Evil is as Evil does...
including some thoughts on Eason Jordan
411mania.com
Advertisment
Evil Is As Evil Does
Posted by Ray Robison on 12.29.2006
A response to Joe Rivett's column about Saddam and evil...
Because I am currently completing the manuscript for a book based on the Saddam documents released by the government early this year, I have been remise in writing for the 411mania audience. I decided to take a peak at what I have been missing and almost laughed when I read this lede: Face it, Saddam ran the country better and I'll tell you why by Joe Rivett.
Let me start by saying, I don't know Joe and I want to keep this polite, but there is not much in the world that gets me more worked up than justifying evil actions by dithering with the definition of the word evil.
It is like the old joke, I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it. Well maybe we can't define evil to a standard that all men, including Joe, can agree on, but can we come to some basic tenants of defining evil?
Joe asks, what is evil?
For some reason people in our government get away with calling the man evil. Evil is an ignorant word. What is evil? Does that mean he is possessed by the devil? Does that mean someone cast a spell on him, which controlled him to do bad things? Does it mean he is mentally ill? What is evil?
Well maybe I can take a stab at reconstructing your deconstructionist argument for you Joe. When I was in the Gulf War, I worked in a field hospital. We received a young girl who had been hung up from clothes lines and had her arms sawed off by the Iraqi army. Now before liberals make the knee-jerk response about Abu Ghraib, keep in mind, when we send our troops to battle, they go to war with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and General Orders such as rules of engagement to define what they can and can not do. When they break the rules and laws, it is their culpability, as long as the military enforces those laws and prosecutes when appropriate. When Saddam sent his men into combat, he had no concern for the rule of law. He in fact ordered his men to commit atrocities as collective punishment, which is one of the reasons he will hang in a few days.
Unleashing armies on a peaceful non-threatening country for the specific purpose of committing mass murder, rape, torture and to steal everything of value within sight, that is a pretty good qualifier of an evil man. And for those of you who are now saying we did the same thing by invading Iraq, I can not begin to imagine the depths you will go to put a lie to the reality of the Saddam regime. In other words, save it, you're an idiot.
Joe continues with this nugget of wisdom:
Part of the reason why Iraq is such a mess is that I believe we ignored how Saddam ran his country. Where the hell was all of this factional violence before the US invaded? Why wasn't Iraq a mess under Saddam? Maybe, just maybe Saddam knew the only way to keep the country together was to install terror. Again, not evil but he definitely believed in the concept that the means justify the ends, hence he was brutally pragmatic.
Joe, where do you think those mass graves came from? This blissful, peaceful coexistence between all denizens of Iraq prior to March 19th, 2003 is a leftist fiction. A government agency, called USAID, (yes, us uncompassionate Americans who are always being lambasted for our frugality when it comes to helping poor countries- chalk one up for the leftists again- have an agency devoted to assisting impoverished nations) has a heart rending break down on mass graves in Iraq:
Since the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown in May, 270 mass graves have been reported. By mid-January, 2004, the number of confirmed sites climbed to fifty-three. Some graves hold a few dozen bodies—their arms lashed together and the bullet holes in the backs of skulls testimony to their execution. Other graves go on for hundreds of meters, densely packed with thousands of bodies.
"We've already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair on November 20 in London. The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. "Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades," said the group in a statement in May. "Many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq."
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.
Surpassed only by Rwanda, Pol Pot and Nazi holocaust, is that close enough for you Joe?
Sandra Mackey, whose book Reckoning—Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein, is recommended reading for deploying army officers from the Command and Generals Staff College, states:
The Reckoning is an account of the forces—historical, religious, ethnic, and political—that produced Saddam's dictatorship. Iraq was forged after World War I from the Mesopotamian region of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, and its people have never had a national identity or a sense of common purpose. Hussein, ruling by terror, pitted the various ethnic groups, religious interests, and tribes against one another and in so doing achieved the destruction of Iraq's middle class and civilized society.
Not only was civil warfare a plague in Iraq long before we got there, it was a technique Saddam used to control Iraq, a simple strategy of divide and conquer. If one village or ethnic group was giving him trouble, he would simply stage an atrocity and make it look like another of his enemies had done it so they would destroy each other. Once you come to this realization, that it was Saddam's modus operandi, it also raises interesting questions about his application of this technique for foreign diplomacy. But to stay to the point here, Joe asked "where the hell was all this factional violence before we got there?" It was there before, but CNN and other media organizations covered it up while it was happening in order to stay active in Baghdad- by their own admission. That is why you may not have heard of it before we got there. CNN's chief news executive, let me say that again, chief news executive, Eason Jordon told us that CNN was covering up Saddam's atrocities in a New York Times editorial. Because of copyright concerns I will only give you a few snips, but if you haven't read it, just google Eason Jordon, it is an absolute must read:
Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
If we are going to make comparisons about Iraq under Saddam and after, let's make at least a small effort to understand the brutality of Saddam without getting bogged down in the nuances of a word that describes Saddam in pretty much any reasonable definition.
888888888888
And a story about Jordan's new Iraq news site...IraqSlogger
blogs.marketwatch.com |
