Saddam's Mass Graves, Young Turks, Air America Radio

NO GRAVES?

With Crazy 'Reasoning', Libtalker Tops Them All







In the hours after Saddam Hussein's weekend execution, American liberals seemed to be competing with one another to see who could make the silliest denunciation of the Iraqi government's action.

With so many dueling hand- wringing sessions, each trying to stand out in the crowd, it took one of liberal talk radio's "Young Turks" to push beyond the limits of what one might find even remotely credible.

For a good New Year's Day chuckle, get a load of this one:

Cenk Uygur

Where Were the Mass Graves?


As I watched nonstop coverage of Saddam's Death Watch, I was told over and over that this was a heinous mass murderer. There were mass graves. That up to 300,000 people were killed during his reign.

Then they told us what he was actually convicted for -- 148 dead in Dujail. That's a terrible crime.

But there's at least that amount of people killed every two days in Iraq now.

Now, I looked into the mass grave claims and the US government found graves that contained hundreds of bodies in some places. And prosecutors claimed that Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurds in Northern Iraq.

This hardly adds up to 300,000 killed. I am not saying that he didn't kill that many, I just don't know why we didn't do our homework and convict him all of his crimes. As Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials famously said, "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow."

We need history on our side on this one. Remember we invaded the whole country and turned it upside down because Saddam was such a bad guy. It would have been nice to prove how bad. I don't know why the trial seemed so rushed and third rate. Actually, I do know why. It's because Iraq is a complete mess and this whole fiasco is being run by the same incompetents who have screwed everything else up.

Please spare me the nonsense about how the Iraqis are a sovereign government and they were running the trial and we had nothing to do with it. Saddam did cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people when he started a war with Iran. That didn't get brought up much in the trial.

I am sure the fact that United States supported him in that war and Don Rumsfeld sold him weapons to use in that war was not a factor at all as to why that was not emphasized in his trial ... run by the Iraqis. Remember starting a war of aggression is the highest war crime. And Saddam clearly started one with Iran, let alone Kuwait. But then we're not in a very good position to talk about wars of aggression anymore.

The hotel I'm staying at today only has Fox News Channel (Dick Cheney must stay here when he's in town). So, first I was subjected to the inane chatter of Sean Hannity claiming this might turn things around in Iraq. That our troops were very happy about the execution of Saddam and that it was really going to help their morale. The Vulcan mind meld he did with them must have proved this.

As usual, there were two lackey former colonels on the air to parrot everything Hannity said right back at him, "Yes Sean, our troops our ecstatic that this man will be hung. Yes, things are probably going to get much better now."

Then Greta had one of Saddam's lawyers on, and he clobbered her. She said that Saddam had been convicted of killing the 148 people in Dujail and prosecutors had information about another 5,000 Kurds killed. First, he said some completely unconvincing nonsense about how some of the dead people in Dujail were still alive. But then he made a fair point that Saddam was never convicted of the crimes against the Kurds and that now we would never truly know.

When Greta said those are some tremendous numbers referring again to the two incidents of 148 and 5,000 killed, the lawyer responded that those numbers were not nearly as tremendous as the 750,000 Iraqis killed since the US invasion. Ouch.

Uygur's logic is so faulty here that it's no wonder we haven't seen other "progressives" attempt this line of "reasoning".

While it might seem obvious, let's make the point anyway: is Cenk really attempting to suggest that Saddam's body count might be inflated? And why would it have been necessary to prosecute Hussein for every murder he ever ordered, does he think that 5000 is too insignificant to justify a prosecution?

If so, we should free Charles Manson, the Green River killer and others at once, as they look like petty criminals next to Saddam Hussein. And if there were additional murders that we haven't yet been able to pin on them, then why didn't prosecutors wait until all of the evidence was in?

As for the mass graves, the Iraqi people will be digging them up for the next 50 years or more. And look at what a former government official has to say about Saddam's antics:

“My feeling is that it’s about time that justice came down. I personally am against capital punishment, but there is an issue with ethnic cleansing, there’s mass graves, there’s persecution on a grand scale. He’s not a common criminal.

“I was a government official from 1970 to 1980. Saddam was a strong vice president. Everybody feared him.

In official meetings I had the chance to see him. He inspired awe. He inspired fear.

He was the master manipulator. The master of the carrot and the stick. Those he could not buy, he would just execute.

“For instance a doctor from Tikrit, Raji al-Tikrit, he was executed by launching on him wild dogs. (Saddam) used to behead women that were accused of being prostitutes and leave their bodies without their heads in front of their families’ homes.

“Or somebody would get executed and he would demand the bullet back from his family. . . . He used to publicize that to inspire fear. You know (the novel) ‘1984.’ Iraq is a dramatization of ‘1984.’ He was the Big Brother.

Where Uygur could have made a credible point would have been to argue that keeping him alive longer might have led to more information about past crimes that he has now taken to the grave. We know now the US government has made that very assertion, but the Iraqi leadership had other ideas. It was their call to make.

Worse, contrasting Saddam's crimes with the "750,000" supposedly killed since the US invasion is beyond foolish, since it attempts to turn this into a mere numbers game, rather than a question of justice. If Hussein ordered just one of his citizens murdered each day, it would have been too many.

By contrast, any suggestion that coalition forces are responsible for 750,000 deaths isn't going to hold up to scrutiny. Funny, because isn't that what he's arguing about Saddam's trial, that the prosecution didn't dig up as much evidence as it should have?

And if there's any reason why the trial might have been "rushed", it's because the Iraqi people were still fearful Saddam could return to power at any moment. Only his death could remove that widespread sentiment and allow its people to move forward.

Apparently, Uygur holds himself to a lower standard than what he expects of others, particularly when it's time to play partisan politics.


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Basra family watching hanging: NYT via AP, Saddam trial: AP, Anwar Diab photo: David Goldman, Boston Herald, lower left Saddam montage: al-Reuters