The Suffering in Iraq, As Inflicted By Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush

The Issue of Compassion

I appreciate the thoughtful responses of the people who’ve contributed to this blog. Let me take as starting point here, the last comment to the last entry, by Anonymous, and his remarks regarding the suffering that perpetuators of suffering experience. I agree with his entry, that, in effect, compassion is never "wasted," whether it be for victims of suffering, or their victimizers. So, yes, I should, and I do, to a small degree feel sorry for Bush as a victimizer. But I feel so much more, for his victims. On about Jan 18, National Public Radio reported that 2 million Iraqis have left Iraq, 1.7 have relocated inside the country, and 100,000 a month continue to flee the country. Similarly, I feel compassion for other authority figures, as those from the business world, who abuse their power, as he points out. But mostly I feel compassion for their victims. Those thoughts gave rise to the rest of this blog entry, which are reflections on the extent of the dislocation and suffering in Iraq, as a result of George W. Bush’s invasion of that country.

Should we feel compassion for another victimizer, Saddam Hussein? It appeared that Saddam went to his death with resignation, stoicism and with courage too, as it appeared in the video. However, I think what we were seeing was not Saddam's stoicism in facing the hangman's noose, but his single minded focus on the pursuit of power and control, that extended right up through his last moment of life. On one hand, this focus blinded and distracted him from the suffering he caused so many fellow humans in his dictatorial power. But his power may also have been fed through the acts of torturing others. He didn't seem at all concerned that in the Afterlife, (an article of faith for him, as a devout Muslim), he would be dealing with the karma created and perpetuated by the suffering of so many people -- suffering which he caused.

Bush, Cheney and Saddam Hussein are zealots who draw strength from each other's fears, which blind them to their own crimes of causing suffering to others -- Saddam through his tyranny, Bush and Cheney through the ill-conceived invasion of Iran and the post war fiasco of an aftermath.

Comparing The Numbers of People Killed Through the Actions of Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and Dick (“Tricky Dick”)Cheney.

On Casualties in Iraq

The Bush-Cheney Scorecard

George W. Bush justified his pre-emptive invasion of Iraq on the grounds of the existence of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein, weapons which were never found. The war and its abysmal aftermath are his responsibility as the US Commander in Chief.

655,000 Iraqis have been killed (2 1/2% of the population) as a consequence of this war and the occupation, according to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, from an article in the Guardian, pub on 10-11-2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1892888,00.html .

The Saddam Hussein's Scorecard

How many people did Saddam kill, or was responsible for having killed? From the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88, which he started, the figures are 500,000 Iraqis and 300,000 Iranians, plus several thousand persons from Saddam's 1990 occupation of Kuwait, which caused the US invasion in the first Gulf. (Figures taken from the Iraq Foundation, an expatriate organization, 2003. Another 200,000 persons are presumed to have been killed by Saddam through internal terrorism during his time as dictator of Iraq. War. http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/ajan/27_saddam.html .

So, Saddam is responsible for the death of perhaps 1,000,000 people, compared to Bush and Cheney for 655,000 + people. Saddam wins our contest. These figures really boggle the mind. How do these rulers live with themselves? They demonize their fellow humans as "the enemy" and totally blot out the suffering to others which they cause.

Pre-State of Union Iraq speech of George W. Bush

Bush’s Continued Bellicosity

During his recent Iraq speech to the nation, Bush's face looked tight and drawn. Bush is still angry, combative, and selectively seeing what he wants to see and disregarding the rest (So what else is new?) I thought his speech was very scary, and designed to be very threatening to Iran. Indeed, the very next day, US troops arrested Iranian officials from their delegation in the Kurdish part of Iraq. This was immediately followed by the protests of the Kurdish regional government and the provisional Iraqi government, that the US was violating their territorial integrity. He ordered additional naval forces to be moved to that region. Are these purely defensive, as he claimed? I think not. Bush and Ahmadinejad are belligerent zealots who proclaim what each wants to hear, to justify their hatred and bellicosity. Their supporters feed off of this energy. Yet, according to polls in both Iran and the US, most people do not seek conflict nor to increase the tensions between the two countries.

Bush has continued his aggressive stance toward "Communist" China's shooting down of its own space satellite with a missile. I would think that if there is a bully who bullies people with a big club, and if another bully appears, that the former would become a little more cautious, and pull back a bit. But not Bush. I think he responded by mentioning Starwars, the US government's laser weapon system, or perhaps he mentioned the US own' anti-missile program. So, Bush ramped up his belligerent talk. And he still seems determined to continue to do things "my way" with reference to Iran, regardless of the consequences. Above all, let us hope that Ahmadinejad and Bush do not succeed in provoking each other into increasingly confrontational stances, with dire consequences for the whole world.

GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE LEGACY OF RICHARD M. NIXON: Why Bush Should Not Be Pardoned by the American People

1.
Former US President Gerald Ford died, at the age of 93, over the Xmas holiday season, 2006. Many people who had opposed his decision to pardon President Nixon of all Watergate related crimes --including Bob Woodward, the famous journalist who helped expose Watergate, and Ted Kennedy -- came to applaud this decision. They believed that it helped the nation put Watergate behind it and move on. I’m a bit mystified by this attitude. I don’t see how imprisoning a President for high crimes could be bad for the nation. Indeed, most of the American electorate agreed with this statement by choosing Jimmy Carter instead of Ford, in the 1976 Presidential election, after Ford pardoned Nixon. Most commentators on this question, including Ford, believed this to be the case.

Why were people so quick to absolve Nixon of his Watergate crimes to spare the nation from the trauma of an impeachment, when the Republicans had no problem trying to impeach President Clinton or hound him from office for what was basically a moral offence – adultery -- and the resulting deception that is part of adultery. They didn’t seem to think that would be bad for national morale. Nor did the US mind prosecuting other leaders. The US handed over Saddam Hussein to the Iraqi government, (though international war criminals of his “stature” like Milosevic, are customarily sent to the Hague for trial). Nor did the government desist from indicting infamous CEO’s as Ken Lay, of Enron infamy, or the former chairman of Worldcom.

Why was Tricky Dick (known by that term for years, before Watergate), given this get out of jail pass? If Nixon had been forced to resign and go to jail, would that have been a bad example to have been set for future wrongdoers? Who is to say that such a sword of Damocles, hanging over his head, might not have helped keep George W. Bush from selectively choosing and manipulating data in order to deceive the American public, and the world at large, that Saddam Hussein had viable weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, Bush used his weapon of mass deception, to go after Saddam.

The Watergate crimes of Nixon, while illegal and morally deplorable, did not weaken national security nor result in deaths or even the hurting of other people. The one must hurt was Nixon himself. Nixon’s actions pale in comparison with the hell on earth that George W. Bush unleashed, invading Iraq under false pretenses, and totally botching the whole post war “occupation.” One recent writer on Iraq fittingly made the term, “fiasco” the title of his book. Book after book has come out from 2003 up through the 2006 midterm election describing different botched aspects of the invasion itself, the post-war governance of Iraq, and the lack, thereof.

When the justification for the war was shown to be false, Bush should either have resigned in disgrace or been impeached on grounds of either gross incompetence or gross manipulation and distortion of data, to suit his purposes. This President still expresses no remorse at the hell on earth he unleashed, with his ill conceived war, founded on the deception of Congress and the American people. And don’t forget how he ignored the mass demonstrations of millions of people from all over the world who marched to protest the upcoming American invasion of 2003. They knew the truth, how this President was leading the world toward a pre-emptive war, through arrogance and incompetence, embodying corporate greed for oil and war profits, and made even more incompetent by cronyism (as Paul Bremer in Iraq, and Michael Brown in New Orleans). (We should keep in mind too, that George W. Bush was not even elected by the popular vote but was appointed to the Presidency by a Republican oriented Supreme Court, after the Republicans in Florida botched their state elections).

2.
Bush’s incredible hubris continues. After the non-partisan Iraq Study Group, which he had appointed as a non-partisan group of experts, concluded that the US should begin a phased withdrawal, Bush pulled away the committee and sought a “new strategy.” Right after he lost the 2006 midterm election for the Republicans, he sacrificed Rumsfeld to the howling majority of voters, as he probably saw it, and Donald Rumsfeld, his Defense Secretary, resigned. But will his policy change? The talk from the press is that he will probably order (in a talk scheduled for 1-10-07), that 20,000 more American troops be sent to Iraq, principally to Baghdad to help stabilize the capital. So Bush may turn the vote of the majority of voters to bring US troops home, into a call for victory by adding more troops on a “temporary” basis.

Sounds like “Tricky George,” is at it again. Maybe we should call him “Ploy George” (with all due respects to Boy George). Whatever we call him, it should reflect his actions, which are now to manipulate and deceive us with talk of a temporary troop surge. This actually sounds like a call for troop escalation, as Chairperson Nancy Pelosi of the House has also recently observed.

Given Bush’s history of deceit, would you believe him when he says that added troops they will be there only temporarily? And what does temporarily mean? 18 month? That will take us to the 2008 President election. The Democrats won power largely on a platform of “bring the troops home now”, not a “victory at any cost.” Will they be willing to go into the 2008 election with increased troops and increased causality rate inherited from the Bush administration?

As of this writing, Chairperson Nancy Pelosi, in the House, and Majority Leader Reid in the Senate, both opposed this so-called temporary surge of troops, which Pelosi said, masks an escalation. Meanwhile, at home the National Guard in Colorado were struggling to help stranded motorists and cattle, after back-to-back blizzards. They had fewer troops and supplies than they ought to have had, since many of their brethren were serving in Iraq.

And how will this help the American occupation of Iraq to better help the Iraqis manage sectarian strife? It won’t. The need remains for a political solution, as many retired and current military leaders maintain. The Iraq Study Group noted this fact too. The increased American troop presence just preserves stability at the expense of more American lives and dollars, and perpetuates Iraqi government dependence on the US military, to maintain some kind of order. Invariably, a larger American military presence will increase Iraqi resentment of the American army, as an occupation force, and promote economic dependence of many Iraqis on the occupation forces, as well (a lesson from Vietnam).

3.
It is important to keep in mind the history of Iraq. Iraq was formed from an aggregate of tribes, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish, which existed before the British wrested these groups from control of the Turks, after the final defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW I. The British set up Iraq as an independent state, as part of the League of Nations mandate after WW I. King Faisal I became ruler in Iraq in 1921 after winning a plebiscite. He ruled the country as a confederation of tribal groupings. In 1933 Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as a state, independent of British rule. Tribal antagonisms have been part of state since its inception. Saddam preserved national unity by force, just as Tito did in Yugoslavia, similarly composed of sectarian groups.

To spread democracy in the Middle East through US military occupation, starting with Iraq, was the plan of the Neo-Conservatives (Neo-Cons) in the White House. They used 9/11, as the ruse for launching a so-called pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein, by falsely linking him to Al-Qaeda, despite the lack of evidence. However, it is widely recognized that no Iraqis were ever shown to be involved with 9/11, that Saddam, as a secularist, was antagonistic to the Islamist-oriented Al-Qaeda, and that Al-Qaeda did not have any significant presence in Iraq until the botched American occupation.

A single democratic Iraq may not have been possible, after the American occupation, given Saddam’s rule as dictator and the general impoverishment of Iraq which was partly due to the UN embargo. But there was an educated middle class in Iraq under Saddam’s regime. Women’s democratic rights were protected and they occupied a significant place in the workplace and among professionals. If the occupation wasn’t so botched, with lower level Sunni professionals and military personal allowed to remain, (contrary to Paul’s Bremer’s policy), and chaos wasn’t allowed to rise to ascendancy, starting with the looting (which Rumsfeld described as people just blowing off steam), perhaps democracy might have had a chance. Now, a new “surge” of American troops will add to the violence and general chaos. I suspect that insurgents will go after targeting the Green Zone more, now, in an effort to force the American occupiers to leave, as they were forced to leave in helicopters from rooftops, in those incredible scenes from 1975 Vietnam.

However, if the American troops start to leave in orderly, phased withdrawals rather than risk more chaos with this new troop escalation, then, the factions in Iraq will be forced to negotiate with each other, and may work out some type of confederation, as has have done in the past.

Unlike his son, George HW Bush did not overthrow Saddam in the 1990 Gulf War for this very reason of not wanting to destabilize the country. Cheney went along with this at the time too. With Richard Perl, and Paul Wolfowitz providing the Neo-Con view of history, GW Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld unleashed this second Gulf war in 2003, and the subsequent incredibly botched occupation that has already been amply documented in the many books published since then.

4.
The lesson of Viet Nam came up again in Bush’s visit to Vietnam in 2006 for the signing of trade agreements. Bush talked about learning the lesson of Vietnam and then wisely (for him!) stopped taking questions about it. The lesson of Vietnam is that the US should stop trying to impose its will by force of arms, which is the opposite of the Iraq War of George W. Bush.

Nixon withdrew American troops in 1973 from South Vietnam, and a two state policy was to be the result. However, some American troops briefly returned, and fighting broke out, in 1974. Congress, in 1974, fearing a new major escalation, after US troop withdrawal had already been set up, passed resolutions cutting the purse strings for funding for the war. The North achieved military victory in 1975 as a result of corruption and demoralization of the South Vietnamese forces (ARVN) and lack of US troop and economic support.

Meanwhile, 20 years later, new trade agreement took place in 2005 between the Communist government of Vietnam and the US. What was the purpose of the war? What good did it serve? The two nations are trading now. The deaths and suffering were for naught. The US left Vietnam, driven out by opposition to the war by the North Vietnamese and Americans protesting at home. Over 50,000 American troops killed and 300,000 wounded at a cost of $150 billion dollars (in 1970’s dollars), and 3-4 million North Vietnamese killed. The war did give lots of war profits to companies, and allowed the military test its weapons in combat. The military-industrial complex prospered in the Vietnam War, as in the two Iraq wars, as they always do, with pools of blood watering the trees of war profits.

At the peak of the war, there were over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. They dropped more firepower in bombs than was dropped by Americans in WW II. But the South Vietnamese could not achieve military victory on their own. Nor did the temporary truce between the US and North Vietnam in 1973 prevent fighting from breaking out again, because two self-sufficient economies did not result and because there was still political uncertainty. Congress cut the funding in 1974, and in 1975, the South Vietnamese government collapsed.

Is the description of the war in Iraq not reminiscent of Vietnam? Reports of victory mask defeat. Vietnamization parallels de-Bathification. A weak South Vietnamese government was supposed to assume power and take the country to victory, which it was unable to do, despite several different leaders. The South Vietnamese government was unified in the sense the sectarian differences did not play a decisive role, as they do in Iraq. And still, the South Vietnamese government could not keep power. Innocent South Vietnamese villagers were killed and both North and South Vietnam were devasted by American firepower, including napalm. (In Iraq the depleted uranium munitions of the Americans seem to have replaced napalm). There were atrocities against civilians and military personnel.

Fundamentally, the US refused to admit that it had been defeated in Vietnam until the last helicopter left in 1975. Between 2003-2006 the Iraq insurgents have achieved increasingly devastating results, and the casualties all around have been steadily mounting. I believe that the Iraq Study Group accepted the figures from the British Commission study, that over 600,000 people have already died in Iraq, from 2003-2006. 300,00 have left the country and 30,000 a month continue to leave, including most of the middle class. BBC reported (on 1/8/07) that 1 in 8 Iraqis have relocated, either out of the country or to some other location in Iraq).

Adding 20,000 more American troops to the 140,000 or so, already there, does not hasten the end of political strife, but may just encourage continued resistance against the US occupation by many groups. And if Lyndon Johnson and Nixon could not admit the defeat of the US in Vietnam, neither will someone of George W. Bush’s stature, or lack thereof, admit defeat. But if that is indeed the case, I think we can count on Bush to desperately postpone defeat till after his administration has left office in 2009, regardless of the resulting carnage. Perhaps the probable surge of American troops should be examined in that context. Senator Bayden has already made that observation.

I believe that only one Congressman, Dennis Kucinich, from Ohio, proposes this cutting of funds for Iraq now. Other Democrats want a political solution, thinking they will appear unpatriotic and unwilling to support the troops, if they try to oppose Bush’s continuation and probable escalation of the war in early 2007.

Earlier, Speaker Pelosi said that they did not want to tie up the nation with an impeachment of Bush. Is this not reminiscent of Ford’s pardoning of Nixon? But with the Watergate exposure, Nixon’s days were done, and it was only a matter of whether he left through resignation, Presidential Pardon, or by being impeached. The Democratic leadership now, in not challenging Bush’s illegitimate actions in the past, allows him to stay and continue to deceive the public, with new schemes like a so-called temporary troop surge of 20,000 American troops. Hasn’t Bush given us sufficient grounds to disbelieve virtually anything that comes out of his mouth?

The cutting off of funds for the Iraq war by Congress, and starting the impeachment of George W. Bush might sufficiently “contain” him till the end of his term in 2009. Threat of impeachment might keep Bush from:

• expanding the Iraq war;
  
• starting a military adventure somewhere else, as Iran;
  
• continuing to chop away at the Bill of Rights (as through his warrant-less searches) and American liberties;
  
• continuing to bankrupt the nation with the combination of Iraq war plus tax cut for the wealthy;
  
• continuing to deny global warming, and the need for carbon emission controls and preservation of key nature preserves as free from oil exploration.
  

5. Conclusion
In March 2003, just about 30 years after the Americans agreed to a two-state Vietnam solution, and 27 years before they were totally forced out of Vietnam, George W. Bush invaded Iraq. He justifying his deceptive actions to a rightly skeptical world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which were never in fact found, anywhere.

By now, 2007, after huge Republican defeats in the midterm election, Bush should have either resigned in disgrace or have been impeached, for his deception of the Congress and the American people, and the suffering that he unleashed by an ill-conceived war and subsequent American occupation. He expresses no remorse at what his illegal and misguided war has unleashed in Iraq. He should have done what Nixon did not have the courage to do, and which Clinton had too much courage to do, namely resign. And Cheney too, while we’d at it. Most of him is probably mechanical by now, following the beat of his heart.

Americans need to speak up, by pressuring their Congressman and women, through petitions and demonstration to keep the pressure of impeachment on Bush and Cheney, so the nation can survive 8 years of this administration. Cutting the purse string to the Iraq War, as Congress did in 1974 with Vietnam, would allow American troops to return home, alive.

Who would that leave as President? Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. She just became the first female Speaker of the House. Will she become the first female President, if Bush and Cheney are impeached or forced to resign? Only history knows, and she’s not talking. And, if you religious, you might want to pray that America survives the George W. Bush administration. History will probably judge this to be among the most inept, aggressive, destructive, corrupt and hypocritical administration in American history, and one that occurred at a critical time in the history of the nation, in world history and the history of the planet. Led by the George W. Bush administration, this nation is treading down the path of historical and global cataclysm.

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