Monday, June 05, 2006

THE MARKUP

Saddam's Victims   [Stephen Spruiell]

Perspective is so often lacking in the latest dispatches from Iraq, but John Burns provides some in today's NYT:

What happened here is not only a macabre marker in the history of Iraq under Mr. Hussein, but a harrowing footnote in American politics. The victims here, American and Iraqi officials say, died in Mr. Hussein's suppression of the Shiite uprising across southern Iraq in early 1991. It was a rebellion that survivors — and American critics of the President George H. W. Bush — say that the president encouraged after halting American troops at Iraq's southern border with Kuwait at the end of the Persian Gulf war.

For years, Middle East experts have debated Mr. Bush's role in encouraging Iraq's Shiites and Kurds to mount a challenge to Mr. Hussein after the war over Iraq's invasion of Kuwait ended, before ruling out American military action to halt the mass killings of Shiites that Mr. Hussein initiated to crush the uprising. Mr. Bush himself has said that what happened to the Shiites was one of the deepest regrets of his presidency.

For the American forensic experts who came to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, the desert camp is a way station toward holding Mr. Hussein accountable for what many Iraqi human rights experts say was the most merciless passage in his 24 years in power.

From the brutality of Saddam Hussein to the insurgents' daily terrorism, the U.S. military has always been the best hope for delivering Iraq into a free and peaceful future. It's time to put Haditha into that context and focus on the 99 percent of the troops who are bringing that future about through strength and compassion.

06/05 03:39 AMShare