Posted on 12/23/2007 7:56:31 PM PST by james500
He had advisors for a reason: to advise him. He was advised to surrender during the First Gulf War - he certainly didn't want to, but he was prevailed upon to do so once it was explained to him how dire the situation was.
Saddy most likely wouldn't even ask him "permission" and
But he would take strategic suggestions from the Ba'ath Party's governing council.
Aziz would not be in any position to be anything other than a yes man to Saddy.
Even if that were true, the honorable thing to do is to resign in protest, not to stand by.
The second thing wrong is that you say as a Christian he shouldn't have sat by --> well, that's what most of the heads of Western governments DID do at that time, just twiddled their thumbs.
So your preliminary line of reasoning is that if someone else does something wrong, then it's OK for you to do something wrong. As moral reasoning, that's frankly laughable.
Of course, the facts of the case are different from your implication as well. Western leaders were not informed ahead of time that Hussein intended to gas the citizens of Halabja. What happened in Halabja was deliberately concealed from the outside world as long as possible.
That's what the rest of us -- you and me -- DID do, we didn't grab weapons and go to oust Saddam, we didn't go in for mass imprisonment in IRaqi jails
The details of Halabja did not become well-known in the West until the US had already intervened against Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Your flawed moral reasoning is again on display here: why would a teenager in IL who had never heard of Halabja have the same level of moral culpability for the Halabja atrocity as one of the officials who helped plan and execute it?
The other statement abotu Ted Bundy is a red herring -- you can compare Ted Bundy to Saddam --> both perpetrators of crimes. I don't condone either of those two, but Aziz would seem, to me, to be more like Ted's pet dog (if he had one) who had no say in anything.
Aziz and Hussein were friends from their teen years as radical Ba'ath Party activists. Tariq Aziz was one of the leaders of the Ba'ath Party - he helped form, along with his colleague Saddam Hussein, the Regional Command. The Regional Command was the inner circle of the Ba'ath Party, its governing council. He and Hussein both put together the plan to push al-Bakr, the party leader, aside using a council-within-the-council named "The Revolutionary Command Council." In 1979, with Aziz's help and advice, Hussein became President, Prime Minister and Commander in Chief of Iraq's armed forces. he made Aziz his Deputy Prime Minister and together they identified and executed 22 members of the Regional Command as "disloyal."
Aziz was not a "pet dog" - he was an active and willing accomplice who assisted Hussein in becoming a dictator and who acted as his right hand man in conducting the internal Ba'ath purges - performing the identical role for Hussein that Goering performed for Hitler in the Nazi Party internal purge (the "Night Of The Long Knives") of 1933.
Hitler was not in control of Germany until Goering and Himmler assisted him by coordinating the murder of all his enemies within the party. Was Goering just a "pet dog" who bore no moral culpability for the actions of the Nazis?
I do NOT believe Aziz rubber-stamped anything and do NOT believe he was in any position to make any decisions beyond when he could let out gas -- maybe not even that, everything else was controlled by SH
To the contrary, both Hussein and Aziz personally selected Ali Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali") to take over Iraqi Kurdistan as a candidate they felt would be more "aggressive" in anti-Kurd actions than his predecessor. Aziz knew Ali from his university days and Ali was also a member of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council. As Ali's trial showed, he kept in close contact with Prime Minister Saddam Hussein and Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and apprised them of everything he was doing, and the Deputy Prime Minister actively encouraged Ali's measures which included not just the Halabja gassing but also the vicious Kurd-only concentration camp in Topzawa.
Aziz had a choice: he could either collaborate with the Hussein regime or he could do the right thing.
He preferred to enjoy the high life as Iraq's second-in-command.
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