Doing their bit for the Cause

Once again the LA times is doing their best to undermine the war effort. These people make me sick. For years I heard and read stories about the Butcher of Baghdad. But now it as if none of that ever happened and Saddam was benign and Iraq was peaceful.

Well Saddam has not been hanged yet, maybe the Times should start demanding that he be put back into power so that he can back to doing what he was doing before Bushitler sent him scurrying into a spider hole. This seems to be the message.

But like John at Power Line ,I remember when the western press had a different story to tell about Saddam's Iraq:

This report in today's Los Angeles Times says that 50,000 Iraqis have been killed since the American-led invasion in March 2003. A large majority of these were murdered by terrorists. The Times trumpets its figure, which it considers conservative, as a rebuke to the Bush administration--the article's very first sentence notes that its figure is "20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration." No doubt the Times' count will be so interpreted when it is repeated by hundreds of other news outlets over the next few days.

The Times makes no effort to put its 50,000 number into any sort of context. Reading its article, one might get the impression that pre-2003 Iraq was the balloon-flying paradise so notoriously depicted by Michael Moore. A bit of research, however, offers evidence that the current level of violence is, sadly, nothing new.

In January 2003, two months before the coalition's attack on Saddam's regime began, John Burns wrote a chilling account of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror in the New York Times. Burns' article, titled "How Many People Has Saddam Killed?", recounted some once-familiar numbers that seem to have been forgotten in the current media hysteria. Burns noted that Saddam was widely considered to be responsible for "a million dead Iraqis," a number that included 500,000 killed in the war Saddam launched against Iran. Burns tried to estimate separately the number that were simply murdered:

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000.

Burns' piece is notable, too, for its appalling description of Abu Ghraib prison at a time when it really was a center of torture and mass murder. As he documents the fear that penetrated Iraqi society, Burns also reminds us that beheadings in that long-suffering place are nothing new:

More recently, ... scores of women have been executed under a new twist in a "return to faith" campaign proclaimed by Mr. Hussein. ... Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein's oldest son, 38-year-old Uday. These men, masked and clad in black, make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords.


Yep, those were the good old days.

read it all.

More news from Iraq, alMaliki's reconciliation . plan. He says there will be no place for those who chose Satan's Path.