Of course. They are a foreign intrusion.

Yeah, god knows the US liberal media just loves the Bush administration, and bends over backwards to make them look good.

Look, dude. I've more or less supported the Iraq operation from the beginning, and I still do, but you're wrong.

Saddam Hussein did not commit genocide.

It's quite a ridiculous charge, and thankfully I believe it's been dropped.

I said this in a previous thread, and I'll say it again because it's important.

This is an incident that few people really understand, but many people spout.

The gassing of the Kurds occured in Halabja. This was during the Iraq-Iran war. Halabja is on the border with Iran. The chemical attack was to stop a column of Iranian forces from occupying the town. It isn't entirely certain whether Iraq was responsible for the attack in the first place, it may have been Iran. The highest estimate of the death toll is 7000, but most of those were not killed by the gas attack, they died from gunshot wounds. They were caught in the crossfire between Iraqi and Iranian forces. Iran were at the very least partly to blame for this incident.

The Kurdish civilians were not the the intended target for this attack. They were 'collateral damage'. It's quite amusing the picture some people paint, how Saddam Hussien personally walzed down and cackled with glee as children choke to death in the streets. Heh. It's frankly absurd to think that the Ba'ath party would waste millions of dollars and years of development of weaponry just to 'get at' the Kurds. The media is much to blame for not dispelling this amusing assumption.
This was a time of war, an increasingly bloody war, and it probably didn't help that the Kurds would support the Iranians and would join in armed resistance against Iraq. But this was 'collateral damage' of 7000 to halt an advancing collumn of troops. Compare this to 'collateral damage' of tens of thousands to invade a country that didn't really resist much at all anyway.

Now, the ethics of 'collateral damage' are certainly debatable, but it is somewhat hypocritical to suggest that American 'collateral damage' is acceptable when invading Iraq but Saddam Hussein's 'collateral damage' is not acceptable when fighting back invading forces. And of course, all the chemical weapons Saddam Hussein had were provided by the United States..


As for whether getting rid of Saddam Hussein will actually benefit Iraq, well, that was discussed in the other thread too.

I don't think the Kurd-gassing charges have been dropped.

If anything I got the impression that the process had been sped up, along with the recruitment of judges with no experience in cases of crimes against humanity.

Seems a bit of a kangaroo court in the making, but then again it's not likely to be much of a democracy over there any time in the next decade.

It might still be relevant to the trial, but the charge is no longer genocide. And rightly so, the Ba'ath party never comitted genocide.

Yeah -- we all know that Saddam was the most friendly guy ever, right?

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/jackstraw1.html

http://216.219.216.117/news/2003/emay/6_sports.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3320293.stm

http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2128

I'm not saying that the premises (WMDs) were justified, but one can't deny that Iraq is a better place.

Naturally there wouldn't be insurgents if this didn't happen...there'd just be torture, rape, and murder by the government.

Can you tell me that the US military took out 5000 innocent and uninvolved civilians?

I can, and I do.

You cannot simply say "Saddam Hussein was a bad man, we got rid of him and now it is good". The world isn't that simple. You have to look at alternatives, and the alternative to Saddam Hussein is.. well.. chaos.

There are attacks every day, people are dying every day, Iraqis are fleeing their homes, fleeing their country, because it isn't safe. What more and more Iraqis are saying now is This didn't happen under Saddam Hussein. There were not suicide bombings on the streets of Baghdad in Saddam's Iraq.
Yes, Saddam Hussein had many enemies within Iraq and the Middle-East in general, he was very unpopular with neighbouring countries, but there were not attacks on a daily basis. Saddam Hussein ruled with an iron fist because that is the only way that Iraq can be ruled, and this is what many Iraqis are coming to realise.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the countries of the Middle East were more or less drawn up arbitrarily by the British Empire. Iraq isn't a 'unified' country of shared ideals, it is compromised of several warring factions. Under Saddam Hussein, these warring factions were oppressed to the point where they couldn't fight and kill eachother.
Now, without Saddam Hussein, the floodgates are open. Up until recently, most of the attacks have been against American and British targets, the warring factions have united against the invaders, but you can see now the various groups fighting eachother.
Iraq is going to see civil war - a civil war not dissimilar to those in Africa.

Iraqis under Saddam Hussein were considerably better off than those in other countries in the Middle East, primarily because the Ba'ath party did not follow the Shari'a, or other aspects of fundementalist Islam. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a secular state.
This gave women rights that they would not have had (rights that they theoretically should have, under Islamic law, but tend not to have in practise).

There was no legislation against homosexuality. In neighbouring countries, it would be illegal and sometimes a capital crime. The Ba'ath party simply didn't care about it. This position is probably the most useful of all.

Being a pseudo-socialist state, Iraqis had the benefit of excellent social services, health care and education. Oil money was (mostly) going towards social services, not extraordinarily wealthy corporations. In the 60s and 70s, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had the best standard of living in the Middle East (and that includes Turkey and Egypt). Iraq's economy took a serious blow after the Iraq-Iran war, and it went somewhat downhill from there.

But it was nowhere near the chaos and mess that Iraq is today. Even after the elections, the government is unlikely to be able to sort out the country, and it is even more unlikely that Iraq will retain the standard of life under Saddam Hussein. They might not have liked him, but he did a lot of good for Iraq. The elected government is far more likely to adopt a fundementalist Islamic stance, as that's an easy way to win cheap support, despite all the benefits of a secular state.

Some countries require authoritarian rule, because of the nature of the country, and Iraq is one of those countries.



Yes. Independant sources estimate 10 000 to 30 000, with one study putting it at 100 000 (which seems a bit much). But it's certainly more than 5000.

Personally I think a world where you can't speak your mind for fear of being tortured isn't much of a place to have a real life at all.

As for civilian casualties you are speculating as well as everyone else. You have no proof.

I'm thinking streets littered with dead bodies is proof enough. Yes, there's a very wide margin for 'possible death toll', but the lowest number is a very conservative estimate and the 'real' death toll is almost certainly higher than it. The data tends to be from funeral directors and the like, they don't just magic up the numbers.

Duh.

I'm waiting for people to try and refute Mort's last long post. Because you know, he actually uses history and logic in that argument there, and it's kinda hard to BS through it.

But don't worry, I'm sure someone will find one point and nit pick it, and ignore the other facts Mr. Hog has there. Lovely it is, lovely.

That's why we should have a organized debate board. Members would be forced to go through all the opponents points and refute or concede them. Anyway, whatever.

Funny! I heard that when congress tried to vote a law against using torture in government police bodies, the White House pressured the congress to keep the options of torture open.

Dude, I got millions of these contradictions, double standards and twisted views of reality in your current government ideology, and I will definitely post them up sometime in the following months. A teaser: my facial expression while running through them in my mind is this:

In the meanwhile, excuse me for not believing **** of what Bush says about morals and values.

Your just a nutcase, you can say whatever you want and claim its fact, but you are still just bsing. I might as well have facts that you are a man who had an operation to become a girl as you have any facts on anything besides the latest conspiracy.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."

Earlier, in objecting to a similar measure in a Senate version of the military authorization bill, the Defense Department sent a letter to Congress saying that the department "strongly urges the Senate against passing new legislation concerning detention and interrogation in the war on terrorism" because it is unnecessary.

The Senate restrictions had not been in House versions of the military or intelligence bills.

In interviews on Wednesday, both Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican negotiator, and Representative Jane Harman of California, a Democratic negotiator, said the lawmakers had ultimately decided that the question of whether to extend the restrictions to intelligence officers was too complex to be included in the legislation.

"The conferees agreed that they would drop the language but with the caveat that the intelligence committees would take up the issue this year," Ms. Collins said.

Ms. Harman said, "If there are special circumstances around some intelligence interrogations, we should understand that before we legislate."

Some Democratic Congressional officials said they believed that the Bush administration was trying to maintain some legal latitude for the C.I.A. to use interrogation practices more extreme than those permitted by the military.

In its report last summer, the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks recommended that the United States develop policies to guarantee that captured terrorists were treated humanely.

Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department lawyer who left the department in 2002, said in an interview on Wednesday that he believed that the administration had "always wanted to leave a loophole where the C.I.A. could engage in actions just up to the line of torture."

The administration has said almost nothing about the C.I.A. operation to imprison and question terror suspects designated as high-value detainees, even as it has expressed disgust about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Senior officials have sought in recent public statements to emphasize that the government will continue to abide by federal laws that prohibit torture.

At his confirmation hearing last week on his nomination to be attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales said he found torture abhorrent.

The issue of the C.I.A.'s treatment of detainees first arose after agency officials sought legal guidance on how far its employees and contractors could go in interrogating terror suspects and whether the law barred the C.I.A. from using extreme methods, including feigned drowning, in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders captured by the United States. He was apprehended in Pakistan in early 2002.

An August 2002 legal opinion by the Justice Department said that interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture. The administration disavowed that opinion last summer after the classified legal opinion was publicly disclosed.

A new opinion made public late last month, signed by James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, explicitly rejected torture and adopted more restrictive standards to define it.

But a cryptic footnote to the new document about the "treatment of detainees" referred to what the officials said were other still-classified opinions. The footnote meant, the officials said, that coercive techniques approved by the Justice Department under the looser interpretation of the torture statutes were still lawful even under the new, more restrictive interpretation.

Current and former government officials said specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of still-secret documents, including an August 2002 one by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.'s use of some 20 interrogation practices. The legal opinion was sent to the C.I.A. via the National Security Council at the White House.

Among the procedures approved by the document was waterboarding, in which a subject is made to believe he might be drowned.

The document was intended to guide the C.I.A. in its interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah and a handful of other high-level detainees. Instead, it led to a series of exchanges between the Justice Department and the intelligence agency as they debated exact procedures to be employed against individual detainees.

At times, their discussion included an assessment of whether specific measures, on a detainee by detainee basis, would cause such pain as to be considered torture.

In addition to Ms. Collins and Ms. Harman, the lawmakers in the conference committee negotiations were Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan.

The Senate measure to impose new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures, drafted by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, was in an amendment introduced by Mr. Lieberman and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. And in little-noticed comments on the Senate floor in December, Mr. Durbin complained that the decision by conferees to delete the measure had been "troublesome."

"I think the intelligence community should be held to the same standards as the Department of Defense," Mr. Durbin said in those remarks, "and taking this language out of the bill will make that very difficult to monitor, as I hoped we would be able to do."

A Congressional Democrat said the White House stance had left the impression "that the administration wanted an escape hatch to preserve the option of using torture" against prisoners held by the C.I.A.

The only public statement from the Bush administration about the kinds of restrictions proposed by Mr. Durbin came last June, when the Defense Department expressed strong opposition to a measure in the military authorization bill. That measure, adopted by the Senate, also imposed restrictions prohibiting torture as well as cruel, inhuman and other degrading treatment but it applied only to Defense Department personnel.

In a letter to Congress, Daniel J. Dell'Orto, the Pentagon's principal deputy counsel, criticized the legislation as unnecessary, saying it would "leave the current state of the law exactly where it is." Mr. Dell'Orto also criticized as "onerous" and inappropriate other provisions in the measure that would require the Pentagon to submit annual facility-by-facility reports to Congress on the status of detainees.

Ultimately, the House did not include the measure in its version of that military bill, and the final version of the legislation included only nonbinding language expressing a sense of Congress that American personnel should not engage in torture.


Correction: January 15, 2005, Saturday:

A front-page article on Thursday about legislation restricting the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers referred incorrectly to the release of a letter in which Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, opposed the legislation. While the letter was indeed provided on Wednesday in response to requests by The New York Times, it was initially made public as a White House news release on Oct. 19.




Pay attention damnit. You could've just done a simple google search. But, and here's the thing: you didn't. And if you have proof of me being a girl, present it. On my desk, tomorrow.

Hey didn't you watch Farenheit 9/11...Everyone knows that all the news channels get their info from fox news. I can't believe Moore actually tried to claim that.

I'm not reading it until you point to the link of the site.

I don't think you can really go for the whole "BIASED SOURCE" line. I've read it before on several sites. It's worded differently, but the general idea is pretty much the same. It's true, accept it - the US want to reserves the right to use torture to get information.

You don't want to know how many times I've heard that line from liberals...

I don't want to claim it as biased, I'm lazy.

You've really got nothing to go against here.. Unless of course the LIBERAL MEDIA are deliberately fabricating entire news stories, fabricating the very existance of legislature, fabricating Congressional officials, all of this just to 'get at' the Bush administration... and doing the whole thing on a fairly obscure and insignificant topic to begin with.

]


Hind sight is 20/20. Do you realize what you're saying? You're saying that the power that controls Iraq should slaughter every one who speaks out against it. Full scale, government endorsed torture (none of this wimpy "humiliation" crap) of prominent political enemies, and the gassing entire towns that are opposed to us, like Falujah. That way life will be fine if you stay in line, and if you are the member of the right religious faction. (Which is hereditary, not something you can choose) That's not thousands of civilians, that's millions.


Don’t get me wrong here, I’ve never been sure that we should have gone into Iraq. Many of my friend think that we shouldn’t have, and they had good reasons. When I defend the war here, I’m just countering the rather stupid arguments against it, such as “OMQ teh war was for oil. Bush will take it all!!one”

Now let’s look at the bright side of things. 70% of Iraqis are glad that we are there, which is pretty good considering the inherent hatred of western culture over there. If they pull this government off, they could easily become the richest country in the world. That much wealth influx in a democratic society, and it’s practically inevitable. Iraq already has a government set up over there which is in control. The question is, how much longer will we have to have a police force over there, made up of the greater part of our armed forces keeping the order? In conclusion, I just realized that because I debate the forums much, I’ll probably have an easy time getting an A in rhetoric this year, and I will have a much easier time writing reports and such for the rest of my life. I’m off to do some gaming.

I blame George senior for being such a wuss and not taking care of it the first time around.

I never made those claims. However, much of the media is liberally biased, and puts a liberal spin on things. I never suggested any "fabrication" of any sort... Just cool it...

The tortures are intended for interrogating people who are potential threats or know anything about them, that's different from torturing people who have different beliefs. Believe me if someone knew the location of bomb near your family you would be willing to torture them to get the information, most anyone for that matter. I am from and grew up in the middle east for seven years. Someone mentioned that outside of Israel that the other countries in the middle east could only be governed by a dictator. This is a huge insult to us, we are good people and what pushes some of us to extremeism is the propoganda we see everyday from these dictators that you think would fit us. We are just like everybody else and Democracy is just as fit for us as any westerner. Mort_Hog you mentioned that Sadam never commited genocide, this is not true. Almost all my friends from Iraq who have migrated have done so because of fear of the Bath party and have had atleast one family member killed or detained by them. Now I am not saying I trust Bush and his motives seem unclear to me, but he's got to be doing something right if millions of Iranian uni students took to the streets to celebrate his reelection in 2004.

Right, but that isn't genocide.



Heh, I like how you suggest the Ba'ath party went around gassing everyone on a daily basis. Halabja is the one incident. I suggest you actually read what I wrote about that - it was during a time of war and the deaths incurred were collateral damage, considerably less than those incurred by this invasion.

As for the Iraqis..
A child might be happy when you give him a bar of chocolate, but he isn't very happy when he has to go to the dentist afterwards.

The Ba'ath party were not trying to win any popularity contests, they were trying to get things done. And they did.
Iraq is never going to be 'the richest country in the world', but Saddam's Iraq was the second richest country in the Middle East (second to Saudi Arabia), and the standard of living was excellent.

You're totally overlooking all of the problems in Iraq today. They're not going to 'pull off' this government, Iraq is going to see civil war. Shi'ites at war with Sunnis, Sunnis at war with Shi'ites, Kurds at war with both of them, and then tribal factions within those at war with eachother. This has been going on for centuries, and it isn't anything new. Africa has seen exactly the same sort of thing in modern times. The Ba'ath party prevented this sort of civil violence by supressing all sides to the point where they couldn't fight and kill eachother.

It's not a question of 'how much longer' they're going to need American soldiers. They're going to need more. There are more attacks every day, it's going to result in full blown civil war.

And quite simply...this didn't happen under Saddam Hussein.

Yeah.. how long? Forever. We've still got troops in Korea, Japan, and Germany. Yes, we still have troops in Germany since the end of WWII.

Ofcourse there's going to be different factions fighting for control when the government just vaporized. Remember its only been two years, nothing great can be done overnight. Even Germany was in chaos when it was invaded by the U.S. and Soviets, it wasn't till the Berlin wall fell that the country stabalized. No one in their right mind would say the invasion of Germany was not justified because of the chaos afterward.

No, Germany was different. Yes, it was left in ruins, it was left in chaos, but the German people were not fighting eachother. Germany has always been 'one country'.
Iraq was never really 'a country', it was simply drawn up arbitrarily by the British empire, and unfortunately encompassed several warring factions that would otherwise much prefer to exist as separate countries. No, trying to make comparisons, especially of this magnitude, isn't going to work - there are different circumstances. Germany especially was very much shaped by external forces, whereas Iraq is suffering from internal conflicts.

No, the best we can do is make observations and draw conclusions from those. The observation is that Iraqis are dying every day, and this didn't happen under Saddam Hussein.

Wanna make a bet on that?

Yep, the observation is now reported. Whereas under Sadam, there was little if any freedom of the press to report all the things he, his family, and his party did including random executions, rape, and torture so intense it'd make the prison insident and the other forms of U.S. torture you guys were refferring to a joke.

It's a well known fact that people were executed (or worse) on a daily basis under Saddam.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was an authoritarian ruler, but there were not suicide bombings on the streets of Baghdad. He kept order, he kept peace. 'Democracy' is not going to bring order, or peace. Iraq needs an authoritarian ruler, that's just the way Iraq is.

You're going down the whole "Saddam was a bad man and did bad things and now that he's gone everything is good" line, and it simply doesn't work because you have to look at alternatives. The alternative is civil war.



The "well known facts" about the Ba'ath party are questionable at best, as they often turn out to be "well known myths" or "well known exaggurations". Case in hand being the Halabja incident, which has been exagurated way beyond preportions and the vast majority of the public have accepted it. So don't accept something just because it is "well known".

So - You are THE authority on facts, I presume? Not to be rude, but what makes you so sure that all of your facts are god, and that all your sources are utterly reliable?

Obi: Again with the uncited statistics, that, unsurprisingly, are way off. You're referencing a March 2004 Oxford Research International poll of Iraqis that found 70% thought they were doing well and were generally optimistic about the future. That same poll found that just under half thought the US invasion was justified and more than 60% thought foreign troops should leave the country.

Interestingly enough, a June 2004 poll by the same organization found that 59% of Iraqis believe that the US invasion was somewhat or absolutely wrong. Also, the UN is trusted by 58% of Iraqis, compared to 26% for the CPA and 20% for the occupying troops.

You can find both surveys here.

So do I actually. But I also blame George Jnr for trying to go back for seconds and making a complete bollocks of it.

He isn't doing that bad all things considered. We just have to wait for elections here for the first real steps to begin with the government.

Elections in Iraq would never be 'free'. Shi'ites will vote for Shi'ites, Sunnis will vote for Sunnis, Kurds will vote for Kurds (or Sunnis).

The tribal identity is very important too. There's about 170 odd different tribes in Iraq. They will vote for their tribe, or their religious faction. Some tribes are naturally 'superior' to others. There is no 'choice' in the matter. You don't 'choose' what tribe you're in, you don't 'choose' to be a Sunni or a Shi'ite (and you obviously can't 'choose' to be a Kurd). Iraqi society, and society throughout the area, is not based upon 'choice'. You are born into a role and you fulfill that role. That's how it works, not dissimilar from the 'caste' system in India, a hierarchy of social status based on ethnic or tribal group.
The Ba'ath party openly opposed tribalism, but not even they could do much about it (and they didn't really bother much either, there wasn't that much to gain from it). 'Tribal equality' is a preposterous idea to Iraq.

Elections in Iraq are not going to be about 'choice', they are simply going to be different factions fulfilling their 'duty'. A good Shi'ite will vote for the Shi'ite party. The actual policies of that party are largely irrelevant, as long as they convince the Shi'ites that they are a Shi'ite party. This is already being seen in the January elections, a prominent Shi'ite religious leader expressed his support for a particular party, and the Shi'ite support for that party went through the roof. The elections in Iraq are just going to be a facade, and all the work the Ba'ath party did in secularisation is going to be undone.

Ohhh ohhh ms. Cleo can you read my palm too!?

It appears Mort has taken over Sine's role in stomping the arguments of stupid liberals on these forums.