Redbeard said:
Actually I doubt you can find an African dictaor responsible for that many dead among his own people.
The high estimate for the number of murders at the hands of Saddam's regime is about 290,000 (and these figures are disputed, as will be discussed below). Some African dictators definitely did kill as many as Saddam. Others killed less, but were equally evil and should have warranted intervention if "removing brutal dictators" is a legitimate reason to invade another country. A few examples...
1) you may recall that the rulers of Rwanda killed about 500,000 people back in the late 1990s. They had killed a further 200,000 or so back in the 1970s, as I recall. We did nothing.
2) Mengistu of Ethiopia killed over a million people during the late 1970s and early 1980s, either directly or by interfering with delivery of food supplies during a drought, causing a famine in his own country. We did nothing, except raise money for food that Mengistu confiscated and gave to his own supporters while allowing the population at large to starve.
3) Almost as bad was Idi Amin (who is thought to have killed over 100,000 Ugandans in the late 1970s). Amin killed so many people so rapidly that there were actually power outages in the capital city which resulted when the bodies of Amin's victims (which were thrown into Lake Victoria) got caught in the hydroelectric dam supplying power for the city. They would just accumulate there until the water supply for the turbines would stop flowing, and would have to be cleared out to get power going again. Again, we did nothing.
4) Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire was a cannibal who fed the bodies of political prisoners to friends, family and foreign dignitaries at his coronation ceremony. In another infamous case, he also had a group of school girls beaten to death because they wouldn't wear school uniforms, then kept many of the bodies for his own larders (and as food for his pet crocodiles). And these are just a couple of examples. He was eventually removed by outside intervention, but not full scale invasion...it was a special forces operation carried out by the French Foreign Legion (who says those French don't have balls?). The United States did nothing.
5) Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is well on his way to duplicating the deed of Ethiopia's Mengistu in creating a famine in his own country which is aimed at eliminating political opposition. He also has had a lot of his political opponents murdered in more traditional ways. Strangely, nobody is talking about military intervention in Zimbabwe.
6) The Islamic regime in the Sudan is engaging in genocide against Christian and animist tribesmen in the southern part of the country. Estimates of the dead range in the hundreds of thousands, even as much as a million. Not only genocide, but they are actually taking people and selling them into slavery! A human slave costs the equivalent of $50.00 in Sudan. A goat sells for the same price. Again, I don't see anybody proposing...to the strains of The Battle Hymn of the Republic...an Operation Sudanese Freedom.
And there are other examples that could be cited. The point is, though, that the United States did not feel the need to remove any of these brutal dictators. What was different or unique in Iraq that caused us to move there?
Redbeard said:
Saddam's actions against Marsh Arabs and Kurds were nothing short of genocide, and combined with losses in Iraq-Iran war probably is counted in hundreds of thousands.
You are kind of comparing apples to oranges here. Deaths caused by warfare are not really the same thing as people murdered for political purposes by a repressive regime. When we talk about the people murdered by Hitler, for example...to whom Saddam is often compared...we don't count in all the people (soldier and civilian alike) who died as a result of military operations. To lump in those deaths with the actual murders committed by the regime for purposes of inflating the body count is a bit much.
And the numbers that are frequently quoted for actual murders committed by Saddam's regime are in dispute. The highest estimate...about 290,000...is simply based on the number of people who are claimed to be "missing and unaccounted for" by Human Rights Watch, a private organization based in the United States which has 2 observers in Iraq. Many of these people may be alive and living in exile, or alive inside Iraq even. We don't know. It may be that high, but then again, it may not.
http://www.antiwar.com/rep/laughland18.html
Redbeard said:
Believeing that OIF was started over Iraqi oil is ridicilous. Iraqi oil was largely away from the world market and that market did OK.
I agree with that. I don't think it was about oil. I think that Bush got hold of some bad intelligence about WMDs and supposed links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and was pushed to a bad decision by neo-con hawks whose agenda has been to remove Saddam from power since at least the mid-1990s.
Redbeard said:
And believing that the absense of WMD found after the invasion is proof of absense of WMD is the zenith of naivety. Saddam has used WMD, also against his own people, and had plenty of time to get rid of evidence.
If Saddam "got rid of the evidence," then he was, by definition, in compliance with the UN resolutions which Bush used to justify invading Iraq. The only way to "get rid of the evidence" was to destroy the WMDs and dismantle and destroy his facilities for making more. I don't deny at all that Saddam had WMDs in the 1980s, and possibly even into the early 1990s. But I think the UN inspectors were a good bit more successful than Bush et al gave them credit for.
Redbeard said:
And hadn't the coalition invaded it would have been no problem to produce new weapons in very short time
Not without production facilities...of which no evidence has been found in Iraq.
Redbeard said:
Saddam is/was the WMD - and as the Iraqis themselves wasn't capable of geting rid of Saddam, somebody else had to - God bless America!
I too am glad to see Saddam gone. I personally think we should have done it in 1991. But we didn't invade in 2003 because he was a "brutal dictator." That was an afterthought.
Redbeard said:
Pol Pot and his likes actually was the target of a bloody war, but in vain mainly due to incredibly naive peaceniks!
If you are talking about the anti-war protestors during the Vietnam War, to a certain extent I agree. But poor American policy and strategy had a lot to do with the loss, too.
Redbeard said:
Pacifists are probably the world record holders in responsibility for dead people!
I am not a pacifist. I recall a discussion with some of my liberal friends back in college, when we were discussing the Sandinita/Contra conflict in Nicaragua. The liberals were complaining about Reagan's support of the Contras. My response was..."Yeah. I think we ought to just invade the place and be done with it." Needless to say, my liberal friends were not amused.
My problem with Iraq is not that we we invaded...my problem is with the Bush administration lying about why we did it, and all the flag-waving "patriots" who believe every word he says and accuse you of "treason" if you don't agree. Which is, sad to say, all too prevalent in America today.
Redbeard said:
Thank God the Vietnamese wasn't troubled by pacifist worries. If they had been, Pol Pot and his followers would have been killing on to this day.
Well, the Vietnamese themselves were not motivated by humanitarian motives. They had ideological differences with Pol Pot (who was a Chinese puppet) and wanted to control Cambodia for strategic reasons. When they got there and found what Pol Pot was doing, of course, they made all the political hay out of that they could. But the Vietnamese communists are a pretty bloody-handed lot too. Maybe not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but somewhat similar.
