And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

-          Revelation 6:7-8

History and archeologists tell us that Mesopotamia was one of the earliest cradles of civilization. Cities, or settlements which became cities, existed in Mesopotamia from 5500 BC. The earlier cities lay in the northern part of Iraq, and in northeastern Syria. The Sumerians developed one of the world's first systems of monarchy; the early states they formed, the very first states in human history, needed a new form of government in order to govern larger areas and diverse peoples. Empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians rose and fell. Abraham, whom both the Jews and the Arabs claim as their ancestor, was born here before he migrated to Canaan.

On Friday I watched television coverage of the bombing of Baghdad. I’m still trying to come to grips with what I felt and what I am feeling. As I watched the complex of buildings on the western bank of the Tigris being blown to bits by precision guided bombs and cruise missiles, I didn’t feel any sense of retribution. I didn’t feel any justice being meted out. Nor did I feel any sense of revulsion at the devastation being rained down upon a city of 5 million souls. I sat in our office lunchroom hoping beyond hope that none of our pilots would be shot down and that the bombs would find their proper targets and spare innocent civilians who have already suffered for decades under a tyrannical regime. But mostly I felt a sense of hopeless emptiness. The same kind of emptiness I felt staring into the maw of the hole that used to be the World Trade Center. So this is the New World Disorder, and our country is condemned to be at the epicenter of it.

I have been thinking about all of the compromises that got us to this point, all of the playing off one lesser evil against another greater evil. That’s the world of diplomacy. That’s the world of international relations on a planet that’s getting smaller all the time while its people seem to keep growing further apart. I was thinking about some of the so-called great thinkers of diplomacy I studied in college like Machiavelli and Metternich. I thought about what a mess they made out of Europe and how it culminated in a worldwide conflagration that cost millions of lives, the kind of giant Petri dish that breeds a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mussolini and a Franco. They say war doesn’t solve anything, but it took a war to solve Nazism and Fascism.

Well we’re in the middle of it now. We’re using war to solve a problem that was the creation of years of compromises and looking the other way, not just by this country, but by all of our allies, pretend friends and opponents as well. The hundreds of thousands of protesters, who were noticeably invisible before the troops were committed, are now decrying the “fact” that we are killing innocent Iraqi civilians. Yet you hear nothing from them about the atrocities which Saddam Hussein and his henchmen regularly visited on the Iraqi people. All of these have been chronicled over the years by Amnesty International which is certainly not considered a right-wing mouthpiece.

Over the years Saddam Hussein and his regime have systematically used torture against political detainees in Iraqi prisons and detention centers. These acts have not only been in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Iraq ratified in 1971, which states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”(Article 7), but also Iraq’s own laws prohibit the use of torture. Article 22(a) of Iraq’s Interim Constitution states that “the dignity of the person is safeguarded. It is inadmissible to cause any physical or psychological harm”. Article 127 of the Code of Criminal Procedure states that “it is not permissible to use any illegal means to influence the accused to secure his statement. Mistreatment, threatening to harm, inducement, threats, menace, psychological influence, and the use of narcotics, intoxicants and drugs are all considered illegal means.” In fact the Iraqi Penal Code criminalizes the use of torture by any public servant. Yet political prisoners have been subjected to systematic torture including electric shocks to various parts of their bodies, including the genitals, ears, the tongue and fingers. Victims have been beaten with canes, whips, hosepipe or metal rods and how they have been suspended for hours from either a rotating fan in the ceiling or from a horizontal pole often in contorted positions as electric shocks were applied repeatedly on their bodies. Some victims had been forced to watch others, including their own relatives or family members, being tortured in front of them. Victims have been beaten on the soles of their feet, had cigarettes extinguished on various parts of the body, fingernails and toenails extracted and hands pierced with an electric drill. Some have been sexually abused and others have had objects, including broken bottles, forced into their anus. In addition to physical torture, detainees have been threatened with rape and subjected to mock execution. They have been placed in cells where they could hear the screams of others being tortured and have been deprived of sleep. Some have stayed in solitary confinement for long periods of time. Detainees have also been threatened with bringing in a female relative, especially the wife or the mother, and raping her in front of the detainee. Some of these threats have been carried out. This is just a summary. The details recounted in Amnesty International’s various reports are even more sickening:

click here for more if you can stomach it

Ann Clwyd, a Labor Party Member of Parliament related an eyewitness account of Iraqi torture in a recent article in The Times Online:

“There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders.”

Saddam Hussein has routinely used assassination of political opponents as a tool to remain in power. He has routinely used poisonous chemical weapons against the people of Iraq and Iran. According to Clwyd, for more than 20 years, senior Iraqi officials have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list includes far more than the gassing of 5,000 in Halabja and other villages in 1988. It includes serial war crimes during the Iran-Iraq war; the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88; the invasion of Kuwait and the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians; the violent suppression, which she witnessed, of the 1991 Kurdish uprising that led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths; the draining of the Southern Marshes during the 1990s, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Shias; and the summary executions of thousands of political opponents.

Saddam Hussein has invaded the sovereignty of neighboring countries which posed no threat whatsoever against him. He has fired ballistic missiles against a country, Israel, which he was not even at war with. Yet our protesters decry our use of precision weapons targeted solely at military and leadership targets. One has to wonder if they really give a damn about the Iraqi people as they claim. Do you ever see Susan Sarandon protesting the treatment of the Shiite Muslims or the Kurds? 17 UN resolutions passed since 1991 on Iraq include Resolution 688, which calls for an end to repression of Iraqi civilians. It has been ignored. Torture, execution and ethnic-cleansing are everyday life in Saddam’s Iraq. The U.N. Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result, no Iraqi official has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

We are now paying the price for our past compromises, our past “lesser of two evils” method of thinking. Evil is evil. This regime is evil. Given time and the development of more advanced weaponry, Saddam Hussein and his sons who will succeed him will have no hesitation against using them against his neighbors or us. He clearly sees himself as a modern day Nebuchadnezzar. I do not claim that we can or should be the world’s policeman. But this evil regime poses by itself, and through those proxies it supports, a threat to our very civilization. We can destroy this evil before it becomes too great to destroy without Armageddon. We must destroy this evil and do so now. Whether cowardly nations or nations with a self-serving agenda choose to go this route with us is irrelevant. And we must rebuild this country into a strong and viable democracy, something which other than in Israel does not even exist in that region. The Cradle of Civilization deserves no less.

2:07:07 PM