If true, this is absolutely and completely horrifying.
The question is to those of you that support the pull out of Iraq and denounce American control of the region: should we do anything about this? The second question is: can we do anything?
Yes, and no.
Is there a “real” source for this info anywhere? It doesn’t turn up in any searches of dependable news sites.
If true, that is indeed truely horrendous.
What to do? In my world every nation on the planet would put boots on the ground and stop it. In the real world we’ll get sanctions.
Man, I hope this isn’t true.
We can’t do anything, nor do we actually care. We are probably responsible for more dead LGBT people in Iraq ourselves; that’s one of many areas in which Iraq is worse off under us than under Saddam.
That’s what happens when you change a secular country into a theocracy. A lot of Iraqis were better off under Saddam.
Maybe, but Sadaam criminalized homosexuality himself, in 2001. And before that, even when it was technically legal, it wasn’t in practice.
So why are we discussing this as if it’s the worst thing ever, and condemning America for letting/making it happen, when it hasn’t yet even remotely passed the “cite?” test?
The 128 number appears to come from here. Its the total number of who are on death row in Iraq. Even if Iraq does use capital punishment for homosexuality (and I haven’t seen any evidence that this is the case), I seriously doubt all 128 are were convicted for being gay.
The OP’s cite is BS and doesn’t stand up to the 20 second google test.
Amnesty International says (on 13 March, so “this week” has already come and gone):
So it seems to be the case that there are, or were as of mid-March, 128 condemned Iraqi prisoners whose convictions were, to say the least, questionable. However, there appears to be no reliable information about what they were charged with or convicted of or whether charges of homosexuality were involved.
It is certainly true that homosexuality is a capital crime in Iraq:
Maybe I’m evil but in MY world - if this is true - I would pull all the troops out, cancel all aid, remoe any protection we are giving, and throw them to the wolves. I thought (yeah, I know better) that we were there to bring freedom and democracy (yeah uh huh) and it had nothing to do with oil or power. So much for that I guess.
Yeah, throw them to the wolves.
So you want to be able remove as stable government on false pretenses, then occupy the country, turning it into an anarchic mess. Then you want to walk away and let people die.
Dude you aren’t throwing them to the wolves. You are breeding wolves and then disarming the people, breaking their arms and legs, painting them with sheeps blood, staking them out on the ground and and sicking the wolves onto them.
And yes, that does make you evil. The US led coalition fucked the country up, bigtime. We can’t just say now “gee things are pretty fucked, these people deserve what they get”. They are getting precisely what we gave them.
In short, you fucked it,you fix it. You don’t get to walk away and let people die because fixing things is tough.
What makes you think that we have the ability, or the desire ? What makes you think we are capable of being anything other than part of the problem ?
America is neither well meaning, nor competent. At least, competent at anything but destruction and exploitation, which is hardly the way to help them.
Eternal optimism. But at least make the f(&^ing effort.
This “We fucked things up, gee things are pretty fucked, well the people living here deserve it for living in a fucked up place like this. Let’s go home and have a beer” attitude is just plain evil.
That’s a little extreme, no? America is competent in a great many areas. Middle East relations just happens to be one area where it is incompetent on every possible level. But even that doesn’t preclude the US, if necessary, removing all personnel and funding a more competent body to try to solve the fuckup it created.
There’s certainly no justification for setting fire the house and then levaing the occupants to burn.
So disagreeing with who gets the death penalty in a country is grounds for another country to intervene? i suppose all the civilized countries in the world, which have already abolished the death penalty completely as barbaric, should get together and start making plans to intervene in the USA.
Assuming you haven’t just returned from Mars you should be aware that you intervened 7 years ago. You should also not be ignorant of the fact that you have 100, 000 soldiers and god knows how many mercenaries there right now. So how the hell can you claim that it’s somehow immoral or impractical to intervene?
Nobody is suggesting that you intervene any more, just that your ongoing, massive and destabilising intervention not produce a completely barbaric government that murders its own citizens on whim. Does that sound unreasonable to you?
That was the justification for the invasion, right? To get rid of barbaric government that murdered its own citizens on whim? Oh, no, hang on. It was to remove WMDs that could strike London within 20 minutes. Err, no, hang on, it was about 9/11.
Hang on, there was no fu*@&ing clearly stated aim of the invasion, and no exit strategy. And now that it’s worked out so well that thousands of civilians have been killed by coalition troops, and hundreds of thousands more in civil unrest following the destruction of a stable government, and now hundreds more are being executed in cold blood by a puppet government propped up by the coalition. And now you want to claim that you shouldn’t or can’t intervene.
Well its too late. You should have thought of that before you intervened. The fact is that you did intervene and you are responsible for this sort of shit being perpetrated by the government that you installed and that your troops are keeping in power.
getting back to the OP…
aside from the fact that its far from definite that they’re being executed for being gay…
I would be very divided on the idea of intervention - on the one hand I don’t think “being gay” should single anybody out for such a thing, and its totally unjust, immoral and outright wrong.
On the other hand, Iraq is not my country, and as a sovereign nation, they should, and do have the rights to enact whatever laws they think suit their citizens. If this means outlawing homosexuality and making it punishable by the death penalty, then so be it.
To want to impose “American Will” or standards on other countries by force breeds the sort of resentment that has made the US a pariah in the court of public opinion…
Blake, my lad, you must have not been paying attention. I am not American and I opposed the invasion vehemently from before it ever started. My position is that America has zero legitimacy to be in Iraq. Zero. None. It is none of their business. That is the meaning of my post. America has no right whatsoever to force others to behave in ways America likes. America has the rights all other nations have: to protest, to throw tantrums, to hold their breath, etc. But not to use force.
In my mind there are two very obvious problems with this statement.
The first is that Iraq is only sovereign nation in the same way that Poland or Lithuania in 1960 were sovereign nations. The Iraqi government operates under a constitution that the US imposed upon it, it only exists because of the coalition invasion, it owes its continued existence to coalition troops and coalition money and if either dried up they would cease to exist in an instant. Saying that Iraq is a sovereign state is really stretching the definition.
The second problem is that a major excuse used for invading Iraq was to prevent the killing of minorities by the government of the day. Hell, we just executed the last leader and several of his top aides with the justification that their government killed minorities. And now you want us to accept that no matter what the human rights abuses entailed or what minority gets slaughtered by the government it’s alright, provided it’s done under the cover of “whatever laws they think suit their citizens”.
So tell me, if Hussein had passed laws that said that being Kurdish was punishable by death, and that he believed that such a law “suited his citizens”, would that also be OK? How about if the Nazis had passed laws that said that being Jewish was punishable by death, and that they believed that such a law “suited their citizens”. Actually I believe they did exactly that. Yet I find it hard to believe that you support the Nazi’s to outlawing of Jewishness and making it punishable by the death penalty.
I honestly fail to see the difference here. In all cases the sovereign government has outlawed a minority and made being a member of that minority punishable by death base don laws they think suit their citizens”. So do you consider all these to be acceptable, and if not why?