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| Iraq |
| Leave Iraq and Brace for a Bigger Bloodbath |
| 2007-07-09 |
| By Natan Sharansky Iraqis call Ali Hassan al-Majeed "Chemical Ali," and few wept when the notorious former general received five death sentences last month for ordering the use of nerve agents against his government's Kurdish citizens in the late 1980s. His trial came as a reckoning and a reminder -- summoning up the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule even as it underscored the way today's heated Iraq debates in Washington have left the key issue of human rights on the sidelines. People of goodwill can certainly disagree over how to handle Iraq, but human rights should be part of any responsible calculus. Unfortunately, some leaders continue to play down the gross violations in Iraq under Hussein's republic of fear and ignore the potential for a human rights catastrophe should the United States withdraw. As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Hussein in power and (even more remarkably) that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq "had a dictator who was brutal" but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school." This line of argument began soon after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By early 2004, some prominent political and intellectual leaders were arguing that women's rights, gay rights, health care and much else had suffered in post-Hussein Iraq. Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. "Under Saddam," he said, according to the Associated Press, "if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK." |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #2 I am beginning to think we should not rule out the bloodbath option. If you can guarantee me all out war between Turkey, Iran and some mish-mash of Arabs then I say arm all sides and let popcorn time begin. Even another Clinton presidency might have this silver lining. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-07-09 22:21 |
| #1 Enjoy totalitarian nostalgia do you? According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the SS helped finance Nazi war criminal Haj Amin Muhammad al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his efforts in the 1936-39 uprising in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, took Husseini on tours of Auschwitz and financed his Moslem academy in Dresden, set up by the Nazis as a training ground for their envisioned Nazi/Muslim puppet government. Husseini recruited Bosnian Muslims in Nazi occupied Yugoslavia in his efforts to ethnically cleanse their country of Jews. When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Eichmann in a trade between German citizens and 10,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt death camp, Husseini directly intervened with Himmler and was successful in canceling the exchange. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2007-07-09 04:44 |