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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Robert Fisk: The dishonesty of this so-called dossier

(Robert Fisk, The Independent, 25 September 2002)
If the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct – and I will come to the "ifs" and "buts" and "coulds" later – it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us – for nothing. . . . The Blair "dossier" tells us that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. . . . Here is one example of the dishonesty of this "dossier". On page 45, we are told – in a long chapter about Saddam's human rights abuses – that "on March 1st, 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, riots (sic) broke out in the southern city of Basra, spreading quickly to other cities in Shia-dominated southern Iraq. The regime responded by killing thousands". What's wrong with this paragraph is the lie is in the use of the word "riots". These were not riots. They were part of a mass rebellion specifically called for by President Bush Jnr's father and by a CIA radio station in Saudi Arabia. The Shia Muslims of Iraq obeyed Mr Bush Snr's appeal. And were then left to their fate by the Americans and British, who they had been given every reason to believe would come to their help. No wonder they died in their thousands. But that's not what the Blair "dossier" tells us. . . . Now maybe Saddam has restarted his WMD programme. Let's all say it out loud, 20 times: Saddam is a brutal, wicked tyrant. But are "almost certainly", "appears", "probably" and "if" really the rallying call to send our grenadiers off to the deserts of Kut-al-Amara? . . . So there it is. If these pages of trickery are based on "probably" and "if", we have no business going to war. If they are all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children. How's that for a war crime?

posted by LoZo 2:09 PM