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Author
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Topic: The Deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children
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Laura
Advanced Member
Member # 450
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posted
The terrible truth is, I'm afraid, that we may never know the truth, or truths that go on in this world today, yesterday, and tomorrow. How do we know what to believe? Sometimes I think it's better to not know. How can we as decent humans not want to know though? Is there no one in politics who will stand up and accept responsibility? I wonder how these people can sleep soundly at night, and how can they face God? My sins are no less, yet I can face God because I know and accept the truth. I am at fault.
How do we know what to believe?
Posts: 26 | From: east TN | Registered: Sep 2002
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Kindgo
Advanced Member
Member # 2
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posted
The Deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children is a crime
From the Irish Independent http://www.unison.ie/irish_independ...6&issue_id=8074
Tony Blair's "dossier" on Iraq is a shocking document. Reading it can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof - if their contents are true - that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq.
For if the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct - and I will come to the "ifs" and "buts" and "coulds" later - it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed.
In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us - for nothing.
Let's go back for a moment - as Mr Blair likes to do when he talks about Saddam's crimes - to May 12th, 1996. At the time, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was telling us that sanctions worked, that they prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction.
The British Tory government of the time agreed and Tony Blair faithfully followed the same line. But on May 12th that year, Mrs Albright appeared on America's CBS television. Interviewer Leslie Stahl said to her: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
To the world's astonishment, Mrs Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
Now we know - if Mr Blair is telling us the truth - that the price was not worth it. The price was paid in the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. But it wasn't worth a dime. The Blair "dossier" tells us that despite sanctions, Saddam Hussein was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction.
All that nonsense about dual use technology, all that banning of children's pencils - because lead could have a military use - and our constant refusal to allow technical equipment to be imported into Iraq to restore the water treatment plants which we so bravely bombed in the 1991 Gulf War, was a sham.
It's difficult, reading the full 50 pages, to know whether to laugh or cry. There are a few titbits of information that ring true. The new ammonium perchlorate plant illegally supplied by an Indian company - who breached those wonderful UN sanctions, of course - is a frightening little detail. So is the new rocket test stand at the al-Rafah plant. But this material is so swamped in trickery and knavery, that its inclusion becomes worthless.
On page 46, the Blair "dossier" weeps crocodile tears over the 20,000 Iranians killed by Saddam's mustard gas.
But who would believe, for example, that at exactly this moment in the Iraq-Iran war CIA director William Casey was stating at a meeting with the National Security Council in Washington that a sale of cluster bombs should be made to Iraq via Chile - at the very moment when Saddam was using gas against the Kurds of Halabja - because Casey was "adamant" that they would be a "force multiplier" for use against "human waves" of Iranian attackers. No mention of these cluster bombs in the Blair "dossier." Of course.
And anyone reading the weasel words of doubt that are insinuated into this text can only have profound concern about the basis for which Britain is to go to war.
The Iraqi weaponisation programme "is almost certainly" seeking to enrich uranium. It "appears" that Iraq is attempting to acquire a magnet production line. Let's all say it out loud, twenty times: Saddam is a brutal, wicked tyrant. But are "almost certainly", "appears", "probably" and "if" really the rallying call to send armies off to the deserts of Kut al-Amara?
So there we have it. If these pages of trickery are mostly based on "probably" and "if", Britain and the US have no business going to war.
If they are all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children. And how's that for a war crime?
Robert Fisk, Independent News Service
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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