Bastards, Part II

The London Times features this report from Iraq on Saddam's torture.

The UN could have gone on passing resolutions and sending in inspectors and rapporteurs for the next 50 years, but in the end there was no realistic alternative to war. Those who bleat about weapons of mass destruction or question the legality of war should talk to the Iraqi people. They are irritated. They ask, “Don’t they care about us? About mass graves? About torture?” Stand at the mass grave at al-Hillah where up to 15,000 people are buried, hands tied behind their backs, bullets through their brains.
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Stand at the mass grave near Kirkuk, where huge mechanised trucks churn the earth in clouds of dust. Look at the skeletons now tenderly reburied in simple wooden coffins. Talk to Nasir al-Hussein, who was only 12 at the time of the 1991 mass arrests. He, his mother, uncle and cousins were piled on buses. They turned off on to a farm road and the executions started. People were thrown into a pit, machinegunned and then buried with a bulldozer. Nasir crawled out of the mass grave, leaving his dead relatives behind.

The killing fields of al-Hillah and Kirkuk look unremarkable. Shepherds graze their sheep, children play on bikes. But also here are some of the hundreds and thousands of the perhaps 800,000 of the dead of this country. Saddam’s victims: Shias, Kurds, Communists, the people of Iraq. Now the secrets of this evil and despotic regime are being revealed. How much more killing could there have been?
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On the streets of Baghdad, WMD is not an issue. “Thanks to Bush and Blair,” they cry. I ask what would have happened if they had spoken to me like this in the past on the streets of Baghdad. One man slowly drew his hand, palm down, across his throat.