Iraq’s Mass Graves Could Hold 300,000 victims

The top human rights offi­cial for the CPA says Sad­dam Hus­sein killed at least 300,000 oppo­nents and buried them in 263 mass graves located around the country.

Sandy Hodgkin­son [the U.S. offi­cial in charge of dis­in­ter­ring these hell­ish pits] said the admin­is­tra­tion has been send­ing foren­sic teams to inves­ti­gate those grave sites reported to U.S. offi­cials. So far, the exis­tence of about 40 graves has been con­firmed. “We have found mass graves with women and chil­dren with bul­let holes in their heads,” she said.
…
Hodgkin­son said the major­ity of peo­ple buried in the mass graves are believed to be Kurds killed by Sad­dam in the 1980s after rebelling against the gov­ern­ment and Shi­ites killed after an upris­ing fol­low­ing the 1991 Gulf War.
Pres­i­dent Bush has referred to Iraqi mass graves fre­quently in recent months, say­ing they pro­vide evi­dence that the war to drive Sad­dam from power was justified.

With­out WMD or con­vinc­ing ties to al Qa’ida, Bush’s point­ing to Saddam’s well-documented bru­tal­ity as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for March’s inva­sion seems a lit­tle thin, since Hodgkin­son says the graves date from 1983 to 1991. Saddam’s Iraq was a U.S. client state until Sad­dam invaded Kuwait that year, touch­ing off the Gulf War. Hameda Farag, 46, a vic­tim of 1988 Hal­abja attack, pho­tographed in Halabja’s sin­gle hos­pi­tal. It was near sun­set when she smelled some­thing odd. “I didn’t know it was a chem­i­cal attack until I fled to Iran,” she said. She was preg­nant at the time and lost the child. Since then, she has had three mis­car­riages and now can no longer have chil­dren. At the time, the U.S. didn’t care. ®2002, Christo­pher Allbrit­tonThese mass graves don’t sur­prise me. I wit­nessed the after­math of Saddam’s vicious­ness when I inter­viewed vic­tims of the 1988 gas attack in Hal­abja last year (the largest sin­gle attack in the Anfal cam­paign that saw mul­ti­ple gassings of smaller vil­lages across Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.) What I’m curi­ous about, how­ever, is the seem­ing lack of mass graves after the 1991 Gulf War. Are there none? Did Sad­dam clean up his act after his defeat from Kuwait? I find that hard to believe. In this post, the debate in the com­ments sec­tion focuses on bal­anc­ing the actual num­ber of Iraqis killed in the war (between 11,000 and 15,000) ver­sus the “hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple that will not be tor­tured and put to death in Saddam’s ’secu­rity’ appa­ra­tus, and who would have been if we had not gone to war,” accord­ing to com­menter Gary Robin­son.
I’m not try­ing to use Gary’s words against him; he has a valid point. But what if the sanc­tions imposed on Iraq and strong inspec­tions, as appar­ently Iraq was will­ing to sign on for in order to avoid war, was keep­ing not only Saddam’s WMD aspi­ra­tions in check, but also his thug­gish instincts toward his sub­jects? In the absence of mass graves from the 1990s to the present, how can we say that we saved more Iraqis by going to war than if we hadn’t? And to broaden the pic­ture, can we say it was worth it to bog down a good chunk of the U.S. mil­i­tary — that could be used to fight ter­ror­ism else­where —  and dam­age so many inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions if Sad­dam weren’t bru­tal­iz­ing his peo­ple to the degree that he was said to be doing?
I don’t know the answers to these ques­tions because there is no evi­dence — so far — that Sad­dam was fill­ing graves with “hun­dreds of thou­sands” when he was Pub­lic Enemy No. 1. Instead, the evi­dence points to him fill­ing them when he was an ally of Amer­ica. Until other or more recent evi­dence shows up, sup­port­ers of the war should real­ize that by point­ing to these graves as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for invad­ing Iraq and caus­ing the actual deaths of tens of thou­sands, many of them civil­ians, they’re point­ing out that the United States, too, has the blood of Saddam’s vic­tims on its hands. Any­one want to bet the Iraqis don’t know this?

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