Halabja

I wonder how many people know what Halabja or the Anfal campaign is? This is one of the reasons to feel good about having helped to overthrow Saddam. I hear people complaining that since there were no WMDs in Iraq that we were wrong to have 'regime change'. And then I remember GWB and all his talk about Saddam's 'gassing his own people' as justification and I remember Halabja.

''On 16 March, 1988, the Saddam Ba'ath regime began chemical bombing of the town of Halabja, south and east of Silêmanî, close to the border with Iranian-occupied Kurdistan. Halabja has become the symbol of the Anfal campaign to genocide the Kurdish people, although it was not only Halabja that was attacked during the following 72 hours, but the entire area around Halabja was attacked in the same way. The immediate deaths were estimated at 5,000 men, women, children. The animals died.

Those who could, fled, trying to make it through the mountains and across the Iran border. Many died on the way and were later buried in the Zagros. There are a lot of mass graves in and around Halabja. ''

It really wasn't reported that much at the time, and leftists often point their fingers that the US did not agree to a UN motion to censure Saddam at the time, and while we may not have done the right thing at the time, though God knows that UN censure is ridiculous anyway, usually they get the wrong guy. But we did go in a few years later... and we provided a no-fly zone for the Kurds... and also bypassed Saddam with respect to the sanction money.

But unsurprisingly, if one thinks about it... the effects of that gas went well beyond the immediate deaths of 5000 innocent humans. In fact, the survivors in the area around Halabja are today suffering effects that could easily have been expected from poison gas exposure -- congenital malformations, cancers of all sorts, blindness -- young children dying of leukemias and lymphomas. This has been known at least since 1998, along with the fact that absolutely nothing was done or is being done, to help these people medically, either before the article was written or since!

Saddam should be on trial for this, for what is happening, or not happening, today in Halabja, and we should be giving our tax dollars toward helping these people, the Kurdish, our friends, who have suffered so at the hands of a Hitler-like murderer! -- rather than to the murderers and terrorists that make up the Palestinian terror-tories!

I point you here to read: HALABJA, 18 YEARS ON