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Five weeks before the November
2004 election, Senator Ted Kennedy said on the floor
of the Senate:
“President Bush's record on Iraq is clearly costing
American lives and endangering America and the
world. Our President won't change or even admit how
wrong he has been and still is. Despite the long
line of mistaken blunders and outright deception,
there has been no accountability. As Election Day
draws closer, the buck is circling more and more
closely over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Only a new
President can right the extraordinary wrongs of the
Bush administration on our foreign policy and our
national security.
“On November 2, the American people will decide
whether they still have confidence in this
President's leadership. When we ask ourselves the
fundamental question, whether President Bush has
made us safer, there can only be one answer. No, he
has not. That is why America needs new leadership.
We could have been, and we should have been much
safer than we are today.”
It appears that the American people decided on
November 2, 2004 that Sen. Kennedy was wrong and
President Bush was right about Iraq and America’s
security. Only – Kennedy isn’t man enough to admit
it, even after what he said day after day during his
2004 campaigning against Bush from the Senate floor.
Over the week-end, President Bush was asked by the
Washington Post “why no one in his administration
had been held accountable for perceived missteps on
Iraq policy.” The President replied:
“The American people listened to different
assessments made about what was taking place in
Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates and
chose me, for which I'm grateful."
That reply infuriated Kennedy who said that was
“ridiculous” and asked if America was now “a force
that is perceived to be expanding the kind of
uncertainty and savagery and revolution that's
taking place there?" He also charged that “U.S.
soldiers are bogged down in a quagmire with no end
in sight” in Iraq.
Kennedy characterizing America’s ouster of the
murdering butcher Saddam Hussein as “savagery” while
ignoring Saddam Hussein’s 20 year regime of
genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and torture
is nothing short of treason. In those 20 years about
5% of the people of Iraq were killed or mysteriously
disappeared never to be seen again after being
arrested. Since liberation, hundreds of thousands of
the “disappeared” have been found - in Iraq in mass
graves.
The war crimes and chemical weapons of Saddam
Hussein were the subject of a talk given by U.S. War
Crimes Ambassador David J. Scheffer at the National
Press Club. Scheffer, on September 18, 2000, when he
was working for a Democrat President Bill Clinton.
Scheffer, listed 8 specific incidents of war crimes
to illustrate what he called “the magnitude” of
Saddam Hussein’s “criminal record.” Scheffer said
that Hussein’s “criminal record” goes to the “very
heart of why his conduct deserves an international
response.” The eight points of evidence
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/2000/09/iraq-000918.htm
>Scheffer listed were:
1. The Iran-Iraq War in which approximately
5,000 Iranians were killed with chemical weapons
between 1983-1988, plus the several thousand Iranian
prisoners of war killed by Hussein. (In the “legal”
part of the war between these two powerful Muslim
nations, 200,000 Iraqis died and over 300,000
Iranians died. They are not counted in Scheffer’s
report on war crimes.)
2. The dropping of chemical weapons on the
Kurdish city of Halaja in Iraq in March of 1988,
that killed over 5,000 civilians. The U.S.
government has satellite photos of the carnage. The
http://www.kurd.org/halabja/>
Kurds have since reported
that five to seven thousand people of 80,000
inhabitants died immediately and a further 20,000 to
30,000 were injured, many severely. Initial studies
indicate approximately 52% of current inhabitants
were exposed at the time of the chemical warhead
attack on Halaja.
3. The Anfal campaigns, also against the
Kurds, when Chemical Ali, Hussein’s cousin, was
given the orders to slaughter the Kurds. Somewhere
between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds were killed.
Scheffer called it genocide.
4. The invasion and occupation of Kuwait on
August 2, 1990 in which Saddam Hussein’s forces
killed more than 1000 Kuwaiti nationals, and an
uncounted number from other nations while launching
the environmental crime “such as the destruction of
oil wells in Kuwait’s oil fields. War crimes also
were committed against other nationals in an “effort
to coerce their governments into pro-Iraqi
policies.”
5. In 1991, when the United Nations failed to
approve the actual removal of Saddam Hussein from
power, from 30,000 to 60,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly
Kurds and Shiites were killed.
6. In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein drained
the southern marshes, which deprived over 100,000
people of their livelihood and their ability to live
on land their ancestors had lived on for thousands
of years.
7. The ethnic cleansing of Persians and other
non-Arabs from Iraq,
8. The killing, torturing and raping of
political opponents and their wives and daughters
and the disappearance of 300,000 people, the remains
of many of whom have been found in mass graves
following Iraq’s liberation in 2003.
9. And, according to
http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/pdf/iraq_mass_graves.pdf>a
booklet written by the U.S. Agency for International
Development approximately 400,000 Iraqi civilians
were seized by Saddam Hussein’s various “security”
organizations and simply never heard from again
Iraq, a country approximately the size of
California, but with only 2/3rd its population,
suffered more than a million violent deaths under
Saddam Hussein’s regime. That would average out at
about 50,000 deaths a year in a population of 25
million before the Americans got involved. In the
two years since the Americans have been fighting in
Iraq, 13,650 Iraqis, have been killed, many of them
by terrorist attacks by their own countrymen. Others
were by military action. That averages out at 6, 825
deaths per year in a population of 25 million.
So, the mostly American liberation of Iraq dropped
the rate of violent deaths from 50,000 a year under
Saddam Hussein to 6,825 a year with the Americans in
Baghdad. What Kennedy has labeled as American
“savagery” has REDUCED deaths from violence in Iraq
by 87%.
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