Posted on 03/02/2003 5:33:12 PM PST by MadIvan
THE 199 MPs who voted against the Prime Minister’s hard-line stance against Iraq on Wednesday night - especially the 122 Labour MPs who rebelled against their own government - should read the following paragraphs and think again. It comes from The Threatening Storm by Kenneth Pollack, an American expert on Iraq who has the evidence and testimony to back up everything he writes about the government of the Butcher of Baghdad.
"This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents. This is a regime that will crush all of the bones in the feet of a two-year-old girl to force her mother to divulge her father’s whereabouts. This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm’s length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person’s limbs off to force him to confess or comply.
"This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution. This is a regime that applies electric shocks to the bodies of its victims, particularly their genitals, with great creativity.
"This is a regime that in 2000 decreed that the crime of criticising the regime (which can be as harmless as suggesting that Saddam’s clothing does not match) would be punished by cutting off the offender's tongue.
"This is a regime that practices systematic rape against its female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man’s wife, daughter or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him.
"This is a regime that will force a white-hot metal rod into a person’s anus or other orifices. This is a regime that employs thallium poisoning, widely considered one of the most excruciating ways to die.
"This is a regime that will behead a young mother in the street in front of her children because her husband was suspected of opposing the regime.
"This is a regime that used chemical warfare on its own Kurdish citizens - not just on the 15,000 killed and maimed at Halabja but on scores of villages all across Kurdistan.
"This is a regime that tested chemical and biological warfare agents on Iranian prisoners of war, using prisoners of war in controlled experiments to determine the best ways to disperse the agents to inflict the greatest damage."
Read his words again - if you can bear to do so - and wonder why any person of goodwill, especially those of goodwill and sense on the Left with a long commitment against dictatorship and for human rights, would not grasp any possibility of overthrowing Saddam Hussein with both hands, rather than oppose it. Liberating Iraq from a terrible tyranny might not be the sole purpose of any Anglo-American invasion. But it would be one of the beneficial consequences to follow military intervention devoutly to be wished and as good a reason as any for going to Baghdad. Those who oppose it condemn the Iraqi people to indefinite incarceration in the Republic of Fear, where barbarism rules. There is no morality in that.
There are, of course, many other brutal regimes in the world. But none is worse than Iraq; and, unlike most of today’s nasty dictatorships, Iraq is presided over by a tyrant determined to spread his writ throughout his region by force, then hold the rest of us to ransom. He has tried before (Iran, Kuwait) and would do so again if he had the means and opportunity to do so.
Inaction will ensure that he does, as sanctions slip and containment frays at the edges - as they have over the past decade, allowing Saddam to generate new oil revenues and rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. A tyrant who tortures his own people is a stain on humanity who should be removed. An expansionist tyrant whose aim is to extend his evil must be removed.
Be in no doubt that Saddam’s ambition, which he has held for over two decades and still holds, is for Iraq to become the regional superpower of the Gulf, to use its oil wealth to develop his military might and dominate the Arab world, with disastrous consequences for Israel and the West. He sees himself as the new Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin rolled into one; indeed, in a children’s book about Saladin, Saddam had his image used for the cover and was referred to as Saladin II throughout. The dreams of a megalomaniac? Not quite: he has put them into practice.
He has attempted to increase Iraq’s wealth and power by forcibly taking first the oil-rich Khuzestan province in Iran and then Kuwait. Both invasions were part of his grand plan for Iraqi hegemony in the Gulf. In that role, he would use the oil weapon to assert his interpretation of Iraqi interests against the West. His dream is to "liberate" Jerusalem, a goal on which he constantly dwells because it would confirm his desire to be an Arab leader of historic proportions. He has been prepared to sacrifice his people and his country’s economic development to build the most formidable military machine in the region (it still is, despite the sanctions). Since the inspectors left in 1998 he has used illegal oil revenues to go on a global spree to acquire the paraphernalia needed for weapons of mass destruction.
Only a massive American military build up stopped him from re-invading Kuwait in 1994. Only another huge Anglo-American military deployment on his borders today has convinced him to allow the weapons inspectors back in. Now he will play his traditional game of playing for time, as a myriad of "useful idiots" in the chancelleries of Paris and Bonn and the Commons in London play into his hands by arguing for delay and giving the inspectors more time.
Saddam knows the more time he is given, the more likely he is to survive. The Americans and the British cannot keep their huge forces in the region indefinitely. If the inspectors are given an open-ended mission, he will bide his time, cheating and retreating, until he is no longer surrounded by forces that can destroy him. Then he will renew his efforts to dominate the region, courtesy of the peace party.
"It is the combination of Saddam’s intentions and his ceaseless efforts to enhance Iraqi capabilities that is most frightening," writes Pollack.
Those who airily dismiss him as a threat - or someone that can be perpetually contained - are kidding themselves, playing into his hands and condemning millions of Arabs to an indefinite hell on earth. The same sort of folk used to say that Mein Kampf was just an inconsequential ramble, not Adolf Hitler's blueprint for European domination. Millions of innocent people paid with their lives in the Second World War for that mistake. How many millions more will die if we make the same mistake again? And how many more Iraqi children have to have their eyes gouged out before those of us who still have eyes to see wake up and support military action?
No. I am one of those reactionary souls who having witnessed a grown woman get plastered and then joyfully laid by every guy she can impale herself on during the party, spreading her legs in directions she didn't even know were physically possible, REFUSES to support a rape charge in the morning when, hungover, sore and incapable of remembering the names of the last thirteen guys she tackled, she's feeling a bit low on self-esteem.
Or, are you attempting to say that the US government had nothing to do with the Hussein regime in all the years that all those eyes were being gouged out?
Let's say we did. Why shouldn't we remove Saddam now?
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