Nirvana wrote:There are estamates coming from out of Iraq itself saying that throughout Saddam's regime he killed over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens, Kurdish or not. None of the countries you listed, except for the Sudan who might match, can match or even come close to this number.
Here is some information on the 1990's famine in North Korea.
Now, a famine is certainly not the same as gassing or other forms of intentional massacre. However, it is pretty clear that Kim Il Sung's ruling practices made this into an incredibly major and tragic event, with hundreds of thousands if not millions dieing. I think it is fair to place the blame for a huge number of these deaths with the government, and to describe it as a from of 'massacre by neglect.'
Regarding Burma,
this site contains some information on the long-standing problems there, including the following:
According to the 1948 convention, in order to prove the junta guilty, Horton must demonstrate that it has committed genocide in one of five ways. The first is "killing members of the group." Most experts estimate that several thousand ethnic minorities have been killed annually for the past 50 years. In a rare moment of candor in 1989, the chairman of the junta acknowledged that the death toll "would reach as high as millions." He was discussing total deaths in the long-running battle, including Burman soldiers, but a high percentage of the dead are ethnic minorities.
Several thousand per year with a total of up to a million is certainly in the ball park of what we are talking about with Saddam.
Although not current, in the not too distant past, Guatemala and Chile both deserve mention as places where there were incredible human rights abuses. I think it is fair to say that the U.S. aided and abetted these abuses in both instances.
THis site has estimates for a long list of 20th century conflicts. For Guatemala, they report that approximately 200,000 were killed in the period from 1960-1996.
Suffice it to say that Saddam was very bad, and arguably among the worst of rulers in the present decade as far as human rights abuses. Whether he was in another league, compared to some of the other countries mentioned, seems to be debatable.
I think it is fair to say that the U.S. has certainly not been consistent about using its power to promote human rights around the world, and in many cases, we have contributed to a great extent to human rights abuses that have occurred.
At any rate, it certainly does not seem clear that the nature of the abuses in Iraq, although clearly egregious, justified the war, if we use past or present history of interventions by the U.S. as a guide.
Vladd wrote:War is never just. War is the result of reasonable people to find a solution. When war is the solution we have all failed.
I agree. One can certainly make a very good case that war is sometimes necessary or inevitable, but it clearly represents a failure to solve the problem by other means.
In the case of Iraq, we did not even allow the possibility of failure or success with respect to the non-violent processes that were under way. We simply pre-empted the possibilities by going to war, IMHO.[/url]
