It appears that I remembered imprecisely…
PM admits graves claim 'untrue’
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
It wasn’t about the Kurds and Anfal specifically
It appears that I remembered imprecisely…
PM admits graves claim 'untrue’
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
It is an issue that Human Rights Watch was acutely aware of when it compiled its own pre-invasion research - admitting that it had to reduce estimates for the al-Anfal campaign produced by Kurds by over a third, as they believed the numbers they had been given were inflated.
Yes, but just to be clear, the 50-100K was the reduced figure. The Kurds offered something like 190K. But, realistically. Nobody’s going to give you a reliable death toll for either Saddam’s victims or the victims of this war in the near future. (I like this article on estimating the numbers of Iraqi war dead.) It’s probably safe to say that both numbers are at least double digit thousands and under a half million. It would be nice to know exactly when the war dead surpasses Saddam’s victims but best we can say is that probably hasn’t happened yet (though it may have).
As for the OP. How would handing over WMD’s really have changed the situation? Bush could always have claimed that these weren’t “all” the WMD’s and Saddam wasn’t being fully cooperative. It would have been very hard for Saddam to have proved he didn’t have more (as he was unable to prove he didn’t have any). And then the administration would have ended up in precisely the same position as now - whoops, guess there weren’t more WMD’s after all. Our bad. And actually their position would have been strengthened by the fact that Saddam had had some WMD’s to begin with.
Not that I’m for keeping score here, but if you add in all the extra things generally added in to the US’s total you’d get higher counts for Saddam as well. You could add in all the deaths due to the various sanctions for instance (after all, they were imposed on Iraq because of his direct behavior). You could add in deaths due to other things than a bullet to the head (poor medical care, draining of the marshes, etc). You could add in all the deaths due to the Iraq/Iran war on both sides. You could also count Kuaiti’s killed (civilian and soldiers), and of course count all the Iraqi military killed in the various internal operations, invasion of Kuait, etc.
Yawn. That all you got?
:rolleyes:
-XT
Since it only took you two years to grok the idea that Bush may have actually lied about Iraq’s WMDs, xtisme, there’s still hope you’ll eventually dope this one out… 
Knew I should have kept my mouth shut and stayed stuborn on that one. The REAL question is…how long is it going to take YOU to stop excusing Saddam rjung and face the fact that while the US was wrong to invade, Saddam was no boy scout himself, and he has his own share of the blame for what happened? I’m thinking it will take significantly more than 2 years for you…if ever.
-XT
Of course he was (is) a massive asswipe. When have you seen anyone here say otherwise?
But he didn’t attack us.
If Hussein had handed over WMDs some other excuse would have been cooked up. Two come to mind immediately.
The whole WMD fuss was just a convenient excuse for Dubya and his oil pals to make grab for Iraq’s resources. And once that fell through they’ve been making do with the “oppressed Iraqi’s” angle and counting on people’s general ignorance about links to 9/11. It’s just too depressing for words to think that some people are still fooled.
Of course none of this changes the fact that Saddam was evil scum, and if he did have WMDs, and thought he could get away with it, he probably would have lied and cheated to keep them. But the idea that he was an significant threat to the US, or UK, or anyone but his immediate neighbours, is a joke. Almost as laughable as Bush caring so much about the plight of the Iraqi people that he is happy he spent millions of dollars and risked thousands of American lives to rescue them.
Apparently, it wasn’t an excuse so much as it was what they thought we, the electorate would have to hear to okay the affair - at least according to Mr. Wolfowitz.
Try hundreds of billions.
Yes, I know that not all them have been ‘spent’ yet, but get real they ain’t available for anythin’ else no more.
Is anyone claiming that?
Actually this isn’t a real question at all, because neither rjung nor anyone that I am aware of on rjung’s side of the debate has ever excused Saddam or considered him a boy scout. But I do have a real question for you: when the hell are you and your fellow travellers going to give up on this particular strawman?
I’ll answer my own question: never. It seems that the urge to set up a bullshit strawman becomes simply irresistable to certain persons the moment one so much as breathes the idea that there may be others involved in the Iraq situation who have behaved badly, or that there may be limitations on what was justifiable as a response to Saddam’s malfeasance.
Dear War Supporter: Since You Asked . . .
“I have to infer from that (statement) that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power.”
Don’t forget that the spider wasn’t as poisounous as claimed too !
BTW Xtisme isn’t a war supporter (doesn’t seem so)… but I think he is barking up the wrong tree in this issue… we just might not view the costs of taking down Saddam as worthwhile.
I think you are listening to rjungs rants instead of reading what I wrote RM. I didn’t say one way or the other whether taking down Saddam was worthwhile. Since you asked, I’ll give the answer I’ve given in the past…it wasn’t. IMHO the best course was to leave him to rot in Iraq and simply contain him. Would have been harder on the Iraqi people in the long run IMHO, but then look at what the North Korean’s have to put up with…or various people in north Africa. Its not the US’s job to make the world a better place…and frankly we don’t do a very good job at this kind of thing under any circumstance (with the possible exception of WWII, and even there its debatable).
Look back over what I actually said. What I was getting at was that whether Saddam was 100% right or wrong, it was FUCKING STUPID FOR HIM TO NOT GIVE IN AND LEAVE!! Again, if you, RM, have a gun and demand my wallet, I’d be a fool not to simply hand it over to you. You, RM, would be wrong, evil, blah blah blah for demanding my wallet at gun point, but I’d be a fucking moron for not handing it over. Why is this so hard to understand? I’m making no statements of the right or wrong of the US invasion. Thats been beaten to death over and over on this board and I’ve stated numerous times I thought the US was wrong AND stupid for invading Iraq. But because I think the US was wrong and stupid, doesn’t mean that Saddam gets off. He was just as wrong and just as stupid in the past, he tried to bully and bluster his way out after digging himself into a hole, and in the end I lay as much blame at his feet as I do on the US. To me its like the classic World War I scenerio…ALL of the sides were fucking morons and idiots, and they all played their part in this stupid mess. I let the British in on their share as well, and even France, Germany and Russia get a bit of shit splashed on them over this…though granted nothing compared to what the US and Saddam/Iraq has on their boots
Strawman, ehe? Hm, lets see…
So, then Princhester, you consider that Saddam’s actions were mere ‘pre-war assholery’ ehe? Its a straw man to say that they were just a tiney tiny bit more serious than ‘assholery’ is it? Intersting. I’ll give up on this ‘particular strawman’ when folks like rjung wake up and notice that there were TWO sides to this…not just that Bush and the US were evil. I’m not holding my breath if your own knee jerk post is any indication.
Why is your answer of ‘never’ no surprise? Hell, I know some folks who still like to say Hitler was misunderstood, and there are several on this board who think Lenin and Stalin are maligned for their ‘supposed’ actions. C’est la vie…
BTW, I NEVER said that anything the US did was justifiable…never. So, who’s building strawmen now Princhester?
-XT
Unless you’ve got a universally-agreed-upon scale of degrees of “assholery”, this is just semantic nitpicking on your part. The bottom line – that you keep ignoring – is that Saddam’s pre-war behavior was not sufficient provocation for an invasion for many people.
Just because Saddam is/was evil doesn’t mean the US should stoop to his level. We’re supposed to stand for something, dammit.
And what you keep ignoring in your never ending effort to paint me as a Bush supporter/pupper is that I never said it DID. Show me where, in this thread or others, I said that Saddam’s behavior was sufficient provocation for invasion. The most I have said is that since the invasion happened, I’m not shedding any tears over Saddams plight.
Let me lay out my position in another way, in hopes you’ll get it this time (slight hope on my part). If the US decided tomorrow to invade North Korea and depose 'lil Kimmy I would think the US was wrong. Its not our job or our business to make Korea a better place, nor to unify the North with the South, nor to remove a monster from power. Not our job mon.
However, if we DID remove Kim, if we DID depose a vicious totalitarian governments boots from the collective necks of the North Korean people, I wouldn’t be shedding any tears for Kim et al either. You see, what YOU fail to understand is that just because WE are wrong, doesn’t make THEM right. Because we shouldn’t depose Kim and his merry men doesnt mean that its a bad thing they were deposed. Silver linings and all that.
Same goes for Saddam. The US shouldn’t have invaded. It was stupid for us to invade. Unfortunately the reality is we DID invade, so…I’m shedding no tears over Saddams loss of power. He was as much to blame for what transpired IMHO as Bush was…both were stupid beyond belief. I’m willing to look at both sides reasonably unbiased and say they were both wrong. You have always only been willing to look at the bad things the US did without equally looking at the other side of the equations.
And if you actually read what I wrote in this thread, the only point I was making was that it would have been wiser (IMHO) for Saddam to have folded his hand, taken his ill gotten cash, his followers and his family and left…it was pretty clear when we started moving troops to Saudi and building up or logistics that it was going to take either his leaving or war to settle things by then. Right, wrong or whatever is not something I went into…I said it would be SMART. It might or might not have been better for Iraq or even the US (we’ll never know)…but it would have been better for HIM.
I know…this is all still going over your head. If I dont support the fact that the US is evil in everything it does, or that Saddam was some kind of wronged party I MUST be a rump sniffing Bushy in your mind. Whatever.
Well, I happen to agree with you here. Its not the US’s job to right wrongs in the world. I also disagree that the US should have stuck its nose into Bosnia, Somalia, Vietnam, Korea, gotten involved in the European side of either of the World Wars…
-XT
And another strawman because neither myself nor rjung said “mere”. This is just you doing the same dumb trick again. You just seem to be constutionally unable to grok the point that stating that there is a limit on the appropriate response to a poisonous spider does not mean that you think the spider wasn’t poisonous or wasn’t very poisonous or whatever.
You, again because I never said you did say that.
Er…right. Its a strawman because you didn’t use the word ‘mere’. Well, you got me there. :rolleyes:
And you seem unable to actually read, or, er whatever…or you’d see I wasn’t talking at all about what is or is not an ‘appropriate response’. So, I think I’ll leave it there…maybe you can ‘grok’ that.
You just implied it. Do you actually have a debate point here or are you going to simply continue to nit pick mine? Just curious mind you.
-XT
He might as well have… in the *same sentence * that he complained about “tiresome” “mewing” about Saddam’s “assholery” he gravely condemned the war as an “immoral atrocity that has shamed the nation.” IMHO he couldn’t possibly trivialized Saddam’s atrocities more nor could he have been more blatant about having a double standard.
If he felt confident that Bush’s war is an “immoral atrocity” then intellectual integrity and fairness should have led him to refer to Saddam’s actions in the same terms (at least in the same sentence for pete’s sake). If his argument requires minimizing the atrocities of Saddam’s regime than his argument is bogus because what Saddam did was by most people’s count a lot worse (in terms of bodies) than what Bush has done.
The honest and valid argument would be that the atrocities of the past (Saddam’s) do not justify the current ones. Fine, that would be a solid argument. But I think Rjung cynically (and narrowly) cannot believe that anyone can bring up Saddam’s crimes seriously. So he belittles them and anyone that might bring them up as “mewing” and “tiresome”. Pretty horrible from my perspective, since I come at this argument concerned with issues of genocide and human rights abuse and how best to prevent people like Saddam. Not as a Bush apologist.
You see, rjung stated Saddam that was an asshole. You then strawmanned him by suggesting that rjung was “excusing” Saddam, or suggesting he was a “boy scout”
Here, look, I’ll lay it out for you:
rjung: Saddam is an asshole
rjung according to xtisme: Saddam is a boy scout who I am excusing.
Note the difference? It’s subtle, I’ll grant you, but you may just be able to make it out.
So you were embarrassed, and you then strawmanned rjung again by suggesting that he had described Saddam as a “mere asshole”.
Now “mere” is a significant modifier. I’ll show you:
xtisme: “Princhester, you are an asshole”
Princhester: “xtisme, you are a mere asshole”.
Again, subtle, but those who are familiar with the idiom will understand that you are calling me an asshole. That’s bad. I am calling you an asshole, but implying that being an asshole is not as bad as can be.
So what you did was rework what rjung said into something that rjung didn’t say, but which you could use in a vain attempt to support your insupportable position.
So, yes, I’ve got you.
If you consider that the cap fits, feel free to wear it.