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DelightMachine -> RE: The War in Iraq Costs... (3/20/2006 8:02:58 PM)
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OK, I can't resist. you did answer my comments with an actual argument, which is more than some others did, and I'll respond. There's something going on with the website tonight, so I can't quote the regular way. I'll try it with different fonts.
Let's look at your "facts":
Let's take some stock of the situation shall we?
1. WMDs. Most of them were sold to Iraq by The United States of America. We trained them on how to take the chemical precursors and make them into nerve agents. We trained them on how to make nuclear weapons. We trained them on how to refine biological warfare agents. What the F&^%!? Does everyone on the right AND left have selective memory? Doesn't anyone remember the Iran-Iraq war and our "assistance" to Saddam? Regardless, the point remains, all we have found are rotted out worthless leftovers. Great intelligence, huh?
1a. Doesn't anyone remember that Rumsfield, Cheney and Company were involved in these dealings with Saddam? *sigh*
Even if everything you said were true, and I don't buy it, it's also completely irrelevant to what we do now and to what threat Saddam's regime was to us. The point is not to win debating points. The point is to do what we need to do to protect ourselves. You might as well have said that the Western powers after World War I caused Hitler to arise in Germany because they made too many demands on the prostrate German nation. Whether or not that was true was irrelevant to what Britain needed to do in 1938.
2. Terrorists. Before we invaded Iraq, the only terrorists in Iraq were a small faction of Al-Qaeda and a couple of Shiite militias. Most fascinating to me is how people who apparently cannot rub together a couple brain cells and actually read about a subject, would claim the very terorists hunted by Saddam who were trying to kill the socialist secular Baathists were somehow cooperating with Saddam. Saying the terrorists were in league with Saddam is like saying Hamas is in league with Israeli militias.
This is a hoary old chestnut. It was proven with captured documents long ago that Saddam's regime was quite open to working with Al Qaeda behind the scenes. I wouldn't go around talking about "people who apparently cannot rub together a couple brain cells and actually read about a subject" when you're ignorant about that very subject. Here's a recent article that goes into the latest on the subject.
The evidence of contact between Saddam and Al Qaeda has been out there for some time. From a July 18, 2005 article in The Weekly Standard ("The Mother of All Connections" by Stephen F. Hayes & Thomas Joscelyn):
Indeed, more than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.
We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.
Whether or not you agree with the opinions in that magazine, this is a statement about facts, not political opinion. It's either wrong or right and should be falsifiable if it's not true. Here's another quote from a January 16 article in the same magazine by Stephen Hayes:
Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. ...
Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law). ...
And throughout the decade [of the 90s], the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression." One speaker praised "the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers." Another speaker said, "Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state." Dickey continued:
Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.
Newsweek's Dickey is no conservative.
3. Conditions of the Iraq people. The people of Iraq have less electricity, running water, natural gas and oil production STILL than before the invasion. There is a far greater shortage of food, medical supplies, heating oil and gasoline than before the invasion. There are far fewer open and operating schools than before the invasion. More Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion than the entire 1980s. Yeah, you know what, they are so much better off, aren't they?
Electricity is roughly at the same level as before the war, according to numerous sources, including The New York Times.. Baghdad, which was unfairly favored in electricity distribution in Saddam's time, has less, other places have more. Much more would flow without the terrorists threatening it. But all this is less important than the fact that Saddam's regime isn't massacring civilian men women and children any more. It turns out that terrorists without a state to back them up are less dangerous than terrorists operating a state.
Let's turn to that arch-conservative right-wing ranter, Molly Ivins, from her July 12, 2005 column:
CROW EATEN HERE: This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.
The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed.
The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war is 100,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn't want to be accused of exaggeration.
Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam's killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized documents from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered during the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988.
In 1991, following the first Gulf War, both the Kurds and the Shiites rebelled. The allied forces did not intervene, and Saddam brutally suppressed both uprisings and drained the southern marshes that had been home to a local population for more than 5,000 years.
Saddam's regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. That figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20,000. Saddam's widespread use of systematic torture, including rape, has been verified by the U.N. Committee on Human Rights and other human rights groups over the years.
There are wildly varying estimates of the number of civilians, especially babies and young children, who died as a result of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War. While it is true that the ill-advised sanctions were put in place by the United Nations, I do not see that that lessens Hussein's moral culpability, whatever blame attaches to the sanctions themselves -- particularly since Saddam promptly corrupted the Oil for Food Program put in place to mitigate the effects of the sanctions, and used the proceeds to build more palaces, etc.
There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.
I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.
"Yeah, you know what, they are so much better off, aren't they?" you wrote.
Yeah.
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