Call me a cynic, but......
This story outlining Saddam's crimes against humanity and a mass grave of 28 bodies just suddenly appears on the front page of the NYTimes in the week following all the Haditha press and other allegations of excessive force, and, it's apparently sourced to the Army Corps of Engineers.
Did you get the talking points clearly enough? Not only was Saddam horribly evil, far worse than anything the US might have done, and it was a lack of courage in George the Better in "not finishing the fight" that caused this to happen.
Now, it has to be said that John Burns is a top notch war correspondent, but after years of no reporting on any of the mass grave sites, suddenly it's a big front page story?
Later: Rereading the article, I think we get a pretty good sense of who generated the story idea, "American officials who brought two reporters to the desert grave site on Saturday,"
What happened here is not only a macabre marker in the history of Iraq under Mr. Hussein, but a harrowing footnote in American politics. The victims here, American and Iraqi officials say, died in Mr. Hussein's suppression of the Shiite uprising across southern Iraq in early 1991. It was a rebellion that survivors — and American critics of the President George H. W. Bush — say that the president encouraged after halting American troops at Iraq's southern border with Kuwait at the end of the Persian Gulf war.
Did you get the talking points clearly enough? Not only was Saddam horribly evil, far worse than anything the US might have done, and it was a lack of courage in George the Better in "not finishing the fight" that caused this to happen.
Now, it has to be said that John Burns is a top notch war correspondent, but after years of no reporting on any of the mass grave sites, suddenly it's a big front page story?
Later: Rereading the article, I think we get a pretty good sense of who generated the story idea, "American officials who brought two reporters to the desert grave site on Saturday,"
posted by mikevotes at
10:05 PM
2 Comments:
I think your reading is correct, not cynical.
I agree that George Bush I was complicit in that massacre. We may be trying to turn it into a talking point now in favor of George II, but George the Elder did leave them twisting in the wind after egging them on.
I can't understand why Saddam isn't being tried for gassing the Kurds at Halabja. That's what we always point to when we talk about how evel he is.
By
Anonymous, at 8:07 AM
To your first point, I found it very interesting the way that article soft pedaled Bush I promises of support for the 91 Shia uprising. The US had promised air support, intel and aid if the Shia rose up, but pulled back after the Saudis said no. But that was after the Shia had begun, leaving them alone and outgunned only to be massacred by Saddam.
And on Halabja, I don't know. I have a guess, though. Those gas weapons were constructed from raw materials and technology supplied by American and European corporations. That complicity has thus far been pretty well masked, and the revelation would further unglue the motivations for the war.
But, maybe I'm just a cynic.
Mike
By
mikevotes, at 8:52 AM
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