Monday, November 23, 2015

Spare me the Saddam nostalgia: Saddam's Iraq was a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the executive director of the Human Security Centre, Julie Lenarz, writes that

I'm hearing a lot of "if it hadn't been for the Iraq war, we wouldn't be in this mess". The Kurds right now are digging out Yezidi mass graves. Not so long ago it was us digging out Kurdish mass graves.

By all means, let's discuss what went wrong, but spare me the Saddam nostalgia by the historically illiterate. I can't eat as much as I want to vomit.

Jalal Talabani captured it beautifully when he said:
"Saddam's Iraq was a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it."