(Note: This is a post from my blog that's part of an ongoing conversation with another blogger. You can find the beginning of theconversation here.)
I'm a little sad that Jason of CounterColumn had to leave for two weeks of annual training before I got the chance to sit down and respond to his last post in our exchange over his "white feathers" suggestion. Work, family, the task of preparing to move have kept me from sitting down and writing a thoughtful response.
I considered not responding, because there's a point at which I realize that Jason and I are just never going to see eye to eye on the war in Iraq, and I'll never have quite the same enthusiasm for it that he seems to have. Still, there are a few things in his response that I can't let go—or don't want to let go unchallenged.
In his post, Jason doesn't actually so much respond as offer a set of links that he claims prove how "factually grounded" my previous points are (or aren't, in his view). The overall effect is an attempt to cast the war in humanitarian terms, while shoring up the other rationales.
One of Jason's links refers to the mass graves found in Iraq. I've written about them once or twice before, and I'm always a bit cynical when I see folks from the war party throwing up references to these mass graves as a justification for going into Iraq. I've even had one person refer to those buried in the mass graves, saying "those people want us there." Yet I tend to think that those people might have wanted us there a lot more before they ended up in those mass graves, as opposed riding to the rescue more than 20 years too late.
What's almost always missing from the analysis is how complicit we were in filling those mass graves, by looking the other way when the brutality was going on. Jason's link, however, notes the timeline for the filing of those graves.
Most of the graves discovered to date correspond to one of five major atrocities perpetrated by the regime.
- The 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens belonging to the Barzani tribe, 8,000 of whom were rounded up by the regime in northern Iraq and executed in deserts at great distances from their homes.
- The 1988 Anfal campaign, during which as many as 182,000 people disappeared. Most of the men were separated from their families and were executed in deserts in the west and southwest of Iraq. The remains of some of their wives and children have also been found in mass graves.
- Chemical attacks against Kurdish villages from 1986 to 1988, including the Halabja attack, when the Iraqi Air Force dropped sarin, VX and tabun chemical agents on the civilian population, killing 5,000 people immediately and causing long-term medical problems, related deaths, and birth defects among the progeny of thousands more.
- The 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi'a Muslims after the Shi'a uprising at the end of the Gulf war, in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in such regions as Basra and Al-Hillah were killed.
- The 1991 Kurdish massacre, which targeted civilians and soldiers who fought for autonomy in northern Iraq after the Gulf war.
And where were we when all that was going on? We were in Iraq in the 80's , certainly, but represented by Donald Rumsfeld. We were there because Saddam was an SOB, but he was our SOB, and we didn't care who he was killing so long as he was also killing the people we wanted him to. As long as he was we were willing to look the other way. Fat lot of good it does the people in those graves for us to show up now.
Actually, that brings me to my next point, concerning when those graves were filled and the assessment that there was no major humanitrian crisis occuring or looming in Iraq prior to the invasion (though there one might be said to exist today). With the other rationales in tatters, the war party usually retreats to the humanitarian rationale, but the plain truth is that it just doesn't wash.
In considering the criteria that would justify humanitarian intervention, the most important, as noted, is the level of killing: was genocide or comparable mass slaughter underway or imminent? Brutal as Saddam Hussein's reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government's killing in March 2003 was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention. We have no illusions about Saddam Hussein's vicious inhumanity. Having devoted extensive time and effort to documenting his atrocities, we estimate that in the last twenty-five years of Ba`th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or "disappeared" some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more. In addition, one must consider such abuses as Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. However, by the time of the March 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein's killing had ebbed.
There were times in the past when the killing was so intense that humanitarian intervention would have been justified--for example, during the 1988 Anfal genocide, in which the Iraqi government slaughtered some 100,000 Kurds. Indeed, Human Rights Watch, though still in its infancy and not yet working in the Middle East in 1988, did advocate a form of military intervention in 1991 after we had begun addressing Iraq. As Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein's brutal repression of the post-Gulf War uprising were stranded and dying in harsh winter weather on Turkey's mountainous border, we advocated the creation of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq so they could return home without facing renewed genocide. There were other moments of intense killing as well, such as the suppression of the uprisings in 1991. But on the eve of the latest Iraq war, no one contends that the Iraqi government was engaged in killing of anywhere near this magnitude, or had been for some time. "Better late than never" is not a justification for humanitarian intervention, which should be countenanced only to stop mass murder, not to punish its perpetrators, desirable as punishment is in such circumstances. [emphasis added]
Saddam's bloodiest days were decades behind him, and back then we were too busy glad-handing him to notice or care much. Does that mean with can't or shouldn't do the right thing now? No, of course not, but there is no righting some wrongs, particularly those that have have been dead and buried for 20 years.
And there are situations that could benefit from our humanitarian leaningings, and we don't do the right thing when they're happening right in front of us. We're still allying with torturous dictators today, and give billions in aid to them even though they do stuff like this.
On February 12, a 62-year-old woman in Tashkent was the latest to be convicted. Fatima Mukhadirova was sentenced in a closed court hearing to six years in prison with hard labor for possession of unsanctioned religious literature, membership in a prohibited religious organization, and "attempted encroachment on the constitutional order."
Mukhadirova is the mother of the late Muzafar Avazov, a religious prisoner who died from torture in prison in August 2002. An investigation of his death by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture concluded that Avazov had been submerged in boiling water. Those who saw his body also reported that there was a large, bloody wound on the back of his head, heavy bruising on his forehead and the side of his neck, and that his hands had no fingernails. [emphasis added]
Yet somehow when our allied dicators do stuff like this along with killing hundreds of protestors, despite all of our rantings and ravings about Saddam's "rape rooms" we don't seem to think it warrants more than a good talking-to and hope for the best. And we still innocently ask ourselves "Why do they hate us?" The simple answer is that we ally ourslves with their oppressors when it suits our purposes, and we turn a deaf hear to their cries for help. That is, unless they are cries from the grave. Once dead, they may be safely "rescued."
As long as we're shaking hands with torturous and murderous dictators, and caking our own with more blood in the process, don't talk to me of decades old mass graves and a "shortage of moral perspective."
And I haven't even started on the stuff about WMDs and alleged terrorist ties. Yet.
