Saddam the Mass Murderer

From dKosopedia

While there is no denying that Saddam is a Mass Murderer proponants of the Iraq invation inflated the numbers to suit their purposes.

1 How Many?
2 Saddam not even on Top 5
3 Recent Mass Murders
4 Major Atrocities and Wars
5 War casualties
6 Books

How Many?

Claim: Saddam's mass murders are the worst killings since Hitler and it's many variations such as that of Ann Coulter's: revisionist history or USAID's inacurate: Saddam's 400,000 victims represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II USAID 2005. The underlying message is that Bush's Iraq war is justified due to humanitarian reasons a claim we discuss at length here

One line rebuttal: Saddam was not even among the Top 5 mass murderers of the last 60 years

Status: False.

Source: Several e-mails have been circulating describing Saddam's crimes and the mass graves found in Iraq. It is also a staple of the right wing pundit's when justifying this unjustifiable war. Ann Coulter had the following "gem" on her web article titled The Democrats' Idea of a General: In humanitarian terms, Milosevic didn’t hold a candle to Saddam Hussein. Milosevic killed a few thousand Albanians in a ground war. Hussein killed well over a million Iranians, Kurds, Kuwaitis and Shias, among others. Milosevic had no rape rooms, no torture rooms, no Odai or Qusai. He didn’t even use a wood chipper to dispose of his enemies, the piker...

Having pundits and e-mail chain letters spreading misinformation is bad enough, but what is considerably worse is that a government report produced recently by the USAID perpetrates this myth. While correctly adding the Rwanda and Pol Pot mass murders (usually ignored by e-mails and pundits), it "forgets" to include Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Suharto's Indonesia and Bosnia, all mass killings that killed more than the purported 400,000 Saddam is directly responsible for killing, by USAID's own estimates

Snopes: No mention

Investigation: The tale builds on the 1988 "Anfal" Massacre of Kurds and the Shia massacre on 1991 shortly after the first Gulf War. This is the period that all but 50,000 of Saddam's alleged 400,000 victims were killed. Says the USAID: We've already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves... The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. "Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades," said the group in a statement in May. "Many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq.

Saddam not even on Top 5

So how does Saddan stack up to his counterparts in the mass killing arena ? Not very well... According to one of the authorities in the field, R.J. Rummel those are the Top 5 mega murderers of the past 60 years:

Recent Mass Murders

Rwanda

1 million people were killed in 4 months during 1994's massacre

Rwanda had mass rape

Rape rooms are bad ? How about Rape cities ? According to the UN, at least 250,000 women were raped in Rwanda in 1994. Most are not alive to tell their tales, while others are dying of AIDS contracted through the rapes. There are, according to aid organizations, close to 5,000 children in Rwanda today who were born of the 1994 rapes. link

North Korea

Famine and gas chambers are among the horrors occurring in this communist country, unimpeded

North Korea famine

It is estimated that the North Korean famine killed 2 to 3 million people since 1995 Currently, 15% of children under the age of five are diagnosed as malnourished Global Hot Spots - NK

Gas chambers in the 21st century ?!?!?

In the Guardian article Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea’s gulag, we learn: In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea’s largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them. ..chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes.

Bosnia

While reading the Milosevick trial documents we learn of atrocities that Ann Coulter's rape room criminals never attempted: Saddam never told troops to rape women just to “purify their womb” with a Serbian child.

Milosevick Trial

When C-17 arrived there, he saw three members of Red Berets assaulting a local Croat whose house they had just burnt down. They kicked him like a ball down the road until he died, the witness said. The witness’s observations appeared to show that Milosevic’s secret service held power over the JNA and that the Red Berets in particular were in charge. To further support those allegations, C-17 said that he saw a document bearing Milosevic’s signature ordering Perisic to disband a paramilitary unit … [by] killing a number of civilians. The witness recalled how one man was pushed into a manhole and a grenade thrown in after him. After the attack on Mostar, in an operation supported by the Yugoslav army, the Red Berets, along with a newly-arrived paramilitary group, the Vukovarci, attacked a village north of the town called Bijelo Polje. C-17 said survivors were killed by the Red Berets, and described how one pararmilitary cut off an old man’s ears and threw his body in a pool of water, “He then started throwing bricks at him until the man sunk.” But worst was to come. In early June… he said he saw Serb troops killing the men with pistols, knives, guns and “all kinds of other things”. C-17 also testified that Red Berets kept women in one of the bungalows in the camp, which they had frequently visited. “I don’t know what happened to them, but I saw Red Berets members going in and out of their bungalow,” he said. The witness later became a member of the White Wolves… C-17 said that the paramilitaries helped take UN soldiers hostage in the spring 1995 when NATO bombed Bosnian Serb positions around the capital. The order to do so, C-17 said, came from the office of Momcilo Krajisnik, the president of the Bosnian Serb parliament. In the cross-examination, Milosevic accused C-17 of concocting the story …C-17 rebutted the former Yugoslav president’s allegations with seemingly irrefutable evidence. “There are over one hundred graves in Mostar bearing the names of the people killed that day,” he said.

More on Bosnia

link

Iraq

For a detailed account on the deaths that can be attributed to Saddam see Saddam was killing his subjects. It is important to note that although we can find evidence that Saddam's actions resulted in the death of over 3 million people, the bulk of this total (2.5 million) is composed by atrocities that predate Bush's march to war.

It is also important to note that for the sake of comparison with other mass murderers we have to exclude them since those numbers are not usually considered when calculating Hitler, Stalin, Suharto and other mass murderers tally. For instance: We know that 2 million died in wars STARTED by Saddam and around 500,000 died due to economic sanctions. No such numbers were added to Hittler's tally or we would have to add at least 41 million deaths to Hitler's "official" 20 million tally just due to the World War II Fatalities. How many more died due to the experiments of Mengele ? North Korea's tally does NOT include the 2-3 million who died of hunger since 1995, even though the NK government uses access to food as a political weapon.

If starting a war was a valid criteria

In fact, if STARTING A WAR was a criteria to attribute the war deaths to country leaders, Bush 43 would have at least 20,000 deaths in his "tally" and would be among the top 100 mass murderers of the last 100 years

The Lancet Report: Bush responsible for 100,000 deaths

The Lancet report uses the epidemiology method to estimate 100,000 deaths due to Bush's Iraq war. On epidemiology studies we use a sample to estimate total deaths, i.e, for each death recorded there are 3-5 deaths in reality. Although this is a valid way to look at it for epidemiology and other types of studies, it has the same problem the "Saddam caused 3 million deaths" number has: It includes numbers not usually considered. When calculating Hitler's, Stalin's, North Korea's, and other mass murder death tallies we do not include indirect deaths such as deaths due to malnutrition, sanctions, wars... Therefore for the sake of comparison with other mass murderers we have to ignore the Lancet study tally: Just as we didn't use 3 million as Saddam's tally we can not use 100,000 as Bush's tally.

Major Atrocities and Wars