From Malcom LaGauche
ESTIMATES BASED ON ESTIMATES
The number of deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein by the West is incomprehensible. If you add them all up, it seems he killed more people than the number who inhabit Iraq. He had to work overtime and must have had advanced weaponry of which no one is aware.
Numbers and techniques abound: 182,000 during the Anfal campaign (Despite the numbers, not one body has been found. Maybe Saddam had a secret vaporizing ray); 5,000 in Halabja (About 300 bodies were found and there is much doubt as to the origin of the gas used against the Kurds); and hundreds of thousands in the south of Iraq.
In November 2003, word came out that more than 400,000 bodies had been discovered in mass graves in Iraq. “The whole country is a mass graveyard” was the slogan of the day. Finally, proof of Saddam being the Butcher of Baghdad was there for the whole world to see. Case closed.
Let’s go forward a few months from the discovery of the almost half million bodies. On July 18, 2004, the headline of the day for the British paper The Independent read, “British Prime Minister Admits Graves Claim Untrue.” How could that be? George Bush and Tony Blair don’t lie. If we can’t trust them, who can we trust? Certainly not Saddam, even though he told the truth about WMD. That must have been a fluke.
According to the article:
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that “about 400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves” is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year (2003) were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a U.S. government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.
In that publication, Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves, produced by USAID, the U.S. government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.”
Here’s what the USAID website stated:
If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.
I assume that USAID did not hear about the two million Iraqis who died at the hands of the U.S.-imposed embargo from 1990-2003. After all, they’re Iraqis: they don’t count.
The same article delved into the regression of other elevated figures attributed to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath regime in the north of the country. For instance, it mentioned that Human Rights Watch admitted it had to drastically decrease its figures of deaths and could not give an accurate figure.
Read all of it here.
