Abuse worse than under Saddam
Abuse worse than under Saddam, says Iraqi leader
"Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime. 'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.
Comments
You cannot free a despot's henchmen and expect them to live in decency when they have no control's or examples of common decency.
I still think that no matter when the coalition that has created this fiasco exits, we will see a civil war that is beyond anything we can comprehend. There is no strength in the leadership that has been developed by the pseudo-electoral process purple ink on the finger process to date. How can we expect more in the next election tha takes place in December?
There has been no attempt to rid the country of the most obvious weapons of mass destruction - racial and ethnic hatred buried within the hearts of the various religious and cultural factions of this, for centuries, deeply divided country.
Anger and hatred that cannot be legislated away. Nor will it step aside so that Operation Iraqi Liberation can succeed. That is, allow internatinoal interests to liberate the O.I.L. reserves of the country for any purpose. I believe the hatred runs so pervasively that even if it means economic destruction, factions of various groups will do their best to prevent peace - long after the last Bradley fighting vehicle has rolled onto a ship/plane and the green zone has turned brown.
The United States had/has no exit strategy - and no real rebuilding plan - so it seems. So all that can be done is cut and run.
When the remnants of Saddam's "elite forces"' saw what the supposed leaders of Democracy do to prisoners, I am sure they felt that there was no reason to abate their previous practices. In fact, I am sure it encouraged them to follow the same tactics with the assurance that their actions would be ignored or rewarded.
The Iraqi people have been trained for a generation to fear authority and government - those fears cannot and will not fade because a few statues were toppled and mosaic imaged were urinated upon. That fear will only fade when they know that they can move about with the fear of disappearing and not returning and/or being able to live normal lives. Even the normalcy that existed under the dictatorship of Saddam.
At least then they knew that the despot and his henchmen were the ones in uniforms.
Allawi's a hypocrite. Those abuses were well established while he was Interim Prime Minister. The only difference then was that US forces looked on in approval. I still remember his govt gloating about how many detainees they had. Any sickness that exists now in the Interior Ministry he had a hand in creating.
Many are saying what is now going on in Iraq is worse than the situation they had in Iraq under Sadaam. Personnally I find this hard to believe but you see it said on the news all the time. Many Iraqi citizens say Human Rights issues are being neglected in many outlying areas of Iraq. I also am reading how Iran is becoming moreinfluential inside of Iraq, this can only leed to more fundamentalism in the government. Raymond B www.voteswagon.com
Is moving from secular torture to sectarian torture really an improvement? Thank you America, god-inspired torture is just what Iraq was crying out for.
So no weapons of mass destruction, no link to Al Qaida, no threat to America.... Hmmmm, free the people from a mad tyrant who uses torture? Bummer, that didn't work either.
Okay, Mr. Bush, it's time to start explaining this war. Over 2000 Americans and, by some estimates, over 100,000 Iraqis have died. What the hell are we doing there?!
"There has been no attempt to rid the country of the most obvious weapons of mass destruction - racial and ethnic hatred buried within the hearts of the various religious and cultural factions of this, for centuries, deeply divided country"
Gee, that makes such a nice t-shirt. And how wonderful that what you suggest is an impossibility, so you can safely occupy that self-righteous moral highground without having to come up with an actual plan.
One thing the 60's proved: hippies are great at coming up with touchy-feely mission statements.
One thing that is certain is that the only thing keeping the people in that country from civil war, at any time, has been one form of control or another. Be it Saddam or the presence of the US military.
It really must be wonderful to be an armchair philosopher because every situation that results gives you so many opportunities to sniff and posit. Saddam stays? We should do something about that brutal man! Saddam goes? We shouldn't have done anything about that brutal man! Such a flexible position.