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And didn't you see the rape rooms? I did. Did you see the other torture videos? Did you see the guy getting his tongue cut out with pliers and diagonal cutters? Maybe your sources aren't really paying attention.
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By that logic there are many countries we should be marching into. The Sudan? Zimabwe? .......Nobody seemed to have this much of a problem when the Hutus were slaughtering a million Tutsis...Not mention Israel's legally sanctioned and openly spoken of policy of systematic torture of suspects in custody.
Would you be kurdish(sp) in Turkey? How bout poor or female in Saudi Arabia? Have you even noticed what is being done to ordinary people in Kashmir? Even in Britain we hold people in a very dubious prison, indefinately and without charge. Everybody here knows the police conduct fishing expeditions amongst moslem population.....arresting and detaining hundreds of men in a storm of media interest , most of whom are then released quietly to go about their ordinary busniess. They had no leads to those men. Only a wide lead to that mosque, or that town. If I were a moslem man in Britain today I would feel the glare of the authorities regardless of my innocence or lack of invovement in anything other than ordinariness.
Oh....and pictures can be misleading as can testimony. Like the young lady who testified to the world of Saddam's soldiers tossing babies out of incubators with glee....An ordinary nurse she purported to be, but the world then learned she was the daughter of a prominent member of the Kuwaiti royal family. In the middle ages people told stories of Jewish kabbalas crucifying a little Christian boy. Later in the first world war we get stories ranging from bayonetting babies to the crucifiction of a wounded soldier. Most of these stories turn out to be a lot less factual than one might expect.
Nonetheless I do believe much of what has been reported regarding the excesses of Saddam and his sons against a proportion of the Iraqi population. Their's was a particularly distasteful brand of power and cruelty. But the majority of the people in Iraq did not want us to rescue them. Really they just wanted us to stop starving them out of any ability to oppose and maybe who knows, not sell him weapons when our politcal landscape swung back around that way.
We talk so much in the west about how awful it must be for women in some Islamic countries where they are in wesern eyes degraded and humiliated by enforced domesticity and the covering of themselves in public....Iraq was a secular moslem state. For the much of the population, life in Iraq was stable, predictable and secular. Lets remind ourselves that the Baath (sp) party were a communist , socialist organisation. They werent always saddam's plaything. Saddam himself was a secularist. Under Saddam Hussein women worked and engaged fully in the economy. ....Now they are taking up the veil in droves. For many its an expression of their disdain for the invasion which has so offended their sense of nationhood....for others its a form of security.
So.....we have had a dictator in Iraq who made life impossibly miserable for some but made a liberated life possible for others....and now we have an occupation force who make life impossibly miserable for many and send the liberated women scattering for cover.