Quote:
Originally posted by Joe Sixpack
#1
Beginning in 1976, with the Baath firmly in power and after the Kurdish rebellion had been successfully quelled, Saddam Husayn set out to consolidate his position at home by strengthening the economy. He pursued a state-sponsored industrial modernization program that tied an increasing number of Iraqis to the Baath-controlled government. Saddam Husayn's economic policies were largely successful; they led to a wider distribution of wealth, to greater social mobility, to increased access to education and health care, and to the redistribution of land. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 and the subsequent oil price rises brought on by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran greatly enhanced the success of Saddam Husayn's program. The more equitable distribution of income tied to the ruling party many Iraqis who had previously opposed the central government. For the first time in modern Iraqi history, a government--alb
eit at times a ruthless one, had thus achieved some success in forging a national community out of the country's disparate social elements.
#2
A largely socialist republic run by Brigadier Abd al Karim Qasim and Colonel Abd as Salaam Arif.
#3
You said Saddam killed two million. Most of those were in the war with Iran. I said war doesn't count and pointed out how many the US have killed in war.
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Iraq has been subjected to a totalitarian regime since July 1968, when Saddam Hussein seized power in the name of the Ba'th Party. Since then Saddam has plundered the resources of this nation for both internal and external aggression. Iraq is a wealthy nation with plentiful oil resources, but the Iraqi regime chooses to use those resources for violence. Iraq devoted 37.9% of its oil money to military expenditures in 1975, 75% in 1980, 177% in 1985, and 89% in 1989.
In 1980 and 1991, Iraq invaded two of its neighbors. The war against Iran, lasted from September 1980 to August 1988, during which hundreds of thousands died on both sides, and Saddam used chemical weapons on numerous occasions.
In August 1991 Saddam plunged Iraqis into a second war. The destruction on Iraq by the allied bombing and invasion, and the sanctions regime imposed as a result of the Iraqi leadership's policies, has killed an unknown number of civilians, set back Iraq's development by decades, and reduced an otherwise wealthy nation to a state of poverty.
Saddam is also responsible for a long history of internal repression against the Iraqi people. Mass murder, execution, torture, "disappearances," rape, and forced deportation are all used against real or imagined enemies to the state. In 1975, the Saddam waged his first war against the Kurdish citizens of Iraq, and in 1987, the regime carried out the notorious "Anfal" campaign that killed thousands of Kurds, with 100,000-180,000 more deemed "disappeared". In 1988 the regime used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing over 5,000 civilians and wounding thousands more.
In March 1991, immediately following the Gulf war, the Iraqi regime turned its Republican Guard units against citizens who had risen in rebellion against the regime - partly at the urging of the Allies. But without support form Allied forces, most of these people were massacered by Saddam's forces. In the south, the regime's defense minister bragged that the Republican Guard had killed 300,000 people.
Human rights abuses by the state are practiced daily in Iraq, against all sectors of the population indiscriminately. The prisons are overflowing, and the regime periodically conducts "prison-cleaning": mass executions to reduce the population of inmates. Officers and officials are executed regularly for their alleged involvement in conspiracies. In 1993, the International Commission of Jurists said that the human rights situation inside Iraq is worse than any country since the end of World War II