Posted on 01/11/2009 7:13:30 PM PST by nuconvert
In May 1988, a prison guard checked Taymour Abdullah Ahmad's name off a list and directed him to a bus idling in the Popular Army camp in Topzawa, southwest of Kirkuk. The camp was one of Iraq's grimmest prisons. During his month-long internment there, the 12-year-old Kurdish boy watched guards beating male prisoners senseless with lengths of coaxial cable. He had seen four children weaken and then die of starvation. He stood helplessly as a guard stripped his father to his undershorts and led him off to his death. So Taymour was not sorry to see the last of Topzawa. He did not know that the paper in the guard's hand was an execution list.
The buses idling in the prison courtyard looked like ambulances. But this, Taymour soon discovered, was a cruel illusion; inside, they were squalid mobile prisons. The boy, his mother, and two younger sisters were forced into a dark air compartment that reeked of urine and feces. There was no toilet, no food, no water, no way out. The only ventilation came from a small, mesh-covered opening. By the time the bus pulled out, 60 or so frightened passengers--mainly Kurdish women and their young children--were crushed together in the stifling heat.
After more than 12 hours of travel, the bus bumped to a halt in the desert near the Saudi Arabian border. Taymour stepped into the cool night air and noticed at once that their bus, along with the 30 others in the convoy, had parked next to a large, shallow pit. Before he could take this in, however, a soldier pushed Taymour and his mother and sisters over the edge. Gunmen began firing. "When the first bullet hit me," Taymour later recalled, "I ran to a soldier and grabbed his hand." He had seen tears in the man's eyes, and instinctively reached toward him, hoping he would pull him out. But an officer watching nearby issued a command in Arabic, and the soldier shot Taymour. This time the boy fell to the ground, wounded in the left shoulder and lower back. He played dead until the gunmen moved away, then crawled out of the open grave and set off into the darkness. Several hours later, he reached a camp of Bedouins who took pity on him, hiding him in their tents.
(Con't at source link)
People like Matthews, if they thought they could get away with it would murder you and cook your body for dinner.
Great post.
It is a disgrace that anyone would dishonor the American removal of Saddam in light of the Kurdish genocide.
It is important to realize the ramifications of consenting to the dogma that Saddam did not have WMD. That dogma will replicate itself as a denial comparable to Holocaust denial. In the new Anti American reactionary history, Saddam Hussein did not gas to death thousands of Kurds as part of his larger genocidal behavor.
It is profoundly reprehensible that the victory in Iraq is held in equivocal or negative terms.
Maybe we won?
Saddam Hussein is dead — after a trial examining his culpability for atrocious crimes. Now the world tries to pretend there was no Saddam, no weapons, and no crimes. Its outrageous. The Deniers are the moral criminals of our time.
Freeing the tormented is not a good enough reason to go to war according to the current Democrats.
Ping
Bump to your reply
“Leftwingtards LOVE genocide. “
The irony is they’ll be the first to be slaughtered when it happens here.
I’m gonna play the bad cop here, since no one else will.
What saddam did to kurds has no bearing on our decision to go into iraq. Kurds are of no strategic importance to america.
agreed.
They still don't have a country.
I think we should give them a country, with a right to claim parts of Kurdistan now in other counties, and back it up with nuclear warheads.
Bet that'd scare the pants off EVERYONE in the Middle East.
Sure it would. But what would we gain by doing so? And how could we justify stealing land from iran and turkey to create this hypothetical country? Legally, I mean.
As I understand our promises to the Kurds; we promised them safety. (If I am wrong please supply a link)
I doubt that the Kurds will ever have a country because as you pointed out the Kurds homeland is currently claimed by several countries. Most notably for US interest would be Turkey.
I very much doubt that the US is going to alienate our most important Muslim ally to give the Kurds an independent state.
I think they were told they could have a degree of autonomy and self rule. But not a separate country.
I don’t have a link. I’m going by memory.
I disagree.
They were noted repeated in Presidential and Congressional authorizations and explanations.
Moreover, the idea that they had WMD originated with Saddam’s use of those same weapons. The extravagant efforts to disconnect the event from the contemporary war are disingenous. It is unconscienable that the world would allow a sovereign leader to drop chemical weapons on their own domestic civilian population.
If curveball was lying about current WMD, it is little wonder. Saddam constantly bragged about it and used it to deter domestic and international rivals. The fact of his past WMD use made it irrational and outrageous to suggest he should be left in power.
There was no more reckless member of the international community at that time.
Taking out Saddam was in the strategic interest of America. What do you think he would be up to now if he were still in power? What alliances would he be developing? What WMD’s? What terrorists groups would he be hosting? Funding?
We need to understand that the Kurds do have a quasi sovereign state in the north of Iraq.
Not only that, but America Bush and our soldiers are viewed by that community today as the foremost of heroes.
That reality has been swept under the Bush hating American hating rug. We were and are liberators without question in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq.
Anytime you bothered to read the small print on Iraqi polling— it always said— we removed the Kurdish sample from our survey.
The BBC made no effort to defend this decision to remove segments of the Iraqi population that always supported the American war at levels exceeding anything seen here at home. Support was and is in excess of 90%.
We cannot fathom how we have been lied to in regard to the Iraqi Kurdish region.
Of course. Why else would they spend most of their waking hours spewing hate and lies?
They are bloodthirsty.
In the last debate Obummer said that the US should intervene militarily anywhere that genocide or ethnic cleansing was occurring but that he was against going into Iraq. Typical lefty. The US should only intervene when it is not in our national interest. McLame could have nailed him but...
I did some marketing work for Jano Rosebiani and his co-producer of WMD: The Murderous Reign of Saddam Hussein. Jano believes the number of innocents dead because of Hussein is about 1.3 million.
http://www.iraqitruthproject.com/
Irony is a large part of what makes a Liberal. That and hypocrisy. Prop 8 protests wouldn’t have been possible under a Saddam Hussein regime or any of the Left’s favorite heroes for example. And it will never happen in the Palestinian territories.
What is ironic? The only genocide that leftists supposedly hate is the “genocide” of the Palestinians right now but it is not genocide. Personally if I had a fund set up in my name it would be to buy all Liberals dictionaries for Adult Liberal literacy. I have a very odd feeling that they don’t know the definitions of many of the words they love to throw around.
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]
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“In the last debate Obummer said that the US should intervene militarily anywhere that genocide or ethnic cleansing was occurring but that he was against going into Iraq”
I remember that.
Hi — do you have any links about the Kurdish support for us? (poll numbers, etc)
Here is a very recent link of a poll by ABC News:
http://abcnews.go.com/images/pdf/949a1IraqPoll.pdf
If you scroll down to ethnic interpretations, you see an 87% support for the US invasion and 9% opposition to the military invasion among the Kurds.
That is a fairly consistent attitude among the Kurdish population.
The BBC is notorious for simply removing the Kurds from samples in order to skew that data.
In many respects what the Western media has done in polling of Iraq would be comparable to removing Jews from polls about Adolf Hitler’s third reich. The media is complicit in encouraging genocidal rages about human beings.
Joe Biden’s comments about genocide during the VP debate are quite atrocious when juxtaposed against his running mate who opposed the war against Saddam. Based on Biden’s analysis, he should have opposed Obama— which he did during the primary.
People like Matthews, if they thought they could get away with it would murder you and cook your body for dinner.Well put.
Are you responding to the wrong person? I have no idea why this post is directed at me.
Kurds and WMDs are two completely separate issues.
That is an interesting idea and certainly one endorsed by Obama, Biden and and array of hypocrites on the topic.
In reality, WMD were dropped on the Kurds creating an indelible mark of death connecting the two. That is essentially why sanctions were in place for Saddam Hussein. That is essentially why the world could not allow him to simply say,’ I promise I don’t have WMD.’ He had committed such an atrocious act that even the bogus international community [which by the way has about a 2% approval rating inside Iraq] required proof of compliance.
Understand the UN always has as its foremost purposes the destruction of Israel and the dimunition of American hegemony. They would say and do anything to prevent American or Israeli military action on these questions.
Little is said of how the UN process itself was proven in every respect to be a profound moral fraud. Oil for food was an incredible act of fraud that would have been better termed Blood for Oil.
You are completely wrong. Had saddam proven(or allowed the UN to prove it for him) he didn’t have WMDs, no such invasion would have occurred. Ever.
But he didn’t. He instead said he did have WMDs and that the UN had better but out.
That’s why iraq was invaded...NOTHING to do with kurds.
Quoting the authorization for war created by Congress and signed by the President:
“Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people;”
This is a direct reference to the Kurdish genocide and a rationale for the war.
Here is an excerpt from President Bush’s October 2002 speech in Cincinnati when he began to build the central arguments for invading Iraq in spring of 2003. Notice the first justification he offers:
“Many Americans have raised legitimate questions: about the nature of the threat; about the urgency of action — why be concerned now; about the link between Iraq developing weapons of terror, and the wider war on terror. These are all issues we’ve discussed broadly and fully within my administration. And tonight, I want to share those discussions with you.
First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone — because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States.”
Notice that it is you who is factually incorrect. Not only that, having been called on it directly, you continue to insist that you are correct that the Kurdish genocide has nothing to do with the Iraq war.
The insistence of anti war reactionaries to prove the untrue is a vital point. Your advocacy makes genocide an ongoing and useful political reality around the world. It is appropriate for any power to genocidally exterminate domestic populations because the global public sphere is dominated with elite who are prepared to repeat lie upon lie that: the Armenian genocide never happened, the Holocaust never happened, the Kurdish genocide did not happen.
The breaking down of the association between the war rationale and the Kurdish genocide is important because if the public were to become aware of how easily genocidal regimes are disrupted through war, the case for war would be made easier. The Paleo Con and their allies on the radical left fear the use of war as a tool against genocide.
The Kurdish genocide did happen.
It happened in large part because Saddam Hussein dropped chemical weapons on the Kurdish population of Northern Iraq.
That possibility disappeared when a US lead military intervention removed Hussein from power and prosecuted him for crimes against his own people.
Similarly and without any notice, the United States militarily removed from power Charles Taylor. Taylor murdered no less than 250,000 people in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Its okay to give up and let the genocidaires face the music. They really do deserve what they get in WAR.
That’s all you got? 4 words tacked on to the end of a sentence?
Could you try to be a little more realistic? The bleeding hearts need some touchy freely crap to assist them in demonizing the enemy. That’s all. Why do you have to be one of those?
IF it was death of kurds that put us into iraq, then why are all the other cases of “genocide” around the world being ignored by us?
9-11 is what took america to iraq. Weapons, ties to terrorists, and the integrity of the UN. This was what was at stake. We all know it. Quit trying to make believe otherwise.
You’re deluded bud. REad my previous post. It applies to you as well.
I think it is pretty clear who is deluded here. Citing the succinct parts of the two primary documents regarding the Iraqi war is stark enough that you ought to be able to back down from your claim. One could go on all night citing various references by the Administration to the Kurdish genocide.
9-11 did take us to Iraq but as Bush said in the excerpt that hopefully you read. I did try to keep it brief. Iraq was UNIQUE in its willingness to drop WMD on its own people. There is no historical standard for such behavior.
Ergo, the contemplation that Saddam would pass off such weapons to other groups such as Al Qaeda was not an unreasonable expectation. Saddam was a vocal and outspoken critic of the United States. After the 1998 attacks on Al Qaeda, he offered to give Al Qaeda refuge. They declined this offer— although Zarqawi did take refuge in Northern Iraq in 2002.
The effort of the public sphere to dissipate these simple, lucid, factual connections is part of an effort to defend radical global statism in all of its forms: North Korean, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, etc. Nonetheless, to answer the question you don’t really care about, this genocide mattered because it involved a Genocidaire with a history of aggression against US interests and a vocal record of trying to help our enemies and various terrorists in the Middle East. And yes that cooperation extended to Al Qaeda.
Ultimately, this is the vital conservative issue.
Is the State dangerous?
In fact, it is extremely dangerous which is why conservatives believe in limited government. Government kills. The ironic use of government power to destroy government power is an important question of contemporary conservatism. American civics has never really maintained that our vision of government was geographical. It has never held that this portion of North America was uniquely suited to limited government. Ultimately, it is the only way government can work.
Radical liberarians dis war because they see it as an over reaching of the state. This makes some sense but fails to appreciate that radical statism is a global phenomena which can in fact annihilate the United States. WMD is a practical fear whereby a nation such as Iran can erase from human memory a notion of limited government and impress upon humanity the compelling nature of Shia Statism. This analogy can be extended to other radical states.
Understanding the easily comprehensible terms of the Iraq war— including the Kurdish genocide— is vital to preserving a notion of limited government. Lincoln’s fear at Gettysburg was well founded. It could vanish from the Earth.
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