Sadr considers US embassy staff in Baghdad as "occupiers"

'In response to a question from one of his followers, Sadr now says that after the expiration of the SOFA, the staff of the embassy should be considered “occupiers” and must be “resisted”. '

On one hand I see Muqtada al Sadr as an ungrateful fundamentalist majnoon. His opposition to the US does not make sense, given that the US overthrew the dictator who murdered his father and his two oldest brothers in 1999.

On the other hand I can understand why Muqtada al Sadr and his followers would distrust the US, given that the US could have overthrown the dictator in 1991 after bombing Iraq for 40 consecutive days and marching to the outskirts of Baghdad. By the 29th day of the 1991 bombing, the "Allied air campaign passes 40,000-sortie mark - 10,000 more missions than were flown against Japan in final 14 months of World War II."

Based on comments by Americans for posts about 1991, some Americans seem to think the Iraqis should not be angry or bitter about what the US should have done differently in 1991. Some think Iraqis should blame the Saudis, who were afraid of Iran taking over. So did the US allow Saddam to fly his helicopters because the Saudis did not want to see the Shia take over Iraq? Did KSA & USA have common interests? Or was KSA in charge? Is America KSA's bitch? It seems that way, especially when you consider that KSA was not punished for 9/11. The friendship seemed to flourish, actually.

For Americans and Saudis, 1991 turned out to be a good year. They got it all: a short war with relatively little casualties, KSA paid for the war and Sunni Arab domination of Iraq continued. Few Americans and Arabs were interested in helping Iraqis overthrow the Saddam.

Despite the bad things that happened and the mistakes, I would say the average Iraqi does not agree with Muqtada al Sadr and would like to see normal relations with the US. Iraq needs international assistance to develop into a prosperous nation.

Qadhafi is dead

Haha. The talk in the US media is a lot about the killing of Qaddafi, and a US drone was involved, according to Lawrence O'Donnell. Many commentators on MSNBC are comparing it to how the US acted against Iraq. It is a valid comparison, but they don't go into how Iraq and Libya were very different. It is interesting how some Republicans are reacting - they're playing down American involvement, don't want to give too much credit to Obama.

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Rachel Maddow is portraying it as a "Responsibility to Protect", as in protect civilians. America will "work with others" and liberals are praising the way Obama has conducted his foreign policy. It is impressive, even though he doesn't have to deal with major civil war in Libya.

I wonder how different Iraq would have been if the US had helped Iraqis kill Saddam. It would have taken serious help, and the US should have done it in 1991, after bombing the shiite out of the place.

Anyway, it is always good to see a dictator go down. I hope Libya becomes a progressive democracy!

Hillary Clinton says no-fly zone over Iraq didn't bring down Saddam

At two minutes into the clip below, Hillary Clinton said "we had a no-fly zone over Iraq. It did not prevent Saddam Hussein from slaughtering people on the ground and it did not get him out of office."

CNN reporter Chris Lawrence, NBC reporter Richard Engel, and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied that there was a no-fly zone over Iraq during the 1991 uprising. All seem to be unaware that a no-fly zone over southern Iraq was enforced 17 months after the uprisings began in March, 1991. Mr. Engel said the no-fly zone in Iraq did "not apply" to low-flying helicopters. In fact the US allowed Saddam's peeps to fly helicopters during the uprising:

at the Safwan negotiations, Schwarzkopf carelessly authorized the Iraqis to use helicopter gunships on their side of the cease-fire line. The Iraqi generals were so surprised by that concession—which permitted them to strafe and rocket Kurds and Shiites from the air—that one of the Iraqi generals incredulously asked: "So you mean even the helicopters that are armed can fly in the Iraqi skies?"

It's interesting when smart people don't get the facts right, or make comparisons that don't work. The US dropped 250,000 bombs and missles on Iraq during 40 consecutive days and nights in 1991. The first thing US & allied pilots did was to destroy Saddam's SAMs and radar installations. They made sure American pilots could fly planes and helicopters over Kuwait and Iraq without being fired on, and then US troops marched into Kuwait and Iraq, almost all the way to Baghdad. Kuwait was liberated and the cease-fire with Saddam was signed on Feb. 28. Then the uprisings began and the rebels were slaughtered by Saddam's helicopter gunships. I guess Richard Engel's statement (of the three mentioned here) comes closest to the truth: the no-fly zone "did not apply" to low-flying helicopters. LOL!

If there was a real no-fly zone over Iraq during the 1991 uprisings, one that "included" low-flying helicopters, the uprising might have succeeded.

Engel: No-fly zone would help Libyan rebels

Richard Engel in the clip below says that a no-fly zone would definitely help the Libyan rebels. He's right, assuming NATO (or whoever) pilots don't kill civilians. There are many risks in enforcing a no-fly zone.

Engel mentioned that after the war in Iraq in 1991, there was a no-fly zone, but it didn't "apply" to low-flying helicopters, which Saddam used to crush the rebels. Now that's not getting it quite true. I know it's hard to get this all into a few seconds. It might take a minute: the US and allies had already destroyed Iraq's air force by the time US troops entered Iraq in February 1991. At the end of 40 days of aerial bombardment, Iraq's air force was decimated and US forces had complete control of the sky and the ground. No Iraqi dared fly anything over Iraqi airspace. So when the uprisings began in early March (20 years ago!), it was quite a surprise when the US, represented by "Stormin" Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, allowed Saddam's generals to use helicopters:

at the Safwan negotiations, Schwarzkopf carelessly authorized the Iraqis to use helicopter gunships on their side of the cease-fire line. The Iraqi generals were so surprised by that concession—which permitted them to strafe and rocket Kurds and Shiites from the air—that one of the Iraqi generals incredulously asked: "So you mean even the helicopters that are armed can fly in the Iraqi skies?"

The no-fly zone over southern Iraq was not enforced again until August, 1992, 17 months after the uprising began. It is inexplicable, especially when you consider that US troops were already on the ground in Iraq, and there was already a no-fly zone that was established after 40 days of continuous bombing.

I hate it when good reporters are forced to summarize so much that they end up skimming the history and not getting it right. At least Mr. Engel deserves credit for reminding the public that the US allowed Saddam to use helicopters to crush a rebellion that might have toppled him otherwise.

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Sulaymaniya liberated 20 years ago today

"The 1991 Uprising in As Sulaymaniyah or Silêmanî was one of biggest 1991 uprisings in Iraq. As Sulaymaniyah, a Kurdish city of over 100,000 population was the first Iraqi city to be captured by rebels and the last one to fall."

It's interesting to see the uprisings of 2011 happening 20 years after the Iraqi uprising of 1991. Hopefully this time the dictators actually fall, and the people will have real democracy and freedom.

With US fears of Iran, 1991 uprising was doomed

20 years ago this week: "The emboldened rebels wanted to move on Baghdad. They asked for support from the allied forces, still on the ground in southern Iraq, but were rebuffed. The Americans feared the Shi’iah insurgents were aligned with Iranian Islamists. With that, the uprising was doomed. Soon came the counterattack from Baghdad. 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. American aircraft circled high overhead, watching. Saddam’s forces began systematically crushing the uprising. Basra was the first city to fall, after just a week out of Saddam’s control. Iraqi tanks captured a road above the city and pelted it with heavy machine guns. Basra General Hospital issued 600 death certificates, though many more were killed. 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 rape. In Najaf, residential areas were bombed, and hospital staff and patients were murdered. The homes of suspected rebels were destroyed while the suspects were executed in the streets."

20 years ago the Iraqi people almost toppled Saddam

They were so close.

"In 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War, the Iraqi people heeded President George H.W. Bush's call to rid themselves of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The regular Iraqi army had either disappeared or was in open mutiny, and Saddam's loyalist forces were in disarray. Within days, 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces were out of the regime's control, and more than half of Iraq's population had their first taste of freedom in a generation."

America's biggest mistake in Iraq

was the betrayal of 1991. Most of the bad things that have happened in Iraq in the last 20 years would have not happened had the US toppled Saddam in 1991 after already gaining control of Iraqi airspace and defeating the Iraqi army.

'Many Shia feel that they were betrayed by the US administration who failed to intervene after appearing to endorse a popular rebellion.

In February 1991, as US forces were crushing the Iraqi army and driving it out of Kuwait, former US President George Bush broadcast a message telling Iraqis that there was another way for the bloodshed to stop.

"That is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside..." he said in the Voice of America broadcast.

As the uprising spread throughout the country however, US officials insisted it was never their policy to intervene in Iraq's internal affairs nor to remove Saddam Hussein's regime from power.'

So after 40 days of the heaviest aerial bombardment in the history of Iraq, after the US & allies defeated the Iraqi army, after supporting Saddam in the 80s, after Halabja, the US & allies decided it was none of their business to "intervene" in Iraq's internal affairs. It would be funny if it were not so sad.

CNN reporter told a lie today

At about 45 seconds into the clip below the reporter (Chris Lawrence) discusses the possibility of a no-fly zone over Libya, and the guy says that it may not necessarily help, that the no-fly zone in Iraq did not prevent Saddam from mass murdering Shia in the south and putting down the 1991 uprising. The problem with this theory is that the US did not enforce a no-fly zone in southern Iraq until August, 1992, 17 months after the uprising began, long after the mass murder had taken place. In fact the US military ALLOWED Saddam to fly helicopters during the uprising: 'at the Safwan negotiations, Schwarzkopf carelessly authorized the Iraqis to use helicopter gunships on their side of the cease-fire line. The Iraqi generals were so surprised by that concession—which permitted them to strafe and rocket Kurds and Shiites from the air—that one of the Iraqi generals incredulously asked: "So you mean even the helicopters that are armed can fly in the Iraqi skies?"'

Also the reporter says that US troops were not in Iraq during the 1991 uprising. Wrong again, Chris. US troops had been all over southern Iraq and Kuwait in March 1991, it has been well documented. The uprising began on March 1 (some sources say March 2nd and 3rd) but half a million US troops only began to leave the area on March 10: "On 10 March 1991, 540,000 American troops began to move out of the Persian Gulf."

Also: 'U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher explained the next day on March 6: "We don't think that outside powers should be interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." Consequently, U.S. occupation forces in Iraq stationed a few miles from Nasiriyah, Samawa, and Basra did nothing to help the anti-Saddam rebels.'

And: "The emboldened rebels wanted to move on Baghdad. They asked for support from the allied forces, still on the ground in southern Iraq, but were rebuffed."



I don't know if the lie was intentional. Maybe he just doesn't have the facts. Hope he does now!

No-fly zone an option, says USA

Libya 2011 is looking more like the 1991 uprising in Iraq by the day, at least from a US perspective. Except the US doesn't have half a million ground troops near Libya, and with respect to the Iraqi uprising it took the US 17 months (after the uprising started) to enforce a no-fly zone in southern Iraq: "In August 1992 the NFZ in the south to the 32nd parallel was established..." Between the beginning of the uprising (March 1991) and the establishment of the no-fly zone in the south (August 1992), Saddam's regime had murdered at least 300,000 Iraqis.

Will the US get involved militarily in Libya, other than to enforce a no-fly zone? Would the US send ground troops, or even special forces? What if Qaddafi crushes the rebellion, like Saddam did? Would the US allow him to stay in power for another 12 years, like Saddam did?

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Could the Iraqi people have overthrown Saddam?

'The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings succeeded because the military forces of those countries refused to protect the regimes by cracking down on their own countrymen. The Egyptian military's self-image is that of a force that protects the nation and the people, not Hosni Mubarak. Yes, many top officers were his cronies, but when the push came to shove, their loyalty to the state was greater than their loyalty to the regime. The same was true in Tunisia.

Saddam, on the other hand, could always count on two armed groups whose ONLY reason for being was their loyalty to him: the Republican Guard, and the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam. As they showed while putting down the Shi'ite uprising after the Kuwait war, these forces were perfectly happy to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis on his orders.'

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/02/23/could-the-arab-revolution-have-removed-saddam/#ixzz1ExhllkU2

Thanks RhusLancia for posting over at Zeyad's Healing Iraq.

Fedayeen Saddam were not formed until after 1991. Otherwise Bobby Ghosh is right. Fedayeen was just another tool Saddam & Sons used to control Iraqis. Saddam was stronger in 2003 than he was in 1991.

I asked my my mom a couple of weeks ago if she thought Saddam would have fallen as easily as Mubarak. She said maybe not as easily, but she thinks eventually he would have fallen. I didn't have time to talk about 1991, but I disagree with her. Saddam had already brutally put down a major uprising in 1991 and he had a firm grip on Iraq in 2003. Saddam might have been overthrown if Iraq's Sunni Arabs, including his Republican Guard and Fedayeen, had been united with the Shia and Kurds to overthrow Saddam.

Any Saddam fans support Qaddafi?

I remember some Arabs, including a few Iraqis, who implied that Saddam's crushing of the armed rebellion in 1991 was natural and justified, given that the rebels wanted to overthrow their government. I wonder if they would say the same thing about the armed rebellion taking place in Libya today. Where are you, Saddam fans? Qaddafi needs your help.

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Saddam's atrocities after 1991 uprising

A reminder of what Saddam's regime did to Iraq's Kurds and Marsh Arabs after the uprising of 1991. I hope Qaddafi does not survive like Saddam did after 1991.

Opportunity for regime change squandered in 1991

Dr. Geoffrey Wawro: 'Having seemed to settle on limited aims, Bush casually expanded them, enjoining Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam. His actual words were not stirring—"In my own view, I've always said it would be—that the Iraqi people should put him aside and that would facilitate the resolution of all these problems that exist, and would certainly facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations"—but they sufficed to trigger an uprising, which further complicated the war's termination. Suddenly the U.S. was responsible for all of those rebels answering Bush's call to arms. Yet at the Safwan negotiations, Schwarzkopf carelessly authorized the Iraqis to use helicopter gunships on their side of the cease-fire line. The Iraqi generals were so surprised by that concession— which permitted them to strafe and rocket Kurds and Shiites from the air—that one of the Iraqi generals incredulously asked: "So you mean even the helicopters that are armed can fly in the Iraqi skies?" Having first foresworn a breakup of Iraq and then encouraged one, the Bush administration spent the last days of the conflict watching its would-be insurgents being hunted into "no-fly zones" and debating what to do. Bush finally accepted Scowcroft's position that he must leave Iraq united and reasonably strong to balance Iranian power. Powell and Schwarzkopf warned against any "Lebanonization" of Iraq that, as Powell put it, would leave Washington to "sort out 2,000 years of Mesopotamian history." It's too bad they didn't enforce that view until after all of those Iraqis had been driven from their homes and slaughtered.

Overall, Bush 41's careless termination of the Persian Gulf War arguably sowed the seeds of the Bush 43 administration's invasion of Iraq. No demand was made for the surrender of WMD. The Republican Guard pulled off a "desert Dunkirk" to fight another day. Neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, who served in Cheney's Pentagon and protested the mildness of the war's end, were later emboldened to go "all the way" in Iraq, reasoning that great opportunities for regime change had been squandered in 1991.'

Unfinished business from 1991

Geoffrey Wawro: 'Bush called for a "clean end." The main thing, Bush insisted, was to avoid "charges of brutalization," of piling on just to kill Iraqis in the war's last hours. Secretary of State Baker concurred: "We have done the job. We can stop. We have achieved our aims. We have gotten them out of Kuwait." But, like everyone else in the room, Baker worried about "unfinished business." What would become of the Saddam Hussein regime? Would the Americans give it a shove, or let it stand? In Riyadh, Schwarzkopf was declaring victory at the Hyatt Hotel -- "the gates are closed ... we almost completely destroyed the offensive capability of the Iraqi forces" -- and assuring the press that going to Baghdad was not in the cards. That ingenuous revelation prompted a startled protest from Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, who agreed that the allies probably weren't going to Baghdad, but considered it foolhardy to tell that to the Iraqis. Wolfowitz and the other "Washington hawks" -- the future neo-cons -- were still hoping for a coup, and wanted to keep pressure on Saddam.

In Riyadh, the deputy Centcom commander, General Calvin Waller, also expressed amazement at Washington's hasty, charitable concession of a cease-fire, when only about half of the Republican Guard's equipment had been destroyed, and before the last bridges over the Euphrates had been demolished, effectively bottling up the Iraqi army, most of which was still south of Basra, squarely in the sights of the U.S. forces. American planners had planned to disarm and dismount the Iraqis and then send them streaming back into Iraq on foot. That was the kind of image that would humiliate Saddam and rock his regime. "You have got to be shitting me. Why a cease-fire now?" Waller expostulated. "One hundred hours has a nice ring," Schwarzkopf chuckled. "That's bullshit," Waller said. "Then you go argue with them," Schwarzkopf said. "Them" was the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, and the Bush White House. Schwarzkopf had never squared off against Powell and was not about to begin now. Powell set the tone in the J.C.S., and talked the other chiefs into an early end to the war. Desert Storm had evicted Saddam from Kuwait and erased the stain of Vietnam, so why fight on?

Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrill McPeak privately protested the "merciful clemency" offered Saddam, but publicly supported Powell. President Bush too wanted to quit while he was ahead. In Washington, the analogy on everyone's mind was not Vietnam, but Korea, where a limited American war -- to evict the North Koreans from the south -- had slipped (under MacArthur's gung-ho influence) into an unlimited struggle to destroy the North Korean communists that had dragged on bloodily and inconclusively for three years and then left American troops as a permanent fixture in South Korea. Few wanted to risk this easy victory and expand American liabilities by rolling the dice and pushing north to Baghdad. Powell ridiculed the notion: it was not as if "a lot of little Jeffersonian democrats would have popped up to run for office" in Baghdad on America's coattails. Still, Bush felt tension and incompleteness everywhere. "Why do I not feel elated?" President Bush asked aloud. He knew why. The instigator of the war had survived to fight another day, and there was little that Bush could do to change that outcome. In his diary, Bush wrote of his anger at seeing Baghdad Radio broadcasting victory even as U.S. forces trounced the Iraqis. But the coalition would not support continued combat in Iraq or Kuwait merely to "destroy Iraqi forces," nor would many Americans. The war was not cheap either; 390 Americans had died in combat, and the bill for the war stood at about $620 billion. "We need to have an end. People want that. They are going to want to know that we won and that the kids can come home. We don't want to screw this up with a sloppy, muddled ending." Within a year, two-thirds of Americans would come to believe that President Bush had terminated the war too soon, and the unresolved issue would contribute to Bush's defeat in the elections of 1992.

The Hundred Hour War ground to an equivocal close, over Paul Wolfowitz's recondite objection that "100-hour war" would be a politically disastrous term since it would evoke memories of the 100-hour Franco-British-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. ("Would 99-hour war be better?" Cheney joked.) Bush had confidently predicted that the Iraqi "troops will straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000," but they were more numerous than that, and they had extricated lots of armor. American surveillance photos of southern Iraq revealed the depressing news that Saddam had pulled one-quarter of his tanks and half of his APCs from Kuwait. Worse, the tanks that escaped were largely Republican Guard. Indeed the Republican Guard divisions in Kuwait had pulled off a desert Dunkirk, extricating 80,000 troops with large numbers of tanks, helicopters, and heavy guns.

"The end game: it was bad," McCaffrey recalled. "First of all, there was confusion. The objectives were unclear. And the sequence was wrong." Ordinary Iraqis expressed wonderment at Saddam's continued hold on power. Retreating troops fired their AK-47s into the portraits and murals of Saddam that lined their routes home. An Iraqi cement worker muttered: "Kuwait destroyed by Saddam. Iraq destroyed by combined forces. But Saddam is still in his chair." The Shiites of southern Iraq, who had begun to seethe even before the ground war, exploded into rebellion after the cease-fire. Saddam was weakened and discredited. The moment to rise up had arrived. In northern Iraq, the Kurds made the same calculation. They took President Bush's awkward March 1 declaration as a call to action: "In my own view, I've always said it would be - that the Iraqi people should put him aside and that would facilitate the resolution of all these problems that exist, and would certainly facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations."

But even as he incited the Iraqis to rebel, Bush rejected any push to Baghdad and conceded Saddam the use of armed helicopters on his side of the border. Saddam promptly exploited the American concession not to hop-scotch over shattered roads and bridges but to blast his rebellious subjects from the air. Bush 41 expressed again his mixed feelings about Desert Storm, this time to a (startled) White House press conference: "You know, to be very honest with you, I haven't yet felt this wonderfully euphoric feeling that many of the American people feel." The father's doubts would sow the son's resolve to, as Bush 41 concluded, "cross the last 't' and dot the last 'i.'" '

In 1991 Americans were moved by a lie

They thought it was the truth at the time.

'By September 1990, 80 percent of Americans supported Operation Desert Shield, which belied Powell's hand-wringing about scant "popular support." Most Americans recognized the need to defend the Western world's energy security. Americans were also moved by a largely spurious $11 million P.R. campaign paid for by the Kuwaiti government and crafted by Hill & Knowlton. Its most effective piece of propaganda was a lie: that Iraqi soldiers had entered Kuwaiti hospitals, yanked newborn babies out of their incubators and dashed them on the floor before packing up the equipment for shipment to Iraq. That lie was retailed by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., who pretended to be a Kuwaiti nurse who had witnessed the Iraqi atrocities. In fact, she was not a nurse and had not even been in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded. Nevertheless, senators and congressmen swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. Many of them referenced it when explaining their votes in support of the war, which was narrowly authorized by the Senate 52-47 and by the House 250-183 on January 12, 1991.'

1991 Gulf War oil spill largest in history?

This article claims that the 1991 Gulf War oil spill is the largest in history: "The Gulf War oil spill, when Saddam Hussein intentionally spilled oil into the Persian Gulf, resulted in anywhere from 240 million to 460 million gallons of crude oil poured into the Gulf. It remains the world’s largest oil spill today."

I was surprised to see that today because just a few weeks ago, while writing the post Humans can be quite stupid, I read this Wikipedia article, which at the time listed the Gulf War oil spill as the third largest in history. The list of the largest oil spills in that Wiki entry has since been updated to include "Kuwaiti oil fires" and "Kuwaiti oil lakes". The Wiki article claims that an incredible 42-63 BILLION gallons of oil were burned in 1991, and a further 1-2 billion gallons of oil were spilled from sabotaged fields in Kuwait that year. One billion gallons is more than five times the amount of oil spilled as a result of the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Until now I did not know that so much oil was burned in 1991 (more than 200 times the amount spilled by Deepwater Horizon), and I did not know that Saddam's saboteurs discharged millions of barrels of oil directly into the Persian Gulf. The burning of dozens of billions of gallons of oil may not be considered a spill by some, but it's definitely a waste and a huge spike in emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Those environmentally damaging acts of sabotage alone should have been reason enough to overthrow Saddam in 1991.

Iraq to compensate US victims of Saddam

I wonder when Iraqi victims of Saddam will be compensated. $400 million is a large amount of money. That's $16 per Iraqi, assuming an Iraqi population of 25 million. So Iraqi victims of Saddam have to pay American victims of Saddam. It seems strange.

'Iraq has agreed to financial compensation for Americans who say they were mistreated by executed dictator Saddam Hussein's regime during the 1990-91 Gulf war, the US embassy said on Saturday.

"The agreement was signed on September 2," US Embassy spokesman David Ranz said.

He could not confirm the size of the settlement, but the Christian Science Monitor reported that Baghdad had agreed to hand over 400 million dollars (314 million euros) in compensation.

The deal was signed between Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and US Ambassador to Baghdad Jim Jeffrey.

Iraq's August 2, 1990 assault on neighbouring Kuwait was rapidly met with a concerted international military response that pushed Saddam's forces out of the emirate and eventually ended in his ouster by a US-led coalition in 2003.

Several US citizens were held by Saddam's regime during the war over Kuwait and used as human shields to deter coalition attacks, with some claiming they were mistreated and tortured by Saddam's forces.'

Mass grave found in southern Iraq

"Iraq's Human Rights Ministry says a Saddam Hussein-era mass grave dating to his 1991 suppression of a Shiite revolt has been unearthed in the south.

Ministry's spokesman Kamil Ameen says government teams working on an irrigation project found the grave in an agricultural area in Maysan province.

Ameen told The Associated Press Tuesday that about 20 bodies were unearthed. The irrigation project has been put on hold until the excavation is complete.

Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppling Saddam's regime, mass graves have been found across Iraq.

Following Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf War, Iraq's Shiites revolted in the south, but were brutally suppressed. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have been killed."

Leaving Saddam in power in 1991 was morally insensible

William F . Buckley in April 1991: "Mr. Bush never hesitated in the month before his great victory to pronounce Saddam Hussein to be a "Hitler." The general sentiment is that Hitlers cannot be left to run whole countries, even countries whose destructive potential has been vastly reduced. Iraq is no longer in position to threaten Kuwait, or Israel; but the government of Saddam is well positioned to continue barbarous treatment of those Iraqis whom we encouraged to revolt against him. To be indifferent to their needs when we have sitting in the area the heaviest military concentration since the invasion of Normandy strikes many people who aren't given to thinking in geopolitical grids as morally insensible.

On the matter of the UN mandate, Resolution 686 authorizes the coalition to move against Iraq to cause it to "Cease hostile or provocative actions by its forces against all member states and other parties, including missile attacks and flights of combat aircraft." The rebels would surely qualify as "other parties." And the helicopters which General Schwarzkopf said he had been "suckered" into permitting the Iraqis to use are certainly combat aircraft, and are being used against Iraqis courageous enough to align themselves with the coalition. They are volunteers, answering the mobilization call of George Bush.

The objection that other members of the coalition would not sanction shooting down Saddam's helicopters being used to shoot Iraqi rebels is by no means obvious. In Great Britain, the press is highly mobilized in opposition to inaction. The Kurds do not constitute a threat to Turkey, and in any event are asking not for independence, but merely for more autonomy. Syria is frozen in the existing situation, and Israel has every reason to hope for the quick extinction of the neighboring dictator who threatened to pulverize Israel only a year ago. The geopolitical argument in favor of withdrawal is subsumed in the moral argument in favor of liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein."