A Small Victory

Why Saddam must go

From the Britisish dossier collected on the brutal regime:

Methods of torture include eye gouging, piercing of hands with electric drill, suspension from ceiling, electric shock, sexual abuse and acid baths. The torture is not limited to adults. There are first hand accounts of children being tortured by the regime, including one two year old girl whose feet were crushed by soldiers while the intorregated her mother.

There was the woman who was tortured while her children were made to watch; cigarettes were put out on her body and she was beaten and thrown about the room.

Women's heads have been cut off in the street. Babies are taken away from women who will not submit to demands.

Executions are carried out without due process of law. Relatives have been made to pay for the bullets used for the execution of their family members.

Male relatives are allowed to kill a female relative out of honor without any punishment.

Raping female political prisoners is a standard practice of the regime.

Between 1987 and 1988, at least 60 Kurd villages were attacked with mustard gas, nerve gas or a combination of both.

Penalties for criminal offenses include branding and amputation, including amputation of the tongue.

Need I go on?

How do you appease a regime like this? How do you reason with them? Most of all, how can you trust them?

The answer to all three is, you don't.

And you don't wait until the moment they decide they want to exact their way of life on you before you go after them. You do it now, before it's too late, before any more innocent Iraqis are tortured, before more children are beaten, before more men are starved to death in holding cells.

You don't wait until they launch the weapons of mass desctruction. In the name of democracy, in the name of future peace, in the name of all those tortured and killed every day by a ruthless leader you do it now. Before they come for you.

update: From reader Sondra, a very graphic, very depressing site dealing with the March 1988 Iraqi chemical attack on Halabja.