Hey, Let’s Help Those Dead People
Jun 2nd, 2003 at 9:42 am by Susan
MaxSpeak points out the obvious about why we can’t justify an invasion over the finding of mass graves:
Lacking evidence of weapons of mass destruction, or even modest destruction, and finding no meaningful links to active terrorist networks, the Iraqi invasion has been justified ex post with the finding of mass graves.The logic of this escapes me. The people are already dead. There is no help for them. In at least two ways, the U.S. government facilitated their deaths. (1) The USG supported Hussein in the 1980s, with the personal participation of “Chemical Don” Rumsfeld; and (2) one of the massacres in question, of the marsh Arabs, occurred right after the first Gulf War with U.S. forces looking on. There is also the record of serial betrayals of the Kurds.
I could see a case for an intervention (as in Kosova, which I supported) aimed at preventing this sort of thing before its grim consummation. To claim the discovery of the graves as some kind of triumph for the U.S. I find profoundly perverse.
Is that what the U.S. does — jumps into situations to prevent mass death? How come our jingoist humanitarians spend gobs of bandwidth on the tribulations of the New York Times, but precious little on, say, ongoing atrocities in the Congo? What about repression in Uzbekistan? What fraud could be more obvious?
It’s All In The Name
via Suburban Guerrilla: Maxspeaks, again. For those of you who missed it the first time: In at least two ways, the U.S. government facilitated their [Iraqi] deaths. (1) The USG supported Hussein in the 1980s, with the personal participation of…