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I agree, NW. The case against Saddam has been made for a long time. The pols and press have know excuse.

Kurdish village offers proof of Saddam's crimes against humanity
St. Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 2/16/03 | Trudy Rubin

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This is the town where Saddam murdered 5,000 Kurdish civilians in a matter of hours on March 16, 1988, when his military sprayed and shelled them with VX, sarin and mustard gas.

The population cowered in their homes, or ran out into the streets, or crowded into government air-raid shelters built for the Iran-Iraq war. I peer into the remnants of one belowground shelter, now a fetid pit filled with garbage, where 120 men, women and children perished.

This was a revenge killing by Saddam. Some Iraqi Kurdish leaders had helped the Iranians. Such aid was not surprising: Saddam's troops had slaughtered more than 100,000 Iraqi Kurds and razed 4,500 Kurdish villages in the 1980s.

Even though the Iran-Iraq war was ending, Saddam wanted to punish the Kurds further. So he became the first leader since World War I to unleash a major chemical weapons attack on civilians — and the first ever to gas his own population.

"He had been producing nerve and mustard gas, ricin, anthrax, and viruses and bacteria," says Fouad Shaban, a prominent Kurdish physician who has studied the medical effects of the Halabja attack. "He had piles of chemical weapons in air bases, so why would he not use them?"

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Certainly Saddam was not deterred by any qualms over a long-term health disaster. He knew the effects of the gases, says Shaban, because they had been tested on hundreds of political prisoners.

The survivors of Halabja, and scores of other small villages that were also gassed, suffer from increased rates of cancer, scars, blindness, continuous itching, and severe breathing problems. Women miscarry, and their babies suffer abnormal numbers of birth defects.

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Halabja is near some mountain villages where a small number of al-Qaida terrorists are en-sconced along with a few hundred radical Kurdish Islamists who want to establish an Islamic state in Kurdistan. I could see those villages from a peshmerga fortress in the valley that exchanges regular mortar fire with the terrorists....

...Kurdish intelligence officers tell me that Iraq is helping this small al-Qaida cell for a more local reason — because these terrorists are attacking secular Kurdish leaders. In other words, Saddam is willing to make common cause with his al-Qaida enemy to keep himself in power, and al-Qaida will use his help for its own goals.

It is this ferocious determination to keep power, for which he will use any means, that makes Saddam more dangerous than the usual despot. My Halabja trip convinced me that the U.N. Security Council has only two options: commit to maintaining intense weapons inspections of Iraq as long as Saddam rules Iraq, or pass a second resolution to disarm him by force.

I say this with trepidation because I don't think the council will take up the first option. The consequences of war, while they would improve life for Iraqis, could trap the United States in a Mideast quagmire. But I believe there is no choice. The man who used chemical weapons against Halabja will never willingly let go of them.

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