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Originally posted by Eddie999
However (you knew this was coming) the US is just basically cleaning up it's own mess caused by over a decade of sanctions and continuous bombing before and during the war.
By Thundercloud:That's why schools and hospitals were falling apart and nonexistent in many places when we got there
Back when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, seven merchants were found guilty of using U.S. dollars instead of Iraqi dinars and were punished by having their right hands chopped off and X�s tattooed on their foreheads.
In Islamic culture, having a right hand cut off is a severe form of public shame. For Saddam's regime, sending Iraqis back into public without a hand reinforced the former dictator's harsh rule.
But for seven Iraqi men, nine years of public shame are finally over.
These men are now in Houston undergoing rehabilitation. Through plastic surgery, the black X�s are gone from their foreheads and they all now have state-of-the-art prosthetic right hands, which once again allows them to do simple things like tying their shoes.
�They all cried and had tears in their eyes when they put these on,� said David Baty, director of prosthetics at Dynamic Orthotics and Prosthetics in Houston
Each of the prosthetic hands cost between $25,000 and $50,000. For each of the Iraqis, the whole procedure and rehabilitation is worth about $150,000.
But for the Iraqi men, everything is being done for free.
Originally posted by Eddie999
OK Saddam wasn't the most compassionate of people but he did care about the majority of Iraqis.
Originally posted by Agent47
gassing a ethnicity of his own country,
Originally posted by Eddie999
A gas that Saddam Hussein never possessed but a gas that Iran possessed in large amounts.
I'll let you do the maths on that one.
As a result of the successful bid for autonomy of Kurds in northern Iraq under the U.S. no-fly zone, tens of thousands of documents from the Iraqi secret police and military were captured by Kurdish rebels from 1991 forward. These were turned over to the U.S. government. Some ten thousand of them have been posted to the World Wide Web at the Iraq Research and Documentation Program at the Center for Middle East Studies of Harvard University: www.fas.harvard.edu...
The captured documents explicitly refer to Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Kurds, called "Anfal" (spoils) operations. Some documents were reviewed by Human Rights Watch in the early 1990s, which issued a report, entitled "Genocide in Iraq." Robert Rabil, a researcher with the IRD Program, has also published an analysis of the documents, in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
The documents under review never mention Iraqi authorities taking precautions against Iranian uses of chemical weapons, and there is no good evidence that Iran did so. Since Iran and the Kurds were allies, Iran in any case had no motive to gas thousands of Kurds. The Baath documents do frequently mention the Anfal campaign of February-September 1988, when high Baath officials in the north were authorized to gas the Kurds.
The Kurdish minority of northern Iraq speaks an Indo-European language very different from the Semitic language of Arabic, and has long sought greater autonomy from Baghdad. Largely farmers and pastoralists, they practice a mystical, Sufi form of Islam that is distinctive in modern Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, which Saddam Hussein launched against his neighbor, the Kurds sought Iranian support for their insurgency. The Baath regime, threatened, responded by destroying Kurdish villages in strategic zones, resorting to ethnic cleansing.
These brutal conventional measures failed to achieve their objective, and for that reason the Baath regime initiated its chemical warfare on the Kurds in 1988. The operation was headed up by Saddam's cousin, Ali Hasan al-Majid, the Secretary-General of the Northern Bureau of the Ba'th Organization. For this reason, Iraqis call him "Chemical Ali."
The Baath regime launched 39 separate gas attacks against the Kurds, many of them targeting villages far from the Iran-Iraq border. Beginning at night on Thursday, March 16, and extending into Friday, March 17, 1988, the city of Halabja (population 70,000), was bombarded with twenty chemical and cluster bombs. Photographs show dead children in the street with lunch pails. An estimated 5,000 persons died. Although some analysts say the gas used was hydrogen cyanide others have suggested it might have been sarin, VX, and tabun. Iraq is known to have these agents. (Iran is not known to have hydrogen cyanide, in any case).
Iraqbodycount.net, a website that draws on media accounts and eyewitness reports, estimates that between 4,065 and 5,223 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of coalition military action, both during and after the war.
A May 15 Associated Press report gives an estimate of 2,100 to 2,600 civilian deaths, without citing sources.
The US Department of Defense has refused to give any sort of estimate on deaths
Two news organizations have produced estimates of civilian casualties in just the Baghdad area by canvassing hospitals and tallying their records. The Los Angeles Times reported on May 18 that probably between 1,700 and 2,700 civilians were killed in and around Baghdad. The Knight Ridder agency published an estimate of between 1,100 and 2,355 on May 4.
At least 5,000 civilians may have been killed during the invasion of Iraq, an independent research group has claimed. As more evidence is collated, it says, the figure could reach 10,000.
Iraq Body Count (IBC), a volunteer group of British and US academics and researchers, compiled statistics on civilian casualties from media reports and estimated that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians died in the conflict.
Originally posted by Agent47
Go do some reading on the oil for food program. All those millions in dollars that Saddam and his sons were caught with? All of that money was supposed to be food to feed starving Iraqis.
Originally posted by df1
Your arguements in support of the travesty in iraq are worthlessly plastic just like the phoney plastic avatar you choose to use.
.
Three of America's biggest oil and gas companies have received subpoenas from federal prosecutors related to the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.
Please Agent47, don't get all high and mighty. It seems you are pretty recent as well. Just because you won a RATS award or whatever it doesn't mean you are THE authority at ATS. Calm down your ego some.