The two Saddams

[ProSense]

Bush's Saddam: an evil tyrant who gassed his own people and needed to be removed from office, even if it meant lying and starting an illegal war.

Clinton's Saddam: A man who would have fed his people (oil for food) if only the evil Clinton hadn't upheld sanctions.

[zbdent]

1. Third (actually, First) Saddam

Reagan's Saddam: A secular ally in our war against the spread of communism and extremist Islamic terrorists from Iran (look away from the fact that he was gassing his own people and torturing them)

[ProSense]

2. Thanks for adding.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2382812&mesg_id=2382812

[zbdent]

3. Hey, DU has been a great source of stuff that Repukes want to forget

so I help out when I can . . .

[ProSense]

4. Interesting article

Saddam manipulated everything. Given the current Clinton criticism, why didn't Bush Jr. lift the sanctions Bush Sr. implemented? Does anyone really believe war is better than sanctions, especially an illegal war?

Were Sanctions Right?

By David Rieff*
New York Times
July 27, 2003

snip...

Most Iraqis and most outside observers agree that food was the area in which Saddam Hussein's government coped best with sanctions. Kenny Gluck, a seasoned American relief worker who is now the operations director for the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders, remarked to me recently, ''You can't say too many bad things about Saddam Hussein, but give the devil his due: on the food issue, he responded very capably.''

snip...

One doctor I spoke to who spent several years in a hospital in the provincial city of Baquba, about 25 miles north of Baghdad, told me that the hospital staff had instructions, whenever a child died, to keep the corpse in the morgue rather than burying it immediately as mandated by Islamic custom. ''When a sufficient number of bodies accumulated,'' he explained, ''the authorities would stage a mass funeral, railing against the sanctions, even though as often as not there was no connection between a particular child's death and the sanctions.''

snip...

I inquired whether there had been other manipulations of the system to make things seem worse than they had really been. ''Of course,'' he replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ''It happened all the time. For example, we would get a shipment from the Ministry of Health of vaccines provided by the World Health Organization. But then we would be instructed not to use them until they had reached or even exceeded their sell-by date. Then the television cameras would come, and we would be told to lie and tell the public how the U.N. made ordinary Iraqis suffer. You have to understand: this was a system where everyone knew what was expected of them. Most of the time, we didn't even have to be told what to do.''

snip...

One may disagree with the policies the present administration has followed with regard to Iraq -- policies that have led to a brilliantly successful war and a staggeringly inept postwar occupation. But to its credit, at least it had a policy, one partly based on the understanding that Iraq sanctions may have contained Hussein, but they had failed at weakening his grip on his country. Brent Scowcroft is right that without the sanctions the American victory in the second gulf war might very well not have been as smooth. The embargo does seem to have achieved the goal subsequently advanced for it as a rationale; that is, to keep Hussein ''in his box'' and to prevent him from developing weapons of mass destruction. (Of course, the absence of weapons of mass destruction bolsters the case for sanctions but vitiates the stated case for the war itself.)

More...

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/2003/0727right.htm