Saddam’s Black Book

The numbers will be very different if you include premature mortality due to economic/medical deprivation. With respect to children,

“The two most reliable scientific studies on sanctions in Iraq are the 1999 report “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children,” by Columbia University’s Richard Garfield, and “Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq,” a May 2000 article by Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah in The Lancet. Garfield, an expert on the public-health impact of sanctions, conducted a comparative analysis of the more than two dozen major studies that have analyzed malnutrition and mortality figures in Iraq during the past decade. He estimated the most likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000. Garfield’s analysis showed child mortality rates double those of the previous decade.”

That leads to the contentious argument about whether the sanctions or Sadaam are to blame. Amongst the Shiites, and Marsh Arabs in particular, premature mortality was so much higher than in Sunni areas that a politically motivated policy of selected resource allocation seems likely. The Kurds, who administered the “oil for food” revenues apart from the central government, fared very well during the period of sanctions, which to me suggests the responsibility lies primarily with Sadaam. Deliberately depriving populations of the necessities for survival in my opinion is tantamount to murder. Most of the Armenians in WWI died from starvation or disease after the Turks instituted their policy of “relocation” to the deserts of Northern Syria. When the Turks defend their actions by claiming they did not commit “murder” or “genocide” I think it’s reasonable to say bullshit.

Considering conditions in Iraq, it may be a very long time before any figures more reliable than the ones we have now are available.

For the time being, I wish that people would stop repeating that “300,000 victims have been found in mass graves”. The 300,000 figure is an estimate from Human Rights Watch of the number who may be buried in mass graves. This estimate may turn out to be accurate, but nowhere near that number have been found yet.

” Thus, I was in favour of allowing Saddam to remain in power for a short period (waiting for a coalition of people I trusted to be assembled).

Clearly, therefore, my moral culpability (and thus the extent to which I am prepared to take crap from pro-war lefties) is very heavily dependent on what might have happened in Iraq during that period of six months to a year. ”

Huh? Who was really coming on in six months to a year if their experience over 11 years wasn’t enough? Just because the ‘very very no seriously we mean it’ last delay before the war was advertised by the French as being six months to a year doesn’t mean there wasn’t going to be further delays later. There had been other ‘last’ chances previously.

Also we should note that inspectors apparently weren’t going to be finding WMD–the ONLY issue that the UN cared about.

So in your counterfactual world, if the only variable changing is Bush’s willingness to leave the UN behind, we are left with Saddam in power until his natural death (or I suppose until one of his sons killed him and took his place).

“Bodycounts” are always difficult.

Before the war, the UN estimated that ca. 250,000 killed lie in mass graves. A recent AP report cited forensic scientists (working for the Coalition), saying that the number could be as high as 400,000. This number usually covers all those killed between ca. 1980 up to 2003. (Try to Google these numbers with keywords like Saddam, Iraq, killed etc., and you get relevant hits).

Then there are ca. 2,000,000 dead Iraqi soldiers and civilians who died as a consequence of the Iraq-Iran War 1980-88 and the Iraq-Kuwait War 1990-91. Both wars were started by Saddam. (Try to Google, or take a look at the COW database at Michigan).

This means that up to 2.4 million Iraqis died as a direct consequence of Saddam Hussein’s actions (at least since 1980; data before that is almost impossible to get nowadays).

Then there are those who died needlessly because of indirect consequences of his actions. So you could include those 300,000 dead infants which UNICEF said died because of the sanctions regime. Moral responsibility is difficult to identify here; sanctions were in place because Saddam did not fully fulfil his obligations under the 1991 ceasefire agreement; also, medicine and food under the later oil-for-food programme were primarily channelled to the Republican Guard and Baathists, not to those who needed it most.

Whatever the final bodycount, it’s quite a horrific number.

PS on the time issue: Moral responsibility or guilt is timeless, so should be punishment. Even if most of these crimes were committed a couple of years ago, this does not alter the moral argument (it may only alter the practical argument).

Mr Telebol

You admirably state that moral guilt is timeless and must always be punished, yet you undoubtedly do not fail to notice that Mr. Hussein is alive and well, and several thousand Iraqis are not, as a result of Operaition Iraqi Liberation. So the question must be asked, who exactly is being punished here, and in what way did O.I.L constitute a punishment expedition?

To bp:

I’m not necessarily saying that moral punishment is a good reason for going to war. But if you make an argument that Saddam was horrible in the past and therefore Iraq would be a better place without him in the future (and that’s the position I think Daniel advances in his post), then this consideration must be timeless (i.e. whether he was bad 20 years ago or 2 years ago should make no difference). Whether such an argument constitutes a “just cause” (which then would partially justify the deaths your actions produce in the name of a higher better goal) is, of course, an altogether different question…

“Whereas if the Coalition of the Trustworthy had determined that Saddam was busy with nefarious acts beyond the wildest nightmares of Perle and Wolfowitz, that the French and Germans would have given the US the thumbs up to charge in and slay the dreaded monster?”

Nope, this part I don’t believe. I suspect that the French and Germans would have opposed the war unless nuclear weapons within a couple of months of activation had been found. Their opposition was more about reining US power than worrying about Iraq. I especially don’t think they would have changed their positions based on evidence of mass killing at a threshold that was less a few hundred thousand per year.

Mr. Holsclaw

I’ve read your screed. Summarized, it goes something like this:

“Containment measures were failing”
“911 blah blah blah not an acceptable risk”
“Arab failure”
“911”

Insofar as sanctions actually bothered you, it would seem that that was merely due to the resentment they stirred up in the Arab world – resentment which in the light off 911 blah blah blah.

Once again Sebastian proffers a revisionist history to conform to facts on the ground. Bush and Powell sold their war to the American people solely based on the threat that WMD posed to our post-9-11 security. They even said that WMD was the one reason for war that everyone could agree on. Bush’s contempt for human rights and the suffering of Iraqi’s is evident by the photo of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand back when Saddam was gassing his own people.

Ms/Mrs/Mr Bp

You went “Meta” on all of us. Understandably it’s an intellectual morass even trying to engage these issues. A psychological dissonance sets in, testing not only argumentative rigor but ontological firmness. Engage with me if you will: Mr. Davies, it is rightly assumed, would have been willing to “slay the dreaded monster”(ipso facto) in due time (Anti this war now); yet you pejoratively deign me holding the same conclusion: “unless you consider war against Saddam to be a preordained outcome looking for a rationalization”.

Mr. Davies, much like those willing to engage, was looking for a rationale as well. You, however, seem to be against the war period. That is not to say you prefer “the dreaded monster”; but you reject the epistemic foundations of the argument per se, and, let’s say, US foreign policy generally. This surely is not a problem but a preference, since Chomsky is always Meta; but obviously not in any practical way— an instructive way, yes. Mr. Davies can choose the standard by which he feels war in necessary. But it’s slightly dishonest to deny others a rationale you yourself would use.

You will undoubtedly disagree with my characterization and many of my premises; but I would not expect otherwise, since your cant would be “Anti War all The Time… Anti… Anti… Anti “. For intellectual reasons you do not have to engage the argument; since you’d be of the opinion that there was no need ever to “take care of Saddam”. Again let’s be honest the French and Germans would have never agreed to this or any war; it’s sheer fantasy to believe otherwise.

An aside; Bp writes:

“if a coalition of the trustworthy found that Saddam was not harboring any WMDs, nor was he exceeding the approved international quota for executions and secret murders, that a $100 billion war would have been very hard to justify?”

Of course it would have been hard to justify, that’s my whole point. This would make Mr. Davies rationale to ouster the “dreaded monster” even more tenuous. And let’s agree on this: Mr. Davies wanted the “dreaded monster” taken care of whether by war or any other feasible measure. It’s obvious that you’re glib about any one making a judgment call on when the “dreaded monster” be taken out—and by what standard— so it surprise me that “you” would not take Mr. Davies to task for making the same judgment call, although counter-intuitively provisional. But again, you’re unwilling to engage.

And let’s be honest

Sorry, bp, teamcanada, I don’t know either of you. And therefore before you demand any soul-bearing or specific position statements from me, you have to put up and “be honest” yourself. I want a few admissions that there were no WMDs and that Saddam posed no threat to the UK or US. Then I’ll be more confident that this honesty isn’t one-sided.

Sebastian; I said, in writing, at the time, that I’d be happy to support a war if the Democrats were in charge in the US. I’d actually have supported even Bush, plus a less token multilateral force. You seem to be taking the USA’s ludicrous failure of diplomacy and throwing it at me as if it were my fault.

Mr Holsclaw

Read your own statements more carefully. On the same page, no less, you indignantly claim that the sanctions caused much Iraqi suffering, and the Axis of Weasels therefore wanted the sanctions lifted. In the next breath you claim that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would not have moved the Axis to approve US action, sans WMD, presumably because of their indifference to Iraqi suffering. The two do not match.. I dispute no facts, I point out your own self-contradictions.

“Anyway, my main point is that knowing what we know now, the UN would never have allowed an invasion of Iraq”

Hit squarely on the head, Mr Holsclaw; I would not dispute it.

The interesting corollary is, of course, that knowing what we know now would the American public have allowed an invasion of Iraq?

Knowing what we know now about the state of WMD programs there would have been no UN sponsored war

I utterly disagree. The fact that the diplomatic effort was fucked up was the specific fault of the Americans. It could and should have been handled better, and it is wrong of you to completely let your own government off the hook. The only reason that the UN ended up in the position it ended up in was the intransigence of the negotiators on the other side.

You’re also being highly disingenuous yourself in playing fast and loose with the concept of sanctions; someone’s already pointed out to you that all-encompassing sanctions weren’t needed to stop WMD development. I had a couple of posts on d2d in this in the early days.

“On the same page, no less, you indignantly claim that the sanctions caused much Iraqi suffering, and the Axis of Weasels therefore wanted the sanctions lifted. In the next breath you claim that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would not have moved the Axis to approve US action, sans WMD, presumably because of their indifference to Iraqi suffering.”

You were doing fine until ‘presumably’. Sanctions killing Iraqis is the US hurting people in the Middle East–worthy of opposition by European governments. Saddam killing his own people is like Syria shelling Palestinians to cause tens of thousands dead; not nearly interesting enough to require action.

“Knowing what we know now about the state of WMD programs there would have been no UN sponsored war

I utterly disagree. The fact that the diplomatic effort was fucked up was the specific fault of the Americans. It could and should have been handled better, and it is wrong of you to completely let your own government off the hook. The only reason that the UN ended up in the position it ended up in was the intransigence of the negotiators on the other side.”

Is this really your position? It is hard to believe that you are really saying this. We couldn’t get a UN authorization for war when France, Russia and Germany believed that Iraq had banned weapons. You think that we would have been able to get an authorization if we knew he didn’t? How does that logic work?

The diplomatic effort of the US failed because we couldn’t convince France, Germany and Russia that Saddam was a threat even when they thought he had some banned weapons and some banned nuclear programs. How were we going to convince them that he was a threat if we found out that he was a lesser threat than France thought in 2002?

No, your position leads to Saddam remaining in power. That is fine. You can argue that he wasn’t a threat. Go for it. But do not pretend that your position leads to getting rid of him. It absolutely does not. And whining about US diplomatic failure changes that not one single iota.

Let me begin by saying I don’t think there is cause for self-righteousness, whatever one’s political orientation, moral sympathies and opinion about the Iraq War, on the part of people who are sitting far away, in no way directly implicated or at risk in the current awful and threatening situation in Iraq, and who have not had to suffer and endure the countless years of terror and misery befoehand. One’s opinion, no matter how well-informed or argued, is just an opinion with no real stakes involved, save perhaps come election time. That said, my own position beforehand was roughly anti-war/why are they doing this and why now?/ let the inspections work and then play the next hand- to lay my own cards upon the table.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was an evil man, a psychopath and a well-entrenched psychopath, heading up a vile regime. This is a given; responsiblity for moral/political judgment in how to deal with such an evil belongs with those who exercise such judgment and act on it, one way or another, and not with the given evil. In other words, there is no point in vilifying Saddam, as a justificatory reason: that is a redundancy, hard as such a brutal fact may be to swallow. The ending of the first Gulf War puzzled me at the time; rarely in history has a regime been so thoroughly defeated militarily and yet left standing. Did Bush 1 simply fail to plan for the contingencies of the end-game, (in which case that’s hereditary, too)? Were they doing the Saudis’ bidding-(my guess at the time)? At any rate, to have encouraged the uprisings among the Kurds and Shiites, only to stand back and let them be slaughtered, was exceedingly cold-blooded. And to simply blame the deprivations of the sanctions on Saddam,- though, in the light of what we now all “know”, his behavior was exceedingly perplexing-, begs the question of whether they were, as designed, the best possible policy, whether they were well-designed for their ostensible end- (and, as far as getting rid of Saddam, such sanctions tend to strenghten the power of a dictator, by weakening the relative power of his people)-, and whether the U.S.A. was ever willing to countenance their lifting as a result of compliance- (yes, the irony). So I don’t think Western power can be absolved of complicity in the Iraq horrors, even leaving aside anything before 1990. And now having initiated a war, motivated apparently by sheer ideological delirium, conducted with massive incompetence in its contingency planning- (though there are plenty of institutional U.S. government reports that show the permanent government apparatus does have the capacity to realistically size up the situation and plan for the required resources and projects)- without a shred of international legitimacy and without the multi-lateral assistance to support and sort out the aftermath and gain some sense of legitimacy for a new Iraqi regime,- not to mention having damaged the whole framework of international and multilateral constraints by which to deal with crises and dire problems, acute or endemic, (which, one suspects, was not outside the purview of these ideologues)-, Iraq stands on the verge, perhaps, of a civil war, always a forseeable danger. Whether Saddam could have been removed by some other means and why this was not coherently attempted, in spite of its being officially declared policy, will be a question that is always left hanging. To be sure, Saddam ran a highly leveraged state-terrorist regime with a maze of security apparatuses to be manipulated together with the purse-strings, but one can guess that his consensual support was virtually nil, outside of his tribe and hangers-on. (One could guess that if the Blix boys had been allowed to complete their work, Saddam would have stood revealed as a toothless tiger, such that, with some new targeted sanctions, controls and constraints of a military nature and with some economic revival for the Iraqi people, his power would have ebbed away until some final explosion. But who knew?) I think many of us were left wondering and are wondering still what the “real” reasons for this war were; it makes all those historiographical works, carefully and rigorously deliniating multi-factoral causes, look like so much indecipherable, antedeluvian scribbling. What hangs in the balance is what are the real costs of having removed Saddam through this war, since it seems to have thus far accomplished little else, versus the sunken costs of its preceding history.

I do have a question for anyone out there who may know of an answer or where to find one, which is tangential to, but not quite off, this topic. Does anyone know what the final accounting of the casualties in the Kosovo War were, specifically the estimated number of Kosovars killed by Serbian military/paramilitary forces versus the collateral casualties among the Kosovars from the NATO bombing and the Serbian casualties, “collateral” or otherwise, resulting from the bombing of Serbia proper? We were told that there was a terrible genocide occurring, but, in the aftermath, the reported estimates of Kosovars murdered was in the 1 to 2 thousand range. Of course, we are not just counting beans here. I never saw an accounting of this in the media, although I also have not done due diligence. My point, aside from wanting an answer, is the role the mass media, manipulated by the power apparatus, plays in legitimizing such exercizes of violent power. It is not who makes the best argument or case, but who controls the agenda and its framework that decides these matters, such that everyone is suddenly called on to have an opinion and the reasons and beliefs by which the majority of the population give their consent often has very little to do with any close examination of the case that is made.

“Highly leveraged state-terrorist regime?” What, he was in hock to bond traders?

Um, did anyone present the evidence behind the numbers commonly cited for Saddam’s murder record? If anything, we may have harder numbers for the sanctions, and those numbers are contentious enough.

BTW, whatever Saddam’s role in increasing the death toll under sanctions, it’s apparent that the US originally intended them to be murderous. Barton Gellman wrote a piece on this for the Washington Post on June 23, 1991, where Pentagon targeting planners for the Gulf War said they hit civilian infrastructure with the idea that it couldn’t be repaired under sanctions. And Pollack (page 125-126) talks about how the US expected the intense suffering under sanctions to cause Saddam to either comply with UN demands or be overthrown. This was the one point made by prowar liberals that made some sense –the sanctions as actually applied were killing children and it’s odd to hear from some (not all) war critics who cry over the 10,000 civilian deaths last year and yet say that the sanctions were “working”. A morally consistent antiwar position which still allowed for the need to keep Saddam contained would have called for “smart sanctions”, which is the policy the Bush Administration claimed it was beginning to favor before Sept. 11. Some antiwar people did take this position, some called for the complete lifting of sanctions , but centrists and some partisan Democrats didn’t seem to care much about sanctions deaths. After all, Clinton supported sanctions.

Going with the off-topic drift, is it really so hard to imagine an alternative to invasion? Perhaps the sanctions could have been eased as the inspections progressed. It does appear that the threat of invasion did impel the Iraqis to admit once more to inspection, and that threat could perhaps not have been sustained indefinitely, but some level of threat above the maintenance of the no-fly zones could have been.

The calculus of casualties is not as simple as the choice among no sanctions, continued sanctions and invasion.

Actually dsquared, whilst I applaud your initiative, and think that you are right (it was the Human Rights Watch article that made me think on similar lines, plus the realisation that certain bloggers seemed to accuse me of supporting genocide each time I made an anti-war comment, despite the fact that they arrived at the party after about 99% of Saddam’s victims had already died) tallies of Hitler’s victims do often include those killed in his aggressive wars, such as Soviet POWs. Indeed waging aggressive war was an indictment at Nuremberg.

Grieving mothers, fathers, siblings, sons and daughters may disagree. They may have preferred a course of action with a different result.

In order calculate the number of people Saddam would have killed had he not been removed, you need to pull a number, out of a convenient bodily orif[i]ce.

That’s what happened when I assisted to a pro-war conference (incidentally sponsored by an INC off-shoot, make of that what you will). They basically said: “Saddam killed millions of people, it was horrible. If we don’t let the US have its war, 1 million people more will die!!!” No idea where they got this number from, but you can guess…

Oh and Daniel, I think you mis-read Andrew, I think he actually agrees with you.

“Saddam would have been in power indefinitely without US action independent of the UN”

Isn’t there also something convenient about this? I mean, “Saddam would have been in power indefinitely therefore there were a potentially infinite number of victims” works as a justification for war as long as you don’t pretend to ever apply it consistently.

This is the point, surely. No one disputes, I think, that there were strategic reasons for the war in Iraq. But these weren’t and aren’t presented as justification because it makes the war seem like a war of aggression. Instead, we are presented with humanitarian and security reasons for war.

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.

But I’m interested to hear justifications from the pro-war people that don’t simply beg the question.

“The US and UK made a tactical and diplomatic error in putting troops on the ground before establishing political rationale, meaning that they had to drive the process faster than it could have been driven.”

I hate to be rude, let us analyze one pointed question. Why did Saddam allow inspections after 4 years of not allowing them? It was the troops on the ground. So let us not call that a tactical error unless you don’t even believe in inspections at all.

The 11 year historical record of UN positions, especially of France is crystal clear. No invasion in 1991, no invasion when the inspectors were hampered in the early 1990s, no invasion at all. We all know that the best way for France to say NO was to say Maybe indefinitely. That is precisely what they are doing.

My justifications for the war are all over the freaking web so I won’t bore you with a recap. But that has very little to do with this post. Daniel made the completely ridiculous suggestion that in six months to a year, after more inspections, France and Germany and Russia would have authorized a war. All of the arguments YOU ALL are making show that to be false. If inspections had continued, it is now clear they would not have found any stockpiles. As such, the most France would have called for was more inspections. They still wouldn’t find enough. More inspections.

The point of this post was a calculation of per/year murders attributable to Saddam with the purpose of seeing if a 6 month to a year delay in deposing him (a delay to gain French and German and Russian support) is ‘worth it’.

If you want to argue that Saddam was not a threat, and should not have been invaded at all, the discussions above make sense. But arguing that the UN would be more interested in invasion after a year of inspections turned up very little is to ignore the fact that they did not get more interested in the inspection period that really did exist. Nearly a 5 month period.

So, if you want to argue that Saddam would have been deposed with UN sanction at that point anyway, you have made an enormous leap of logic.

I don’t mind defending the US policy. I think it was justified. But that is not Daniel’s topic in this post. So today I’m not going to get sucked into a side debate about the defensibility of the US policy. I’m just saying that any position which assumes that the UN would be more interested in Iraq invasion after a year more of unsuccessful inspections is incoherent. Daniel doesn’t want to be left with the reality of Saddam staying in power without US action outside of the UN. But he is. Or would be if he really looked at the likelihood of UN action.

If you believe that in six months to a year the UN would have authorized invasion, please tell me on what grounds? Remember we now know that the inspections would not have found much…..

Far more realistic would be another proposal like the Jan. 2002 proposal to lift sanctions and end all containment measures. Which is fine, if that is what you want. But I don’t think Daniel is comfortable with that.

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

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Saddam not even on Top 5
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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

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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

“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.

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.

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

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.

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

Saddam only a bit less bad than Suharto

But Indonesia has 10 times the population of Iraq. Do you believe in absolute numbers?

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.