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Would life in Iraq be better if Saddam Hussein were still there?
Results so far:
| No | 67% | 172 votes | Total: 256 votes | |
| Yes | 33% | 84 votes |
No
by Rand E Oertle
Created on: May 05, 2011
The most graphic method of determining whether it would be better to have Iraqi President Saddam Hussein still in power would require a comparison between his twenty-five years in office and those since his hanging. In ascertaining the method of judging what is considered “better,” it is prudent to establish indicators of the quality of life under his regime and that following his ouster.
Markers defining the quality of life in pre and post Saddam rule could not be better described than those written by Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence, namely: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With these criteria as primary guides, what was life like under Saddam Hussein?
The Regime of Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq July 16, 1979 and was in effect ousted by coalition forces on March 19, 2003. He was in office a total of 8,639 days. Hussein was a high ranking member of the Ba’ath Party. Upon the resignation of Ba’ath Party president and president of Iraq Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, Saddam Hussein took power. Within months he had executed many of his political adversaries and periodically purged his inner circle. It is said on occasion, that he shot any perceived offender in the head at his leadership table.
One particularly gruesome omen predicting the sadistic extent of Saddam’s ruthless rule comes in an early report of how he handled the elimination of a rival. The man, considered a potential political challenger to Saddam, was called out of a political meeting. When they met in another room Saddam is said to have handed a gun to his son Uday, then about 12 years of age, and ordered him to shoot the man dead. Uday is said to have complied. Years later that incident apparently set the stage for a reign of terror perpetrated by Uday during his father’s administration.
Hussein was a Sunni Muslim from Tikrit, the minority Muslim religion of the country with Shiites Muslims being the majority. Saddam targeted Shiites to keep them suppressed appointing mostly his Sunni-Tikrit tribes-members to most of the key government jobs to maintain minority control.
Ironically, Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s chief spokesman and apologist, though popular in Iraq, was not considered any kind of political threat to Hussein because he is a Christian.
It was not without reason that President George W. Bush included Iraq in his list of members of the "axis of evil." Saddam targeted any one or group whom he considered even a jot of a threat. Kurds, Iranians, Shiites were marked and suffered horrendously under his leadership.
An exhaustive complication by the blog NewsGnome shows that based on figures from the Iran-Iraq protracted war, bodies of native Iraqis found in mass graves inside Iraq, his invasion of Kuwait and then subsequent removal, his Kurdish genocide using a weapon of mass destruction by gassing the Kurdish village of Halabja and reports that he also used gas on Iranians, the number of deaths caused by Saddam’s reign was staggering.
The astonishing numbers of these ghastly genocides are huge. In his 8,639 days in office, Saddam Hussein contributed to the deaths of 3,266,500 of his own countrymen, neighbors and anyone he consider a threat. The NewsGnome blog put the number in stunning perspective, writing: “Saddam’s average daily body count was 378 dead per day for every day he was in office.” NewsGnome added: “Had Saddam gotten nuclear bombs, put them on SCUD missiles and fired them at Israel, these numbers could have been infinitely higher.”
Unfortunately, the horrific reign of terror did not end there. His son Uday was a one-man wrecking crew. Given his introduction to absolute political power at the age of twelve, Uday was said to troll the street and parties of Iraq. When a girl caught his eye, no matter what age, he ordered his underlings to bring the girl or woman to him. At which time he would rape and potentially kill them.
In one case, he chose the wife of an Iraqi Army captain. When the man objected, his wife was raped and killed, and then the Captain was killed.
The UK Guardian reports that “Uday’s brutality finally caught up with him. In 1988 he bludgeoned to death his father's bodyguard Kamal Hana Jajo in front of horrified partygoers.” That incident turned his father against him crushing Uday’s dream of being his father’s successor.
Post Saddam Hussein Iraq.
Since the start of the Iraq war, the web page “Iraqi Body Count” (IBC) has kept what it purports to be an accurate count of violent civilian deaths. Its number count of 100,693 to 109,990 into April of 2010, was originally posted as a condemnation of the United States involvement in the Iraqi war. Although the web page has revised its own definition of its body count, (defined as: “Documented civilian deaths from violence,”) it no longer blatantly attributes all violent deaths in Iraq as solely the responsibility of America and specifically President George W. Bush.
However, the photograph on its title page is of a US Stealth bomber dropping bombs. It is a continuing graphic message and an implication that the violent civilian deaths in Iraq are primarily the responsibility of Americans.
Ironically, a careful analysis of their posted death graphs, tells a whole different story, a story that is the opposite of what the web site implies. At the height of the fighting, the highest violent civilian death count per day was slightly under eighty. That would be about 300 fewer deaths per day than the average day during Saddam’s regime and daily death count. The page also does not indicate potential criminals violent deaths, which it, again counts violent deaths without delineating the truth.
In addition, one of the graphs shows deaths caused by suicide bombers, who have killed mostly other Iraqis. The IBC web page, however, continues to imply, by the photograph on its cover, that US Bombers are to blame.
With Saddam gone, Iraqis are able to elect their own government, collect their own oil revenues and violent deaths are down to an average of a few per day ranging from three to seven. The truth appears very obvious that the absence of Saddam has been a great boon to the Iraqi people.
Uday’s myriad ways of torture and death has been frequently reported from a variety of sources. He fed those who’d offended him to dogs, lions and other beasts. But worst of all, he was said to put people through plastic shredders. His definition of being kind was to feed these people head first so they died quickly. If he was indisposed to kindness, he would feed the person feet first making it a much more painful death.
If you were an Iraqi, who now votes for his or her own government and can follow the guide laid out by Thomas Jefferson to have life, liberty and pursue happiness, which would you chose, Saddam and Uday’s Iraq or today’s Iraq, even with this flaws and problems?
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Yes
by JA Daraja
Created on: August 19, 2009 Last Updated: August 21, 2009
"Iraq: After Six Years and One Million Lives"
The US war against Iraq has reached its six-year milestone. Non-government agencies estimate that more than a million Iraqis have been killed thus far.
Contrary to current US propaganda, the US did not invade Iraq to free the people from Saddam Hussein, or to help the Iraqi people establish "democracy". The US invasion was based on the claim that Iraq had "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and that these WMDs posed an immediate threat to the US. US troops going to war said they were going to fight terrorism, and to repay the terrorists for "9/11".
Six years on, the US media portrays the Iraq war in precisely the same terms as they used for VietNam: " The US is trying to help a struggling democracy against an evil and brutal enemy." - Not true then, not true now.
The invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein were US actions to establish an economic base that Hussein had taken away. As one US oil ececutive put it, "Before Hussein we owned the oil industry in Iraq".
As the "Cash Cow" of global capitalism, the US is obligated to generate profits for "investors". In order to create those profits the US government fashions both foreign and domestic policy toward particular economic goals. The removal of Saddam Hussein was called "regime change" by both Bush and Clinton. That is a euphemism for overthrow of the government. And it is illegal.
A "Cash Cow" is a product or service that a business relies on to generate profits. For example, an auto-maker like Ford Corporation might earn enough from its "F-150" truck sales to sustain operations, even though other models are not selling enough to pay for their production costs. The F-150 would be Ford's "cash cow." - The United States (more exactly, the American people) is the "cash cow" of world capitalism.
Because the United States is the largest single department-store in the world, the multi-national corporations can generate enough profits in the US "market" to keep the system going, even if other areas are not doing so well. As the primary agent of world capitalism, the US government sells "access" to the American "market" (the American people) to influence other nations and to establish cooperation with the projects of world capitalism. Those projects make up what is called "the World Bank".
"Access" to the American people comes in three forms: 1) allowing foreign companies to sell their products ( and make profits) in the US department store; 2) the actual payment or transfer of a portion of the "taxes" collected from the American people - this is called "foreign aid"; 3) "technical/military aid", which is the transfer of goods and services from the American people in order to establish a foreign "market" and to fight those people who oppose it.
People and nations that oppose the World Bank structure of society are generally called Socialist or Communist. Increasingly, they are also called "terrorists". Such nations generally believe that the distribution of goods and services should be based on equality of sharing, rather than by competition. Historically, world capitalism tries to overthrow such governments and to "contain" such persons, either through indirect political means or outright military intervention.
Since World War II especially, whenever the US government speaks of "freedom" or "bringing freedom" to some country (Middle East, Latin America) they mean, specifically, the establishment of a "market" where the distribution of goods and services is based on competition among the people.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 used all three forms of "access" to establish "freedom" in Iraq. Many of the Iraqi leaders within the American-installed government and in the areas beyond Baghdad were simply paid to cooperate. The Iraqis who had helped the US plan and justify the invasion were put in charge of Iraq's oil industry.
US oil companies subsequently reported record-breaking profits. And finally, the US government transferred the actual lives and activity of thousands of American citizens for the military operations to destroy the many-thousands of Iraqis who opposed the deal.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 followed ten years of isolation and punishment by the US, the World Bank, and its international associates. The invasion became necessary because these "sanctions" failed to destroy the Iraq government and open the country's market to international capitalism (the World Bank). Saddam Hussein was not attacked because he refused to allow entry to UN weapons inspectors, but because he refused entry to the World Bank.
The incredible claim that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD's) after ten years of economic and covert military punishment was actually true in one sense; but not as put forward by the US and Britain. The WMD's that Iraq/Saddam Hussein really had were these: 1) the world's second largest known oil reserve; 2) a state-controlled banking system; and most terrible of all, 3) the intention to begin trading Iraq's oil in Euros rather than US dollars. It was the World Bank that feared mass destruction.
Western European countries weighed the relative risk to their own economies and supported or opposed the invasion accordingly. France, whose future is tied to the Euro, adamantly opposed the invasion. Eastern European countries, recently divorced from the Soviet Union and indebted to the US, were persuaded to send a few troops to support the "international coalition". In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair lied so outrageously to support the invasion that all of Britain was embarrassed by him.
And in the US itself, still frenzied by the dubious but dramatic events of "9/11", even the "liberals" saw the danger to US economic interests if Iraq/Saddam Hussein were allowed to carry through this currency transition.
The liberal Senator Hillary Clinton (Dick Cheney in a dress) voted for the invasion of Iraq. Her stated reason one year later, after no WMD's had been found, was clear only to those who knew the inside story. She said that Saddam Hussein was a "potential threat". And even if Iraq did not have WMD's, she said, Hussein "was seeking weapons of mass destruction, whether or not he actually had them."
The idea that a person, group or nation can be attacked by the US government because they are "potential threats" has been a guiding principle in both US foreign policy and also in US national domestic policy since the Reagan administration. President Bill Clinton quietly continued that same policy.
It is a principle that is legally and ethically questionable because it amounts to "guilty by reason of suspicion". It offers no opportunity for the facts of the matter to be judged publicly. It is, of course, a violation of the US Constitution and international law.
In the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with a million Iraqis killed, the US suspicion was not that Saddam Hussein was planning harm to many people, but that he intended to transfer Iraq's accounts to another department store.
After six years and billions of dollars, electricity is still scarce in Baghdad. Clean water is still in short supply. Hospitals are still without basic supplies to treat simple ailments. Many highly educated Iraqis have no place to practice their professions. And the Iraqi people not only have a restrictive government, they have a foreign government. -end.
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