm War casualties http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/index.html ———————- Bosnia———————————Read the Milosevick trial documents. Saddam never told troops to rape women just to “purify their womb” with a Serbian child. …When C-17 arrived there, he saw three members of Red Berets assaulting a local Croat whose house they had just burnt down. They kicked him like a ball down the road until he died, the witness said. The witness’s observations appeared to show that Milosevic’s secret service held power over the JNA and that the Red Berets in particular were in charge. To further support those allegations, C-17 said that he saw a document bearing Milosevic’s signature ordering Perisic to disband a paramilitary unit … [by] killing a number of civilians. The witness recalled how one man was pushed into a manhole and a grenade thrown in after him. After the attack on Mostar, in an operation supported by the Yugoslav army, the Red Berets, along with a newly-arrived paramilitary group, the Vukovarci, attacked a village north of the town called Bijelo Polje. C-17 said survivors were killed by the Red Berets, and described how one pararmilitary cut off an old man’s ears and threw his body in a pool of water, “He then started throwing bricks at him until the man sunk.” But worst was to come. In early June… he said he saw Serb troops killing the men with pistols, knives, guns and “all kinds of other things”. C-17 also testified that Red Berets kept women in one of the bungalows in the camp, which they had frequently visited. “I don’t know what happened to them, but I saw Red Berets members going in and out of their bungalow,” he said. The witness later became a member of the White Wolves… C-17 said that the paramilitaries helped take UN soldiers hostage in the spring 1995 when NATO bombed Bosnian Serb positions around the capital. The order to do so, C-17 said, came from the office of Momcilo Krajisnik, the president of the Bosnian Serb parliament. In the cross-examination, Milosevic accused C-17 of concocting the story …C-17 rebutted the former Yugoslav president’s allegations with seemingly irrefutable evidence. “There are over one hundred graves in Mostar bearing the names of the people killed that day,” he said. http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/yugoindx.htm