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Iraq War Not Humanitarian, Human Rights Watch Says
Any doubts now about HRW?
The war in Iraq cannot be justified as an intervention in defense of human rights even though it ended a brutal regime, Human Rights Watch said Monday, inappropriately dismissing one of the Bush administration’s main arguments for the invasion. While Saddam Hussein had an atrocious human rights record and life has improved for Iraqis since his ouster, his worst actions occurred long before the war, the advocacy group said in its annual report. It said there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing in Iraq when the conflict began.
Yeah, John Gacy hadn’t killed anyone the week before he got pinched, either. Ditto for Ted Bundy and the Green River killer. I’m pretty sure Pol Pot slacked off right at the end, too.
President Bush (and British Prime Minister Tony Blair) cited the threat from Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction as their main reason for attacking Iraq. But even before as coalition forces have failed to find evidence of such weapons, both leaders have consistently starting before the war also highlighted the brutality of the regime when justifying military intervention.
Remind me the exact moments when the left decided not to care about genocide any more?
Human Rights Watch, however, rejected such claims. "The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair," executive director Kenneth Roth said.
Even though more Iraqis are alive today than would have been if Sammy had stayed.
Atrocities such as Saddam’s 1988 mass killing of Kurds would have justified humanitarian intervention, Roth said. "But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he added. "They shouldn’t be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."
I’m sure you’ll enlighten as to why that is. Personally I think that forever hounding genocidal thugs to the ends of the earth is a great idea.
The 407-page Human Rights Watch World Report 2004 also said the U.S. government was applying "war rules" to the struggle against global terrorism and denying terror suspects their rights. It suggested that "police rules" of law enforcement should be applied in such cases instead.
Not after 9/11. Roth-boy wants to live under the old rules, where terrorists blew up stuff and we just endured it.
"In times of war you can detain someone summarily until the end of the war and you can shoot to kill. And those are two powers that the Bush administration wants to have globally," Roth said. "I think that’s very dangerous."
Dangerous for the people trying to kill Americans, that’s for sure. It’s a global fight.
Human Rights Watch criticized the United States for detaining 660 so-called "enemy combatants" without charges at a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan where they were killing people and training terrorists.
Alt-F6 on Roth’s version of MS Word.
Posted by: Steve White 2004-01-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=25077