The following, written by Amir Taheri, appeared in today's Jerusalem Post:
The Iraqis had come with placards reading "Freedom for Iraq" and "American rule, a hundred thousand times better than Takriti tyranny!"To read Amir Taheri's entire article on Saturdays protests, click here. It requires registration with the Jerusalem Post, but it's free.But the tough guys who supervised the march would have none of that. Only official placards, manufactured in thousands and distributed among the "spontaneous" marchers, were allowed. These read "Bush and Blair, baby-killers," " Not in my name," "Freedom for Palestine" and "Indict Bush and Sharon."
Not one placard demanded that Saddam should disarm to avoid war. The goons also confiscated photographs showing the tragedy of Halabja, the Kurdish town where Saddam's forces gassed 5,000 people to death in 1988.
We managed to reach some of the stars of the show, including Reverend Jesse Jackson, the self-styled champion of American civil rights. One of our group, Salima Kazim, an Iraqi grandmother, managed to attract the reverend's attention and told him how Saddam Hussein had murdered her three sons because they had been dissidents in the Ba'ath Party; and how one of her grandsons had died in the war Saddam had launched against Kuwait in 1990.
"Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people about my life?" 78-year old Salima demanded. The reverend was not pleased. "Today is not about Saddam Hussein," he snapped.....
....Fadel Sultani, president of the National Association of Iraqi authors, [said]...."I had a few questions for the marchers. Did they not realize that oppression, torture and massacre of innocent civilians are also forms of war? Are the antiwar marchers only against a war that would liberate Iraq, or do they also oppose the war Saddam has been waging against our people for a generation?"
Sultani could have told the peaceniks how Saddam's henchmen killed dissident poets and writers by pushing page after page of forbidden books down their throats until they choked.
Hashem al-Iqabi, one of Iraq's leading writers and intellectuals, had hoped the marchers would mention the fact that Saddam had driven almost four million Iraqis out of their homes and razed more than 6,000 villages to the ground.
"The death and destruction caused by Saddam in our land is the worst since Nebuchadnezzar," he said. "These prosperous, peaceful and fat Europeans are marching in support of evil incarnate." He said that, watching the march, he felt Nazism was "alive and well and flexing its muscles in Hyde Park."
(Link via James Taranto.)
I would love to sit down and figure out how many people Saddam’s regime slaughters every day. Then, we could make some sort of counter that reads “Peace with Iraq has claimed (x) lives”. The counter would include every death that can be laid at Saddam’s feet going back to the end of the Gulf war and go up daily. Let the other side A.N.S.W.E.R. for that…
Andrew, you may have simply intended to make a rhetorical point, but that is actually a damn good idea. It would help put in perspective the cost of “letting inspections work” or of “containment”.
Has anyone seen a reliable estimate of how many people Saddam has killed? We could use conservative estimates, there is certainly no reason to pad the numbers. We know how long he has been in power so the rest is simple arithmetic.
This would be the perfect weblog to launch such a project. If other bloggers linked to it (Glenn Reynolds), it could actually get some legs. I think I’ll spend a little time doing some Google searches.
I'd love to see that, Mike. Let me know what you come up with, and how I can help. We can run it as a submission under your byline.
Dean (and Andrew),
Here are some preliminary numbers. Unfortunately, I won't have much time today to follow-up, but should over the weekend.
According to an article printed by Genocide Watch, an NGO founded in the Hague, Netherlands in May of 1999, Saddam is responsible for the deaths of roughly one million Iraqis. http://www.genocidewatch.org/IraqkilledJanuary26.htm. (This article was written by John F Burns, a NYT correspondent who also wrote the article that Dean linked to a few days ago.
Of those one million, 500,000 died in the war with Iran, and another 100,000 died in Gulf War I. I am inclined to exclude those for the sake of being conservative.
This means that Saddam is responsible for the deaths of 400,000 purely civilian Iraqis.
Saddam Hussein has been in power since July 16, 1979. Through the writing of the article I cited above that is 8,740 days meaning that on average roughly 47 Iraqi civilians die every day Saddam Hussein is in power. You can do the math yourself, but since I have already done it that’s nearly 1,500 per month, or 17,000 per year.
In direct response to your question Andrew, Saddam is responsible for roughly 200,000 purely civilian deaths since the Gulf War (using my form of analysis).
I would like to stress that this is an EXTREMELY conservative number. I have read quite a few articles on the topic since Andrew’s post and I feel confident that most experts on the situation would agree that my numbers are a low-ball estimate.
I was not being at all facetious; such a banner would through the debate into sharp relief, I think. One thing I would caution about when doing the analysis: outliers. There are days when Saddam’s forces slaughtered tens of thousands of people, and while they _need_ to be counted among the victims such numbers should not be used for the purposes of finding “average murders per day”; it tends to skew the numbers...
The question is: how to create a counter type .GIF that would update itself every few hours? That way many of us could put it on our sites and point to it when asked why we should go into Iraq...
Mike, there's some very good evidence that the 100,000 estimate from the Gulf War is on the high side, to say the least. Possibly by an order of magnitude.
The problem is that they aren't sure how many really showed up, how many deserted, and how many paper bodies there were mixed in with all of that...
I'm willing to predict we'll have a better catalog of horrors when it's all over. But so far I'm pleased with what Mike's come up with, and I'm going to look forward to what he gets together this weekend.
This is shaping into a real nice submission, Mike!