Saddam Apologizes for Invasion of Kuwait

AP / Yahoo ^ | 12/07/02

[dighton]

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - President Saddam Hussein on Saturday apologized to the Kuwaiti people for his invasion of their tiny country in 1990, saying he was not speaking from weakness but a desire to set the record straight.

In a speech read on national television by the Iraqi information minister, Saddam outlined the events that led to the invasion and said:

"We apologize to God about any act that has angered him in the past and that was held against us, and we apologize to you (the Kuwaitis) on the same basis."

He said that in 1989, he had tried to reach a peaceful settlement of Iraq's dispute with Kuwait, but that the neighboring Gulf country's officials were not interested in negotiating.

At the time, he said, American troops were carrying out maneuvers with Kuwaiti forces, threatening Iraq.

He maintained Iraq was the victim of a conspiracy by Kuwaiti officials who were syphoning off oil along the two countries' borders that actually belonged to Iraq.

He also repeated charges that Kuwait was producing oil beyond its assigned OPEC quota, bringing down oil prices and hurting the Iraqi economy.

In the speech read by Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi leader was careful to distinguish between the Kuwaiti people and the country's leaders.

Saddam added that Iraqi officials later found documents showing the United States and Kuwaiti officials had colluded in military plans against Iraq and his country had to defend itself, leading to the invasion of Aug. 2, 1990.

"There was no hope in solving issues by diplomatic means," he said.

[Walkin Man]

Uh huh. I bet this lie was composed in the deepest bunker that Saddam owns! He should assume the position, you know, sit down-put your head between your legs-and kiss your a** good-bye!

[Bobby777]

Mr. Saddam, what, pray tell, does an "apology" (however sincere or insincere) mean to those who were beaten, looted, tortured, raped and murdered?

[EternalVigilance]

I've been rereading a book I've had in my library for about 8 years, entitled: The Last of the Giants...It's about the dangers posed by Islam. This is one portion dealing with the Butcher of Bahgdad and his henchmen:

"A primary manifestation of the spirit of Babylon is a preoccupation with fear, violence, death and the destruction of the human spirit---choice sacrifices to the invisible rulers of darkness. Perhaps nowhere on earth have people suffered so ferociously for so long. In earlier centuries, the unfortunates of Mesopotamian society were liable not only to be pitched into Nebuchadnezzar's infamous fiery furnace, but also to have their 'lying tongues' pulled out by the Assyrians---a race of studied executioners who also burned, flayed, impaled and buried their victims alive.

During the Abbasid dynasty in the seventh century, the governor of Mesopotamia's Iraq province, al-Hadjadj, launched a reign that one historian has termed 'frank terror'. Upon assuming his governorship, he promptly executed all dissident rivals---an act that would later be emulated by Saddam Hussein. In full view of their severed heads, al-Hadjadj then delivered a public address that captured the spirit of Babylon. It contained these immortal lines that have been passed on to generations of Iraqi schoolchildren:

'I see heads before me that are ripe and ready for the plucking, and I am the one to pluck them, and I see blood glistening between the turbans and the beards'

If anything, the advent of 'modern civilization' has served only to make state-sponsored slaughter more efficient. From the early 1970's, Saddam Hussein and his immediate predecessors razed more than 4,000 villages, evicted at least 1.5 million people and killed upward of a quarter- million individuals. In the past decade (this was written over ten years ago), an estimated 35,000 people were executed for their religious beliefs alone. Thousands of others---primarily Kurds and Kuwaitis---were disposed of for other reasons.

In this unimaginably brutal land, it is possible to be arrested, tortured, even executed for such things as telling political jokes, failing to display the president's portrait, taking a picture of the Tigris River at sunset and accidently spilling coffee on a newspaper photo of Saddam. In the northern town of Sulaymaniyah, the bodies of victims were returned to relatives along with a bill for the bullets used in their executions. Others have been killed by rat poison, beatings, poison gas and hanging. In one particularly grisly episode, the government hung the mutilated bodies of several victims on Liberation Square while Radio Bahgdad summoned people to 'come and enjoy the feast'.

The footsoldiers of this terror are the members of Iraq's massive secret police apparatus. This four-headed monster includes the Amn al-Khass (State Internal Security), the Estikhbarat (Military Intelligence), the Mukhabarat (Baathist Party Intelligence) and the Presidential Affairs Department (Direct Presidential Intelligence). The largest and most dangerous of thses is the Mukhabarat, and agency that watches over the other police institutions and was active in the atrocities perpetrated in Kuwait. When the ranks of the secret police are added to those of the Border Guards, the Mobile Police Strike Force, the General Department of Nationality, the General Department of Police and the Armed Forces, an astonishing twenty percent of the Iraqi labor force is charged, according to al-Khalil, 'with one form or another of violence'.

In Stalinesque fashion, the Iraqi secret police have managed to place an effective mental straitjacket on much of the citizenry. Nearly everyone is afraid to speak for fear their words will be recorded by one of Saddam's ubiquitous hidden videocameras, a block watch informer or, worse yet, a member of their own family. In a 1977 publication, the Iraqi president wrote:

'To prevent the father and mother dominating the household with backwardness, we must make the small one radiate internally to expel it. Some fathers have slipped away from us for various reasons, but the small boy is still in our hands and we must transform him into an interactive radiating center inside the family...You must place in every corner a son of the revolution, with a trustworthy eye and a firm mind that receives its instructions from the responsible center of the revolution'

Nadhim Kzar, the first chief of Internal State Security under Saddam, reportedly ordered the torture and execution of several thousand people. In 1971, more than four hundred rivals were liquidated in the aptly named Qasr al-Nihayyah, or 'Palace of the End'. Famous for his habit of extinguishing cigarettes in the eyeballs of his victims, Kzar did much to nurture the widespread and sadistic foms of torture practiced today. A sampling of these methods have included roasting victims over flames, amputating noses, limbs and sexual organs, and hammering nails into joints. Children are tortured in front of parents, and suckling infants are held in cells next to mothers and denied food so that their cries will induce confessions. One survivor even reported that the entrance to his torture chamber was cynically marked with a mat that read 'welcome'.

It is also worth pointing out that the Iraqi regime has not reserved these horrors solely for its own domestic population. In occupied Kuwait, for instance, Iraqi soldiers and secret police tortured and summarily executed thousands of citizens before being driven back by advancing Allied troops. In oblique reference to the demonic nature of the carnage, General Norman Schwrzkopf could describe the participating Iraqui forces only as 'not of the same human race'.

Reflecting on the days of horror, Dr. Khalid Shalawi, head physician at Kuwait City's Mubarak Hospital, said he often wept over what had happened. According to eyewitness accounts from insiders like trauma nurse Basma Yusef, Iraqi torture vicitms were brought in with cigarette and acid burns, fingernails and facial hair torm out, holes drilled through their kneecaps and intestines inflated with air. Others were kicked in the stomach, electro-shocked on the genitals and suspended upside-down. One man had his ears cut off, while another was burned so badly 'he had no skin'. Scores were murdered with ax blows. 'The head is open and the brains are out', Yusef recounted. 'Some, their eyes have been taken out'.

Nor were women exempt form the nightmare. Newsweek reported that the Iraqis paraded one nursing mother before captured Kuwaiti resistance fighters. 'Here is the milk of Kuwait,' they taunted. 'Drink it.' Others, including countless rape victims, fared worse. Some were gang-raped and killed, their nude bodies stuffed into trash bins. Rasha Kabundi, a young mother of three, was shot four times in the chest and jaw before the top of her skull was removed with an electric saw. Her body, too, was found in a rubbish heap."

[TXnMA]

This cr@p comes from the same lying, delusional madman who went on Iraqi TV and told the Iraqi people that the Mother of all Surrenders was a "Great victory for the people of Iraq"...

Wonder if he'll call his own execution a "Victory for Islam"? If so, he'd be truthful -- for once in his sorry life...

[EternalVigilance]

Our own state department virtually invited Saddam to invade. Perhaps you don't remember.

You've been listening to too much Iraqi and RAT propaganda.

Find a good deprogrammer.

[txhurl]

Your opinion as to the bottom line here? TIA.

A ploy for media sympathy's what I think... if he really thought he was going down soon, I'd expect from him 180 degrees from an apology to anybody.

[Demidog]

You've been listening to too much Iraqi and RAT propaganda.

No, I was quite aware of the event as it was reported at the time. Maybe you're too young to remember?

[hosepipe]

[ Saddam Apologizes for Invasion of Kuwait ]

Darn this guy can't do anything right....he.he.he
After being caught with your pants down, waving your arms and yelling "I'm sorry" is not a good idea. Unless you want more attention to the fact that your fat, ugly and your manhood is very small........

[zencycler]

Apology from Saddam to Kuwait, brought to you by the imminent threat of of his own death.

I'm waiting for day when a Marine's boot is planted firmly on his throat, with the shaft of his gun on his forehead. On that day he'll apologize to America, he'll apologize to his own country, he'll apologize to his own mother for being a bad boy. He'll even tell us where Usama is hiding. Then he'll pee in his pants and beg for his life, right before he hears laughter, followed by the sound of his head exploding.

[Mo1]

... and plays the UN like a cheap fiddle.

Somehow I get the feeling this was the UN's idea .. where is Coffee Annan these days??

[aBootes]

Our own state department virtually invited Saddam to invade. Perhaps you don't remember.

Demidog is pretty much right. Search on the name "April Gillespie." She was our ambassador and seems to have somehow conveyed the idea that we wouldn't much care if Iraq took Kuwait. It is quite an interesting story and there are a variety of opinions on how it actually went down.

[EternalVigilance]

Maybe you're too young to remember?

Hardly.

No, I was quite aware of the event as it was reported at the time.

Like I said, you were believing Iraqi and RAT propaganda then---and obviously you haven't gotten over your naivete even now.

[ambrose]

C-SPAN was re-running last night the 1991 congressional hearings wherein Glaspie was in the hot seat.

[Alas Babylon!]

How can anyone in the world, reasonable people in good conscience, call this an apology? An apology says "I'm sorry for I did wrong." It must acknowledge that wrong. It does not blame the victim, nor state one was "forced" to do to the victim that which one is apologizing for.

Euroweenies, Anti-American-Third-Worlders, and left-wing democrats will try to spin this as an apology, but it isn't one. All it is is an attempt to rationalize why Saddam invaded Kuwait and violated Kuwaiti sovereignty. There is NO apology here.

[EternalVigilance]

Let's grant that April Gillespie was an inept diplomat...but to say that she or our country were somehow complicit in the invasion and rape of Kuwait because of it...that somehow that justifies what Hussein did...is crazy.

That was the Iraqi and the antiwar RAT line then, and it held as little water then as it does now.

Hussein can apologize from now until the cows come home, but he is still a demonic murderer who needs to face justice sooner rather than later.

Afterwards, he can tell it to the Almighty, who will have no trouble determining his sincerity.

[Walkin Man]

Now thats the apology from Saddam I'd like to hear! Hope those Devil Dogs get it on tape!

[dighton]

High time we "apologized" to Ada.

;-)

[Parmy]

Hey! He's showing remorse. That is all a liberal or one of the UN lefty's need to call off the whole thing. Hans now has an excuse to pull out the inspectors.

Sadam is so remorseful, he should go free.

[Tennessee_Bob]

At the time, he said, American troops were carrying out maneuvers with Kuwaiti forces, threatening Iraq.

Threatening Iraq - uhhhh - yeah. Right.

We better watch out, Dighton, by his standards, we pose a huge threat to Iraq. Have you seen any Republican Guards surrendering outside your house lately?

[Demidog]

Like I said, you were believing Iraqi and RAT propaganda then

B.S. I read the state department statement that was issued just before Iraq invaded. No reasonable person could have concluded that the state department cared whether or not Iraq invaded Kuwait. I made up my own mind.