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Saddam's dead baby parade

Doctors say Hussein, not UN sanctions, caused children's deaths

Throughout the 13 years of UN sanctions on Iraq that were ended yesterday, Iraqi doctors told the world that the sanctions were the sole cause for the rocketing mortality rate among Iraqi children.

"It is one of the results of the embargo," Dr. Ghassam Rashid Al-Baya told Newsday on May 9, 2001, at Baghdad's Ibn Al-Baladi hospital, just after a dehydrated baby named Ali Hussein died on his treatment table. "This is a crime on Iraq."

It was a scene repeated in hundreds of newspaper articles by reporters required to be escorted by minders from Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information.

Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children's deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies' corpses to have them publicly paraded.

The fighting words of the left, pre-dating the war, were sanctions killed all those Iraqis, not Saddam.

The U.S. starved the babies. The U.S. was killing the children and poor people of Iraq.

Under the sanctions regime, "We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed," said Ibn Al-Baladi's chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. "Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt - but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces."

How is the left going to spin this? Are they going to call it a lie? Propaganda? Another conspiracy by "BushCo?"

This is what many of us have been saying all along. Saddam killed his own people. Saddam starved them, kept medicines from them. But the left laughed in our faces and scolded us for believing in filthy lies.

Turns out they aren't lies after all. And we were right.

Just as with the teary-eyed people who decried the massive looting of the Iraq museum that turned out not to be a massive looting, the left will react to this news one of two ways; they will either be disturbingly quiet or they will drum up some fantasy laden web of distorted facts and claim that this story is fake.

"Saddam Hussein, he's the murderer, not the UN," said Dr. Azhar Abdul Khadem, a resident at the Al-Alwiya maternity hospital in Baghdad.

Doctors said they were forced to refrigerate dead babies in hospital morgues until authorities were ready to gather the little corpses for monthly parades in coffins on the roofs of taxis for the benefit of Iraqi state television and visiting journalists. The parents were ordered to wail with grief - no matter how many weeks had passed since their babies had died - and to shout to the cameras that the sanctions had killed their children, the doctors said. Afterward, the parents would be rewarded with food or money.

Read the rest, as they say. It's quite telling.

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