Bart, yesterday you wrote:
> Danielle, guess who holds the Western Hemisphere
record for murders in the 1990s.
> Then guess who holds the record for most
Iraqi murders in the 2000s.
Actually, Bush may hold the all-time record, once we take a sober look at the facts.
First, most deaths cited in the "mass graves"
are from two wars, the war with Iran and the civil war in the late '80s.
The US lost a few hundred thousand people during
its own civil war, but we don't hold Grant responsible.
If this dynamic isn't clear to your readers, they're
welcome to try this exercise at home: start an armed insurgency
against their own government and see how long
it goes before the feds deal an armed response.
People die in wars, and lots of people die in
civil wars.
As for the Kurds who were killed by gas, those
who've looked past the Bush administration's revisionism have
noted that the people who died in Halabja weren't
killed by chemical agents Saddam had at the time, but by
cyanide or similar compound known to have been
deployed by Iran:
The best evidence is a 1990 report by the Strategic
Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.[2]
It concluded that Iran, not Iraq, was the culprit
in Halabja. Lead author Stephen Pelletiere, who was the
CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout
the Iran-Iraq war, has described his group's findings:
"The great majority of the victims seen by reporters
and other observers who attended the scene were blue in their
extremities. That means that they were killed
by a blood agent, probably either cyanogens chloride or hydrogen
cyanide. Iraq never used and lacked any capacity
to produce these chemicals. But the Iranians did deploy them.
Therefore the Iranians killed the Kurds."[3]
http://www.mediamonitors.net/robinmiller10.html
And then there's Tony Blair, who publicly admitted having inflated Saddam's death count by some 8,000%:
PM admits
graves claim 'untrue'
Sunday July 18, 2004 The Observer
Excerpt:
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.
So once we subtract those killed in wars, exactly
how many people did Saddam kill?
Was it anything close to even the 100,000+ Bush's
invasion has killed?
How much of the Saddam horror story is true, and
how much was fabricated by the CIA/BFEE?
No one the BFEE allows to live can say.
All we know for certain is that the story about
the Iraqi soldiers killing babies in Kuwaiti hospitals that got
US support for first invasion was a lie
(http://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+babies+incubators&btnG=Search).
If that was a lie, how many others lies have followed?
Also, Saddam never used WMDs prior to Rumsfeld's advisory visit in the early '80s, nor did he ever use them again
after relations with Washington broke off -- not even when his own country was invaded, twice.
Like Noriega, Pinochet, and countless others,
CIA-installed Saddam Hussein was just another US patsy,
useful only so long as he played ball with the
BFEE.
PS: Extra credit for your readers who may wonder
how the US helped create the world's first Islamic theocracy
long before they helped establish the latest
one in Iraq: Get someone at British Petroleum to explain why they
refused Mossadegh's request for a simple professional
audit in 1953?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/index.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB90/index.htm#doc19
I've asked BP. They haven't reply on this.
But the records at the National Security Archives
prove a consistent and disturbing trend:
Every time the US tries to force their way into
stealing a nation's oil, it backfires and costs American lives.
Henny
Henny, that a lot of information - thanks.