US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

The UN failed to properly manage the Oil-For-Food program in Iraq to prevent the starvation of Iraqi children and other Iraqis. You or others here in this very forum have blamed the US--oops, pardon me, the Bush Administration--for the deaths of those Iraqi children.

And the text on snopes goes on:

some source as above

Let's try this again. Please read the link noting that it was pre-GWB:


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Well now think about that folks. No invasion, the sanctions by order of the U.N. stay in place and over the next decade maybe another 50,000 die from malnutrition, lack of medicine, etc. The U.N. authorized the OFF program to allieviate that kind of suffering. And you think because it didn't alleviate that kind of suffering is the U.S.'s fault? How do you figure that?

Or we could lift the sanctions and not invade and signal AGAIN that the U.N. and USA are toothless and it's safe to do to anything to anybody.

So far as Saddam's 'crimes' are concerned, here is a relatively short summary of the case built against him in 2000 - note this is BEFORE GWB was elected president the first time, and this was BEFORE we got in there and uncovered the mass graves that number into the many tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands. At least some Iraqis estimate more than a million murdered by Saddam Hussein.
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/2000/09/iraq-000918.htm

I would like you to prove that I have blamed the Bush administration for the deaths of the Iraqi children due to the improper management by the UN (which we are a part of and equally as responsible as any other member to make sure it is properly managed) of the oil for food scandal.

Walter, I did not say nor imply that the statements were a promotion for war. The statements were intended as a justification for going to war, however. And several of those statement, most particularly those of President Clinton, were definitely an indication that we would go to war if ncessary. At least one attributed to John Kerry was in conjunction with his vote to invade Iraq.

Also this

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/mostert/040208

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/21/AR2005052100474_pf.html

Prewar Findings Worried Analysts

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 22, 2005; A26



On Jan. 24, 2003, four days before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address presenting the case for war against Iraq, the National Security Council staff put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or programs.

The person receiving the request, Robert Walpole, then the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, would later tell investigators that "the NSC believed the nuclear case was weak," according to a 500-page report released last year by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

It has been clear since the September report of the Iraq Survey Group -- a CIA-sponsored weapons search in Iraq -- that the United States would not find the weapons of mass destruction cited by Bush as the rationale for going to war against Iraq. But as the Walpole episode suggests, it appears that even before the war many senior intelligence officials in the government had doubts about the case being trumpeted in public by the president and his senior advisers.

The question of prewar intelligence has been thrust back into the public eye with the disclosure of a secret British memo showing that, eight months before the March 2003 start of the war, a senior British intelligence official reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that U.S. intelligence was being shaped to support a policy of invading Iraq.

Moreover, a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president's commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs.

These included claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa for its nuclear program, had mobile labs for producing biological weapons, ran an active chemical weapons program and possessed unmanned aircraft that could deliver weapons of mass destruction. All these claims were made by Bush or then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in public addresses even though, the reports made clear, they had yet to be verified by U.S. intelligence agencies.

For instance, Bush said in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that Hussein was working to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, a conclusion the president attributed to British intelligence and made a key part of his assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.

More than a year later, the White House retracted the statement after its veracity was questioned. But the Senate report makes it clear that even in January 2003, just before the president's speech, analysts at the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center were still investigating the reliability of the uranium information.

Similarly, the president's intelligence commission, chaired by former appellate judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), disclosed that senior intelligence officials had serious questions about "Curveball," the code name for an Iraqi informant who provided the key information on Hussein's alleged mobile biological facilities.

The CIA clandestine service's European division chief had met in 2002 with a German intelligence officer whose service was handling Curveball. The German said his service "was not sure whether Curveball was actually telling the truth," according to the commission report. When it appeared that Curveball's material would be in Bush's State of the Union speech, the CIA Berlin station chief was asked to get the Germans to allow him to question Curveball directly.

On the day before the president's speech, the Berlin station chief warned about using Curveball's information on the mobile biological units in Bush's speech. The station chief warned that the German intelligence service considered Curveball "problematical" and said its officers had been unable to confirm his assertions. The station chief recommended that CIA headquarters give "serious consideration" before using that unverified information, according to the commission report.

The next day, Bush told the world: "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile weapons labs . . . designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors." He attributed that information to "three Iraqi defectors."

A week later, Powell said in an address to the United Nations that the information on mobile labs came from four defectors, and he described one as "an eyewitness . . . who supervised one of these facilities" and was at the site when an accident killed 12 technicians.

Within a year, doubts emerged about the truthfulness of all four, and the "eyewitness" turned out to be Curveball, the informant the CIA station chief had red-flagged as unreliable. Curveball was subsequently determined to be a fabricator who had been fired from the Iraqi facility years before the alleged accident, according to the commission and Senate reports.

As Bush speeches were being drafted in the prewar period, serious questions were also being raised within the intelligence community about purported threats from biologically armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

In an Oct. 7, 2002, speech, Bush mentioned a potential threat to the U.S. mainland being explored by Iraq through unmanned aircraft "that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons." The basis for that analysis was a single report that an Iraqi general in late 2000 or early 2001 indicated interest in buying autopilots and gyroscopes for Hussein's UAV program. The manufacturer automatically included topographic mapping software of the United States in the package.

When the list was submitted in early 2002, the manufacturer's distributor determined that the U.S. mapping software would not be included in the autopilot package, and told the procurement agent in March 2002. By then, however, U.S. intelligence, which closely followed Iraqi procurement of such material, had already concluded as early as the summer of 2001 that this was the "first indication that the UAVs might be used to target the U.S."

When a foreign intelligence service questioned the procurement agent, he originally said he had never intended to purchase the U.S. mapping software, but he refused to submit to a thorough examination, according to the president's commission. "By fall 2002, the CIA was still uncertain whether the procurement agent was lying," the commission said. Nonetheless, a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 said the attempted procurement "strongly suggested" Iraq was interested in targeting UAVs on the United States. Senior members of Congress were told in September 2002 that this was the "smoking gun" in a special briefing by Vice President Cheney and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

By January 2003, however, it became publicly known that the director of Air Force intelligence dissented from the view that UAVs were to be used for biological or chemical delivery, saying instead they were for reconnaissance. In addition, according to the president's commission, the CIA "increasingly believed that the attempted purchase of the mapping software . . . may have been inadvertent."

In an intelligence estimate on threats to the U.S. homeland published in January 2003, Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency and Army analysts agreed that the proposed purchase was "not necessarily indicative of an intent to target the U.S. homeland."

By late January 2003, the number of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf area was approaching 150,000, and the invasion of Iraq was all but guaranteed. Neither Bush nor Powell reflected in their speeches the many doubts that had surfaced at that time about Iraq's weapons programs.

Instead, Bush said, "With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region." He added: "Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

According to subsequent revelations of the incompetence of our "intelligence community," it would seem reasonable for Clinton to have believed what he did. The situation that caused Bush to go to war in Iraq was not based on what he was being told by the CIA - that the US did not personally confirm WMDs in Iraq, but used information from Iraqi ex-patriots and other foreign governments. Don't forget, Powell showed pictures of where those WMDs were located during his speech to the UN Security Council - rather out of date or misinformation.

If we're going to preemptively attack a sovereign country on outdated or misinformation to kill thousands of innocent people, we are at fault for not doing our homework - properly. It also seems evident now that Bush and Company ignored information about their claims about yellow cake from South Africa, WMDs in Iraq, and 'terrorist connections.'

Revel writes


Just go back to the previous page Revel. C.I. flat out said it. You and Geli backed him up. One would think if you disagreed with C.I., you would have said so and would not have backed him up. But if the only way to ensure that the Iraqi children would not continue to be starved and deprived of medicine they needed was to invade, and the U.N. refused to do that, maybe there were some good things to say for the invasion too.

Your thought processes are scary. Instead of saying that I agree with someones statement....you say I'm 'backing him up'.
Damning nuance eh?

Hmmm, interesting observation Geli. If you take the literal dictionary definition of back up, then yeah, the nuance would be wrong. So okay, I'll stand corrected and will amend my remark as follows:

Revel, C.I. flat out said it. Geli gave all appearances of agreeing as did you. Wouldn't you think if you didn't agree you would say so or at least expand the remark to include the whole U.N.?

There now. Is that better?

Hey... ain't no thang ... yall'l get your stuff together some day. Patience

Thanks.

This is just too silly for words. In the first place, the Bush administration is not the UN. So when CI said that sanctions were killing millions of Iraqi children he was not saying the Bush administration, but the UN of which there are lots of members and that we happen to part of. We as in the United States, not George Bush who is not the US.

Then McG said something like, "oh, we are the UN now?"

At which point I said something like, "we are a member of the UN so we are "our."

How you guys can go from there to here is just typical and explains a lot.

I really have not read up or paid attention to the UN sanctions and the history around it so I couldn't say whether I back up anyone or not. Sort of embarrassing to admit but I haven't always paid such close attention to world affairs and politics.

C.I. said "our" sanctions. Not "The UN" sanctions. C.I. likes to do things like that and I like to call him on it. How you choose to participate is clearly up to you.

What difference does it make if he said "our" or "UN" since we are part of UN so we are both "our" and "UN?" That is why I said the whole line of questioning was a bit trivial and got even more so.

But, for my part, I'll end it to in order to end the silliness.

revel, It's all part and parcel of the right's ability to ignore our part of the responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Not only are we "part of the UN," but we are one of its founding member.

June 3, 2005
New Attacks Highlight Growing Sectarian Divisions in Iraq
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 3 - A suicide bomber detonated a belt of explosives at a gathering of Sufi Muslims on Thursday evening north of Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and injuring at least 11 others, an Interior Ministry official said today.

The attack capped an extremely bloody day across the country. Along with the killing of a Shiite cleric in the south, the strike brought to at least 44 the number of Iraqis killed in attacks on Thursday. More violence followed today, as at least three Iraqis were killed and a dozen wounded in shootings and bombings. An American military spokesman also said that a soldier had been killed on Tuesday in a rocket attack at an American base in Baghdad.

At Friday prayers, a cleric representing one of the ruling Shiite Arab parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called for the Iraqi government to execute Saddam Hussein and his aides as soon as possible. The cleric's demand followed comments made to CNN by the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, in which he said that Mr. Hussein could go to trial "within two months."

The cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Taki al-Mowla, asked his followers to take to the streets to demand Mr. Hussein's execution, which he said would help deflate the insurgency, largely led by Sunni Arabs.

"We have to stage peaceful demonstrations and tell the government that we want Saddam and his followers executed as soon as possible," Sheikh Mowla said to hundreds of Shiite worshippers at Baratha Mosque in Baghdad. "Some people still believe that Saddam will return, but his execution will kill their hopes."

The sheikh also acknowledged that sectarian violence was on the rise, and that "man is killed nowadays according to his identity, and they place explosives in his body after they kill him, and they put him in front of his house."

As the sheikh spoke, members of the Badr Brigade, the militia formed in the 1980's by the sheikh's party, SCIRI, stood among the worshippers and brandished Kalashnikovs and pistols. "We have co-existed with the Sunnis for hundreds of years, and we do not want sectarian division, and we denounce it," the sheikh said.

The belt bomb attack and the murder of the Shiite cleric on Thursday evening were the two latest incidents of sectarian bloodshed and pointed to the growing rifts in Iraqi society.

In the bombing, the attacker walked into a headquarters of the Kasnazani sect of Sufism, a mystical branch of Sunni Islam, during the start of a religious ceremony, the Interior Ministry official said. The building is near the Duluaiya river and the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, and is the site of a twice-a-week gathering for the religious ceremony. The Kasnazani sect was founded by Muhammad Abdul-Kareem al Kasnazani, a Sufi from the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

It was unclear who carried out the attack, but adherents of the conservative Salafiya sect, another branch of Sunni Islam, have killed Sufis for centuries and desecrated their tombs, denouncing them as infidels. Prominent Salafi fighters include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant, and Osama bin Laden.

More than an hour later, a prominent Shiite cleric in the southern city of Basra, Sheikh Ali Abdul-Hussein, 53, was gunned down after he left his mosque to go home with his son. The attackers were two men wearing black and driving a Toyota, and they hit the sheikh with three shots to the head and chest, the son, Falah Abdul-Kareem, said in an interview.

"I was busy carrying bags for the house and walking behind him," Mr. Abdul-Kareem said. "I heard the shooting but didn't expect that it involved my father. I didn't realize what had happened until I saw my father lying dead on the ground."

Today, in the tense city of Kirkuk, gunmen killed Sabah Qara Alton, a Turkmen member of the city council. Animosity runs high in Kirkuk among the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, who each claim the city - and its vast oil reserves - for themselves. Kirkuk will almost certainly emerge as one of the key flash points in negotiations over the permanent constitution.

In Baghdad, several mortars landed near the Medical City hospital complex in the afternoon. Insurgents followed that with a gunfire attack that killed one Iraqi man standing nearby, said Sgt. David Abrams, a spokesman for the Third Infantry Division, charged with controlling Baghdad.

An Iraqi contractor, Razzouq Muhammad Ibrahim, was killed north of Baghdad in the morning by insurgents, police officials said, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Ibrahim was in charge of renovating a mosque in the city of Samarra.

The American military said two Iraqis, including a child, were killed when their car swerved into a Bradley Fighting Vehicle north of the capital.

An unattended car bomb exploded in western Baghdad as an American convoy passed by, injuring three Iraqis and damaging nearby shops. In the northern city of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown, a suicide car bomb detonated at an Iraqi army checkpoint, wounding seven Iraqi soldiers and two civilians.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said the rocket attack on Tuesday killed a member of the 155 Brigade Combat Team. The rocket landed outside the troops' supply store in Camp Liberty, next to Baghdad International Airport, and also injured five soldiers and seven civilians.

FROM BRITANNICA BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Iraq (deaths are from all causes)
Year || Population || Deaths || Death Rate

1991 || 18,317,000 || 128,219 || 0.0070
1992 || 18,838,000 || 122,447 || 0.0065
1993 || 19,435,000 || 136,045 || 0.0070
1994 || 19,869,000 || 194,716 || 0.0098
1995 || 20,413,000 || 206,171 || 0.0101*
1996 || 21,422,000 || 222,789 || 0.0104
1997 || 22,219,000 || na
1998 || 21,722,000 || na
1999 || 22,427,000 || na
2000 || 22,676,000 || 145,126 || 0.0064
2001 || 23,332,000 || 144,656 || 0.0062
2002 || 24,002,000 || na
2003 || 24,683,000 || 143,161 || 0.0058
2004 || 25,375,000 || na

*interpolated death rate.

Well if those stats are the real deal, Ican, how do we account for the fact that there are fewer dead in the year with the all out assault and invasion, than there were in 2000 or 2001?