Remember Halabja: 20 years ago today

So any reader of mine knows that I enjoy crashing protests and reporting from within. But yesterday, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bear to see the signs stating that deposing Saddam wasn't worth it, that the U.S. was the evil aggressor -- particularly considering that this weekend is the 20th anniversary of Halabja.

I write about the grim anniversary this weekend at Pajamas Media:

"...Being no stranger to crashing war protests, I can bet that if you held a poster bearing one of the infamous images of a man who fell and died at the base of a home’s steps clutching an infant whose mouth was frozen in a vain gasp for air, or the pile of bodies in traditional colorful clothing strewn across an otherwise verdant hill, most demonstrators would assume the grisly images are products of the American war machine. They wouldn’t like to hear that these murders were committed by the dictator we deposed.

On March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons including sarin and mustard gas, targeting civilians as part of the Anfal campaign to rid Iraq of its Kurds. Five thousand — three-quarters of them women and children — died from the chemical cocktail. Children trying to rush home fell in the street, while the insidious gasses claimed those who cowered in basements from what they thought was a traditional bombardment. Thousands were left with chemical burns, blindness, cancers, birth defects, etc.

The Halabja attack was, in Josef Mengele fashion, an experiment to determine which of the various chemical agents worked best on the population, where were the best strategic places to drop the poisonous canisters, where victims would fall and how many. 'These were field tests, an experiment on a town,' Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told then-New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in 2002. 'The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as "How far are the dead from the canisters?"'”

Read the whole thing!

Acknowledging Halabja, though, means acknowledging that ousting Saddam served a purpose -- and that the international community turned a blind eye (again) to genocide.