Low Earth Orbit

Human Rights Watch slams Iraqis

[…] a Human Rights Watch official challenged the [Iraq Governing] council’s plan saying it would put former victims of Saddam and his regime in the position of judging their tormentors and might not result in justice. Hania Mufti, London director of Human Rights Watch, said the Iraqi court system was ill-equipped to deal with the task of trying such crimes and said international legal experts should be part of the process. “Saddam’s victims should not be overseers of the justice system. It should be independent of both the former regime and its victims,” Mufti said.

This is just a bit different than the view of the post-Apartheid South AFrica or post-Communist trials in Eastern Europe. [source, source, source]

The Big Lies about the invasion of Iraq

It's wrong to mislead and lie to the public, so someone should be held accountable for all of these lies [source, source]: # The Iraqi Army would fight much harder to defend its country than it did in Kuwait. # Iraq is not Afghanistan - it will take half a million American troops and at least six months to capture Baghdad, resulting in 50,000 American casualties (of which approximately 10,000 would be deaths). # Iraq will draw Israel into the war, leading to a larger Middle East conflagration. # There would be massive resistance from the Iraqi population defending their country from invasion. # There would be street by street, house to house fighting in Baghdad that would destroy the city, cost thousands of American casualties, and drag on for six weeks or more. # A war would create a huge humanitarian crisis as millions of refugees fled Iraq, overwhelming neighboring countries ability to deal with it. # A war would create such disruption in the food distribution system and so destroy the water infrastructure that it would result in hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Iraqis dying of starvation and disease. # That mythological boogieman, the "Arab Street", would rise up against us and destabilize friendly, pro-Western regimes in the region. # Saddam Hussein has no ties to terrorism, but if we attack him then he will launch terror attacks in the U.S. and we will thus produce the very thing we're trying to avoid. (Throw into the pot with this the various warnings that Saddam would use the bioweapons against us if we provoked him in this way - that he was harmless if left alone but if we attacked we'd suffer dire consequences, &tc &tc). # War with Iraq would distract from the war on terrorism and it would derail any chances for the Middle East Peace Process. # Israel will expell all of the Palestinians from the West Bank during the confusion of the invasion.