jojo22 wrote:I think it's a stretch to say that I was praising Saddam. I made my comment in relation to someone elses comment - someone that I presume wasn't you - as sister Meriam pointed out - people weren't in the sort of condition they are in now in Iraq before Saddam was ousted - they didn't like Saddam, his 'iron fist' control resulted in the loss of a massive amount of lives as his means to repress elements in Iraq. Can you imagine what it must be like to run and keep it relatively peaceful when it has that many deep seated divisions? Yet, as sister Meriam pointed out - people had food, water, were carrying on with their lives.
As I am writing this, Kofi Annan has just now been on BBC saying that the situation now is worse than when Saddam was leading. He said 'they had a brutual dictator, but the streets were safe, children could walk to school on their own and their mothers were not worried that they would never see them again'. As brutual as Saddam was, his actions kept the peace in a deeply divided country - dysfunctionally functional you might say. Remember, though, I faulted Saddam in that having established that peace, he did not try and then use that framework to help his people transition from dictatorship into a confident democratic state. Maybe he didn't think anything but a dictatorship would work? Maybe he didn't want to give up the power and riches his position afforded him? Maybe he was just an out and out evil b*****. I'm just wondering - what would bring Iraq stability again in the future? Will they achieve a democracy or will their make-up lend itself to another dictatorship filling the void? I think that's an interesting question. If they form a democracy but it doesn't act in a way that the western world wants, will the west swoop in again, disrupt democracy and support dictatorship or oppressive regimes instead, which I understand has happened in the past?
So far as the Iranian president is concerned, he has shown some smart political side-steps and counter-arguments to Bush which went in some way to counter-act the stereotype that he is an 'irrational terrorist muslim'. i.e. challenging him to a debate, saying he is open to discussion. Though I don't like everything he has said - he lets religion creep into his politics too much for my liking - but then he's not the first leader of a country to do that either. I mean, Bush has referred to God, appealed to the churches - by that basis alone how do they differ apart from our views of what is our religion vs. what is their religion? It's still religion being used in politics. Humans are just primed to see anything other than their beliefs as evil, or whatever. Personally, I like my politics served sans religion, irrespective of who is doing the talking - but then I am secular, so that is the position you would probably expect me to take. I did get the feeling that the wars in the middle east seemed to be a bit Muslims vs. the Christians again, like we were back in the years of the crusades, and if you mix that with scripture that needs to be 'fulfilled' (i.e. Jihad, holy wars, etc) then I feel downright panicked!
I'm not anti-American just because I allow myself to think outside the stereotypic way your 'enemy' is viewed, I'm trying to be pro-human, and muslims are just as much humans as anyone else.
In the BBC interview, Mr. Annan agreed when it was suggested that some Iraqis believe life is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein's regime:
"I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi's life," Annan said. "If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, 'Am I going to see my child again?' . . ."
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061204/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_annan
Had Mr. Annan glanced at the following U.S. State Department report from March 14, 2003, he would be reminded of what is not going on in Iraq today:
Saddam Hussein is the first world leader in modern times to have brutally used chemical weapons against his own people. His goals were to systematically terrorize and exterminate the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, to silence his critics, and to test the effectiveness of his chemical and biological weapons. Hussein launched chemical attacks against 40 Kurdish villages and thousands of innocent civilians in 1987-88, using them as testing grounds. The worst of these attacks devastated the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988.
5,000 civilians, many of them women, children, and the elderly, died within hours of the attack. 10,000 more were blinded, maimed, disfigured, or otherwise severely and irreversibly debilitated.
Link: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/18714.htm
And here's a report from PBS about how Saddam responded to the Shiite uprising in 1991:
Saddam's Republican Guard fought the resistance in Karbala. Civilians and rebels fled the city. On the roads leading out, Iraqi army helicopter crews poured kerosene on the refugees, then set them on fire. . . . There were mass executions of civilians, some of whom were tied to tanks and used as human shields. In Karbala, some of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines were destroyed. Others were used as centers for murder, torture and r****. In Najaf, residential areas were bombed, and hospital staff and patients were murdered.
Link: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/events_uprising.html
Mr. Annan didn't just claim that Saddam, though brutal, made the trains run on time. He said Saddam actually looked out for the safety of the Iraqi people, the very people Saddam's regime was gassing, setting ablaze, tying to tanks, torturing and raping. Is Mr. Annan just ignorant, or is he depraved?
That a country is unworthy of democracy is about the most demeaning, derisive thing one can say.
