Iraq is a clear-cut case of genocide.

http://www.counterpunch.org/model05212008.html

Consciousness of Guilt
Genocide in Iraq?
By DAVID MODEL

...

According to the Convention:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm;
c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Complicity in genocide must embody:

Intentional participation;
Knowledge of the genocidal intent of the perpetrators;
Organizing, planning, supplying arms, training intelligence, or direct military support.

...

Restricting the bombing to only military targets was not part of the U.S. war plan whereas targets included hospitals, electric utilities, schools, factories, water treatment plants, irrigation systems, food storage facilities and community health centres. Over 200,000 people died, the majority of whom were civilians.

In 2003, George Bush Junior inflicted further atrocities on the devastated people of Iraq and on a country virtually bombed back into pre-industrial times by another so-called war. As of today, Iraq has suffered a further one million casualties and four million refugees.

Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant because the consequences of the bombings and sanctions could have been predicted by any reasonable person. The actions of these administrations clearly resulted in mass killing, serious bodily and mental harm, and the infliction of conditions calculated to bring about Iraq’s physical destruction in whole or in part. Iraq is a clear-cut case of genocide.

The carnage resulting from this genocide clearly exposes the disparity between the professed principles of American foreign policy and its manifest practice. This hypocrisy betrays the indifference of American leaders to basic democratic principles and to respect for both domestic and international law.

"with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"

then

"Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant because the consequences of the bombings and sanctions could have been predicted by any reasonable person."

By your own argument it's not Genocide. Genocide by key definition, even your own posted here, requires intent, and then you say intent is irrelevant. It's not genocide.

Criminal? Sure. Genocide? No.

and it is genocide

granted you didn't write them...

and no it's not.

yes it is genocide

:P

Explain to me how if the definition for Genocide requires intent, you (or anyone) can apply Genocide to something without intent.

Nobody (well nobody sane) is denying horrific things have happened in Iraq. It still doesn't speak to, or prove intent.

If we compare this to murder, then Genocide is first degree murder. What has happened in Iraq is more akin to Manslaughter. We went in to do something, and people were killed in the process. Alot of them.

It's not Genocide though unless the INTENT is there.

Any state of the union speech of the past 6 years, thousands of documents, etc. Do you really want me to do that, so you can just say they're lying?

Their intention was to remove Saddam Hussein from power because he was in league with Al Qaeda and helping them get a nuclear bomb. Of course that was total crap, but they didn't know that to it's fullest extent because of their incompetence in leadership.

It came down to they didn't like Saddam Hussein and wanted him gone and would do whatever it took to make that happen. I fully think that they believed that they'd roll in jail Saddam, and then the iraqi people would start dancing in the streets. They really beleived that. Then their incompetence destroyed the country around them.

The intent was to remove Saddam. Their incompetence set the whole country ablaze.

by bush? Do you believe anything he says?

but that doesn't mean his intention is to obliterate the Iraqi people.

the guy is a fucking moron, not some thumb twiddling evil mastermind.

So who is the evil mastermind laughing over his glass of cherry in his wood paneled drawing room laughing at the thought of murdering hundreds of thousands of brown skinned people as was his original intent?

Cheney? Really?

Do you honestly believe it was their intent to murder Iraqi's because of who they are? do you think it was their intent that it would last this long and kill this many iraqi's and american's?

Or do you think they though there'd be some casualties, but a year after the invasion McDonald's would be opening up branches in Baghdad and everyone would be dancing around happy pappy?

I vote they thought the latter because they're fucking morons.

no it's WHERE THEY ARE, ON TOP OF ALL OUR OIL

This is just your belief then. You have no actual evidence. Gotcha.

Pretend you're a prosecutor trying to prove 1st degree murder. Just having a dead body doesn't prove first degree murder. Just that a crime occured.

Prove to me it's first degree murder and not manslaughter.

Do you understand what the word intent means? Are you able to respond to someone else's question about your position or are you just rabid at this point?

AND IT IS HAPPENING

You're arguing they are evil incarnate.

I'm arguing they're singled minded, narrow focused, and totally incompetent.

You have zero proof for your position. I have tremendous proof for mine.

Have a nice day!

Do your own research. Watch a documentary. Everything points to the U.S. being incompetent.

Try here...

http://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+war+incompetence

:toast:

if you think that was the best reply you've ever seen here

not substance

All I see are disjointed statements, sometimes in all caps, sometimes not. You refuse to answer any rebuttal questions, provide any discernable evidence, and prove repeatedly that you really don't get out or read much.

You claim that the U.S. committed genocide. The definition of genocide requires intent. You need to either provide actual proof for intent, or you need to form a cohesive argument for why intent shouldn't be required. You've provided neither.

If intent exists it lay at your feet to prove it. You've both argued that intent isn't necessary, and that intent existed. Which is it? What evidence do you have?

I never said intent wasn't necessary. I say they had intent

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3319481&mesg_id=3319700

"Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant because the consequences of the bombings and sanctions could have been predicted by any reasonable person."

"Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant"

That's your statement. The rest is support of it. It's irrelevant because a reasonable person could have predicted the consequences? Doesn't that imply incompetence moreso than intent?

Genocide, by definition requires intent. It's not irrelevant, and requires more than incompetence. It requires a specific intent and goal in action. It's an evil act, and shouldn't be belittled by applying it to Bush Administration incompetence.

and not others

Genocide requires intent. You can't apply it to just anyone. It has an explicit legal definition.

Why were the energy meetings secret?

But to apply the label Genocide to what has happened in Iraq requires showing Intent on the part of the U.S.

I could surmise why the meetings were secret, but we have no evidence of a connection between those meetings and current Iraq policy besides guesswork and conjecture.

The thing is that so many horrific things have happened in iraq that can be directly tied to incompetent administrators and decisions from all angles, that to assume that all these would happen as directed by a cabal who met for a secret energy meeting is farfetched at best, and pure fantasy at worse.

you should try spell check sometime

What's it like under your rock?

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

Facts showing intent?

You have provided absolutely nothing either way towards intent.

http://hnn.us/articles/23641.html

Iraq, Vietnam, and the Bloodbath Theory
By Scott Laderman

Mr. Laderman is Assistant Professor of History, University of Minnesota, Duluth.

By now we have all seen the analogies drawn between the present war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam decades ago. Some of these analogies have been insightful. Some, to put it charitably, have not. Nearly all, however, have focused on how the United States entered and fought both wars. Little attention has been heeded to what the Vietnam war might tell us about the United States getting out of this one. It is an issue that deserves our attention.

More than thirty-five years ago, as American civilian and military opposition to the Vietnam war increased, those advocating continued warfare found themselves in something of a bind. The applicability of the domino theory to Vietnam had been persuasively challenged. The idea that America was fighting for democracy in Vietnam appeared to many observers, given the despotic nature of the successive Saigon regimes, risible. Yet despite the gap between the government’s rhetoric and observable reality, a minority of Americans clung to the idea of the war as a righteous and necessary cause. What little credibility the public explanations for American intervention enjoyed, however, was largely demolished when, in 1971, the top secret Defense Department history of American policymaking in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, was leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg and published in a number of outlets. It is no wonder, given the extent to which the government’s own analysts put the lie to what American officials had been telling the public for years, that the Nixon administration reacted so hysterically to this turn of events. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, for much of the American public, the Pentagon Papers shattered what remained of their will to continue the fight in Southeast Asia. American policymakers determined to perpetuate the war were therefore confronted with a crisis.

Today, I would argue, American officials find themselves in a somewhat comparable position. Their public explanations for the Iraq invasion have nearly all been discredited. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Evidence of the Bush administration’s deception on this issue is voluminous.1 Iraq’s support for al Qaeda? Dick Cheney’s stubborn insistence notwithstanding, no such relationship existed.2 Freedom for the Iraqi people? As is clear from an examination of the factual record, the Bush administration opposed the 2005 election it now touts as perhaps its greatest democratic achievement.3

The Bush administration currently offers two serious public justifications for continuing the war in Iraq. Both have antecedents, though imprecise, in the Vietnam war. The first is the fight against anti-American terrorism. The second, which is my focus in this essay, is what is described as an effort to prevent full-fledged civil war and the chaos and Iraqi bloodshed this would produce. For this the Vietnam war offers possible lessons.

It even points out that one of the reasons the U.S. is currently using to stay in Iraq is that it's afraid of there being a genocidal bloodbath if they leave. So in a way it's saying that the current intent of the U.S. is actually to attempt to prevent a Genocide.

Of course it points out this is flawed reasoning, which is being made by an incompetent government who refuses to learn from history.

Nowhere does it say or provide any evidence towards the U.S. having a genocidal intent in Iraq.

A few words regarding "intent."

The international laws defining Genocide may or may not mean the word "intent" in the same way as the 1st degree murder statutes in the U.S. I don't think anyone in this thread has established precisely what they mean in a legal sense.

However, what I do know is that "intent" in the "1st degree" sense is not what any of the traditional human systems of morality use to define moral responsibility. In fact, "intent," in that sense, is almost irrelevant. What is relevant to the determination of moral responsibility is knowledge of predictable outcomes. And as SLAD points out in her OP - and as any reasonable person with the slightest understanding of insurgent warfare could attest - the present genocidal outcome in Iraq was nothing if not predictable.

The relevant question then, isn't whether the primary intent of the war's architects was genocide. The relevant question is whether the genocidal outcome was predictable to those taking the action. If the answer to that question is yes, then under all historical systems of morality the architects of the war are just as morally responsible for the genocide as they would be if genocide was their declared "intent."

One can quibble about legal semantics all day, but Bush and Co. are morally responsible for the wholly predictable genocidal outcome in Iraq - that much is clear.

people were going to die if they launched the war?

was not a criminal act. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is. The predictable consequences of committing crimes are the moral (and legal) responsibility of the criminal.

They were incompotent, thinking that it would be rainbows and butterflies with Saddam gone.

Were they idiots? Absolutely. But everyone who engages in war knows there's going to be civilian and military casualties. That doesn't automatically make the war genocide.

But Congress did authorize the use of force, which means constitutionally Bush was within his rights to invade.

It was an idiotic decision, and a poorly mismanaged situation. But it was not genocide.

BTW, the American Revolution was considered criminal by the British.

You hit the nail on the head. It's precisely because of the truth of your statement that anyone who engages in war illegally - by that I mean in contradiction of international law - is criminally responsible for those civilian casualties that you rightfully say are so predictable.

The crime is further compounded when the war-makers use tactics and methods that will predictably compound those civilian casualties. Examples would include (a) the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, (b) the laying siege to civilian populated cities, (c) the indiscriminate bombing of populated areas and (d) the use of munitions which continue to kill innocent civilians long after the fighting stops (cluster bombs and depleted uranium for example).

for your comments in this thead. Spot fucking on.

the one that engaged in personal attacks. I admire his/her restraint.

I shouldn't laugh but I have to agree with Steel Penguin.

The neo-cons led by Rumsfeld really appeared to be anticipating a Patton movie scenario. They did state the Iraqi people would be ever so over-joyed to have the American GI's free them from Saddam.

Bush was a FOOL who wanted to prove his ability over that of his dad who didn't 'finish the job' of overthrowing Saddam. Iraq today is worse off than they were before. They had breweries and beer under saddam They did not have Shariah laws.

... intended to germinate a Jeffersonian democracy? Why, because Wolfowitz and other spewers of black propaganda said so? Isn't that akin to hearsay? I say your "evidence" is paper thin. It is expecially paper thin when one looks at the whole of American foreign policy since WWII. It is not paved with "good intentions". What we do differs greatly from what we say.

I don't like to talk about it generally. We sat around in our plus leather arm chairs sipping brandy and strategizing about how we would just kill as many arabs as possible in order to take their oil. Then we laughed and laughed. Really evilly to. Like a big MUA HA HA HA.

If it helps, I agree with you. The case in Iraq is horrible. The negligence of this administration borders on the criminal in this regard. The dramatic severity is to a degree rarely witnessed.

But to call it Genocide both denies the actual definition, and (more importantly) minimizes the deaths of those actually targeted by genocide.

That's exactly my point.

People that have an intent. If they don't have intent they're not commiting genocide.

Genocide isn't defined by the results, but by the intent of the perpetrator.

This is the disconnect though. Genocide really has little to do with the results, so much as the intent. Bad stuff happens all the time, and we have different terms for it.

It's similar to the difference between 1st Degree Murder and Manslaughter. The result may be the same, but the definition of what was done depends on the perpetrators intent, forethought, etc.

To apply a definition of Genocide you MUST talk about intent. Results alone aren't sufficient.

I know a little about genocide, I suppose you wouldn't consider these genocides either?

5.16 million Irish men, women and children; making it the Irish Holocaust


Native Americans 12 million - Four centuries later 237 thousand

I know a little bit about genocides too. I also know alot about what's happening in Iraq. We're not talking about all genocides. We're not analyzing every instance of genocide, or arguable genocide. We're talking about this one.

What evidence do you have that points to the United States having intent to commit genocide in Iraq?

What evidence do you have showing the intent of the U.S. to commit Genocide in Iraq?

yet that doesn't show intent to commit genocide. Do you have any other evidence?

the fact that Iraq has already experienced genocide



http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1564270,00.html

Is Iraq Headed for Genocide?
ToolsPrintEmailReprintsSphereAddThisRSSYahoo! Buzz President George W. Bush has continued to reject assertions that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. But in the wake of his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan, to discuss the country's continuing sectarian violence, some human rights experts are worrying about a different, worse fate for Iraq: genocide.



Juan Mendez, Kofi Annan's special advisor on the prevention of genocide, told TIME that the targeting of minorities based solely on religion in Iraq, the extent of the violence there, the lack of central control, and the fact that Iraq has already experienced genocide, "constitute warning signs that we take very seriously." He stressed that those warning signs can be present in conflicts and never rise to the level of genocide, but that his office is watching the situation closely. If the situation in Iraq did deteriorate, Mendez said, "I would not hesitate to request armed troops to protect people" but, he added, it would have to be in a "different configuration" than what is there now.

Gregory Stanton, a professor of human rights at Virginia's University of Mary Washington, sees in Iraq the same troubling signs of preparation and execution of genocidal aims that he saw in the 1990s in Rwanda when he worked at the State Department. Sunni and Shiite militias are "trying to polarize the country, they're systematically trying to assassinate moderates, and they're trying to divide the population into homogenous religious sectors," Stanton says. All of those undertakings, he says, are "characteristics of genocide," and his organization, Genocide Watch, is preparing to declare the country in a "genocide emergency."

Though the term conjures up thoughts of enormous numbers of civilian dead, the quantity of victims is not the warning sign experts look for when considering the danger of genocide. Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, says with Shi'ite and Sunni sub-groups already identifying and killing victims solely on the basis of their religious identity, "genocidal intent" is already present in Iraq. "When you drive up to a checkpoint and you're stopped and somebody pulls out your ID and determines whether you're a Sunni or a Shiite and takes you away and kills you because of that, there is a genocidal mentality afoot." The question, Power says, is how broadly that mentality will spread. Iraq has already seen one genocide in recent decades: Saddam Hussein stands accused of attempting to exterminate Kurds, the third largest group in the country.

While Power and Stanton both see a mounting danger of widespread genocide in Iraq, there is certainly not consensus on the threat. Other human rights organizations, like the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the International Crisis Group, do not see the conditions for genocide developing. Human Rights Watch, which is particularly restrictive in what it calls genocide, says it believes Iraq is not headed in that direction. Joost Hiltermann, who covers Iraq for the International Crisis Group, says that the biggest impediment to full-blown genocide is the fact that there are divisions between Shi'ite factions, which prevent them from uniting in a nationwide persecution of Sunnis.

Much of the debate over the possibility of widespread genocide in Iraq stems from differing interpretations of the 1948 United Nations convention on genocide. There, genocide is defined rather broadly as killing, seriously harming, restricting birth or attempting to destroy in whole or in part, "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Says University of Mary Washington's Stanton, "Anyone who says that's not happening in Iraq is burying their head in the sand." But others say the number of people in Iraq operating with the intention of eradicating people solely on the basis of their membership in a ethnic or religious group is too small to constitute genocidal intent.

Stanton, Power, and a variety of politicians and foreign policy experts in Washington, including Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, worry that a U.S. pullout would only heighten the dangers of genocide. Some observers have held up Vietnam's long road to stability as a possible model for Iraq, after American troops leave. But says Power, "When you discuss what is left in America's wake you have to acknowledge that Saigon is not the only scenario that is hanging in our midst. What about the Rwanda scenario?" In Rwanda, the 1994 genocide that had been brewing only broke into full bloom after the withdrawal of U.N. peacekeeping forces.

While the genocide convention is relatively explicit about obligating its signatories to intervene to prevent genocide where it is occurring or preparing to occur, more often than not the world has declined to do so. And no one seriously believes that if widespread genocide unfolded in Iraq that the U.S. would be able to do anything about it. "The arc of humanitarian intervention has already been killed by Iraq for at least a generation," says Power. The clearest example of that is in Sudan. The United States has declared that genocide against the inhabitants of the Darfur region is under way, but there is no indication of possible military or humanitarian intervention to halt it.

The genocide they're talking about is the Shiite on Sunni and Sunni on Shiite violence. The even make specific mention of worrying about more widespread genocide if the U.S. leaves.

That has nothing to do with proving U.S. intent to commit genocide in Iraq. It shows U.S. incompetence in securing and occupying the country, and more broadly U.S. guilt for invading in the first place, but not genocidal intent.

now tell me when that started?

When Mohammed died. It's been going on off and on since then. This flare up though, which you're referencing, began after the U.S. invasion and occupation.

That still doesn't prove any kind of intent on the U.S. Heck they didn't even to seem to understand the differences between the two groups, or that a difference even existed. That points to incompetence far more than intent to murder millions of Iraqi's.

Where did you get that?

It just doesn't have anything to do with showing intent, which is necessary to use the word Genocide.

Assuming that the U.S. invasion was illegal, how does doing so show anything about intent?

Again you're confusing actions with the intent behind those actions. What was the intent of the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq?

Thank you though for giving me something, I read about half of it, and skimmed through the rest and read the conclusions. My main problem with this article is that it seems to take the tack that none of what happened in Iraq was done by mistake, or were blunders. He even calls it the big lie.

His arguments are disjointed, and bring up points which are totally irrelevant, but he uses as evidence (such as statements by Carter during the cold war to ward off Soviet thoughts of invasion of Iran or Iraq. He also implies that another reason Iraq was targeted was because it was one of the most developed countries in the middle east. The whole paper smacks of bias, really. He even says that even if the intent is for "benevolent hegemony" that it still constitutes intent for genocide.

Essentially even if the U.S. didn't want to hurt a fly in Iraq, it's still Genocide, according to the author.

I'm sorry, but this just doesn't cut it for me. It's a paper trying to support it's argument by only pointing out the facts that it finds relevant, ignoring others, and forcing the rest into a preconception. It started out well and I hoped the author would make some interesting points, but it quickly descended into a well-written, but poorly formed thought.

Show me something written by an named author proving your point and I will consider it

If all you can do is a poorly formed essay by a visiting professor at a Palestinian university, go for it. You obviously made your mind up prior to finding this essay, and are incapable of rational discussion on the matter, so I guess we're done.

Have a good one!

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/NotesOnGenocideInIraq.pdf

and who are those please?

For example-- the Armenians, the Rwandans, the Cambodians, and of course-- those races and minorities specifically targeted by the Nazi's in the 30's and 40's. For a few examples.

The following are some awfully good books on the topic, and all lay out the precise and relevant framework for what actually constitutes Genocide.


1. A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts by Charny, Parsons, & Totten.

2. The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective by Robert Gellately and Ben Kieman.

3. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide by Alan S. Rosenbaum.


I can only stand by both the actual definition and my statement. I've read the above three books in the past eighteen months and believe their thesis's to be correct and valid.

btw I've read your suggestions already

What does what happened to the Irish or the Native Americans have to do with proving Intent by the U.S. in regards to Iraq?

If so prove intent

What evidence do you have that points to the U.S. having intent to commit Genocide in Iraq?

lots of dead bodies. The U.S. is responsible. That doesn't make it genocide. It's only genocide if the U.S. went into Iraq with the intention of killing one million plus iraqis. Are you claiming that was the U.S. intent? What evidence do you have for this?

a million dead iraqis and counting

That it's possible for the U.S. to hold responsibility without it being Genocide?

I haven't forgotten them. I simply listed a few examples rather than making a comprehensive list which would take me most of the afternoon to collate.

You'll also notice that the examples I listed had something in common other that being victims of Genocide-- the examples I listed had all happened in the 20th century.



Sheesh...

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/NotesOnGenocideInIraq.pdf

The author of your paper is one college professor attempting to get charges of genocide to stick against the American occupation forces. It is in no way proof that genocide (as per the definition) is being committed-- the only precise thing that it does absolutely illustrate is that a college professor in Palestine believes that it is Genocide.




"Dr Ian Douglas is visiting professor in politics at An- Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine, and working to bring the charge of genocide against the United States and allies in a court of universal jurisdiction (www.USgenocide.org)."

I did not say he was credible. My only point being that one professor leveling charges against a nation is not, in and of itself a Proof.

However-- if we use your standards, the only thing I'd need to do to show genocide was *not* happening is simply cite a professor, yes...? Or if a Professor leveled charges against the U.S. for stealing the Soviet Weather Machine, would that mean that there was a Soviet Weather Machine and that the U.S. stole it...?

I'm afraid I still disagree with your thesis statement and you're too busy tap dancing around everyone and putting intent and words in people's mouths/posts to critically re-examine it.

What is happening in Iraq does not meet the criteria set forth by the standard and classical definitions of Genocide. It's horrible to an extreme, yes, but it doesn't fit within the definition.

but this response just made me laugh.

Reading this back and forth is giving me a headache, and I'm in awe of your humor and restraint. With my low post count I know I'm placing a huge "Flame Me" sign on myself, but I just couldn't let this post fly by without comment.

Thank you for the welcome relief!

Sid

you see this is a discussion board not the tv or radio, ya can't hear so I use caps when I'm yelling, I'm Irish, I like to yell sometimes

This is the longest subthread I have ever seen without a single deleted message. It may in fact also be the longest subthread I have ever seen.

:toast:

by the fact that the U.S. targeted civilian infrastructure. They intended mass civilian death and chaos, enabling siezure of Iraqi assets and establishment of imperial garrisons from which the U.S. can extend and enforce future regional hegemony.

SteelPenguin

One dead body don't prove intend of killing.. But 100.000 or One million?.. The Allied executed 12 germans after the war, and in some cases, the prove for their crimes was more than questionable.. Some of them, who just dodged the bulled when it come to executing (like Albert Speed) was indeed responsible for thousands of prisoner been killed by the germans between 1942 and 1945... But he personally had never killed anyone.. Have just been sitting in a office and crunching the numbers...

After WW2, in the 1960s it was a very open case in Israel, where the mastermind behind the sending of jews to the Ghettos, and the KZ camps was on trial, crimes against humanity.. Himself was just a bureaucrat, who had just doing his job, who was to send people to their death. But himself had _never_ murdered a single man, woman and children.. But the prove against the man was overwhelming and he was executed, I guess by gas...

If we ever would get the hand of all the document about this Administration, many faces we all know, and know well after 8 year with this regime would live in danger to be hang..

If they are not been send to a trial in the United States, the issue here is crimes against humanity, and against the iraqi people, it would always be a place in the International Criminal Court in Hague..

Diclotican

Sorry my bad english, not my native language

Yes it will happen Did you see Philippe Sands?

seemslikeadream

I am afraid I have not been seeing Phillipe Sands, can you point me in the right direction?

And I hope the truth about this horrible regime of you would come to light, one and for all.. And therefore the end of this type of regimes in the US too... The germans learned the same the hard way, after WW2...

It might end in a better, more secure, and maybe more "GROWN UP" United states of America in the end to?.. Today US looks like a kid, a little kid with tooth pain... After a real trial against the criminals, you might, just might get true and be a grown up nation..And maybe again Be the beacon of both hope and comfort you once was... Maybe we even work it out with other things too..

Diclotican

Sorry my bad english, not my native language

For one thing, whether or not Bush is competent is completely irrelevant, and I think misleading and false. The administration had definite plans and executed them masterfully. There is no evidence that they goofed. We may not like the things they have been successful at - advancing the interests of their wealthy and powerful clients - but they have succeeded. Perhaps in spite of being goofy and incompetent. The rulers of Germany in the 30's did a lot of damage, and were not the brightest bulbs or most stable people.

Then this notion that because administration officials said their goals were something other than genocide means anything is also foolish. Had they said "we are sending the military to Iraq to murder people that get in our way and to destroy their culture and communities" they would have risked much more opposition. The relative plausibility of the excuses and rationales for genocide does niot change anything.

To answer your question - yes, I do absolutely think that "it was their intent to murder Iraqi's because of who they are." That is what they have done, that is what all of their policies, tactics and strategies were dead certain to lead to, that is how they are measuring success, and they successfully whipped the people here up into an anti-Arab murderous frenzy - because of "who they are." The average supporter of the war on the street thinks that we are killing people because of "who they are" and has gotten that message from the administration very clearly. The news media outlets repeat the government updates - such and such number of people killed - as a measure of the "progress" of the occupation.

If this is not targeting and murdering people for "who they are," I don't know what would be. It may not be on the scale of past genocides, it may not be as efficiently accomplished, but that is not relevant either.

Why would we want to not pick or water down or weaken the definition of genocide in any case, and look for excuses for the perpetrators?

Targeting and threatening a people's very existence in a variety of ways because of who and where they are is genocidal.

This is the danger of seeing the administration as incompetent idiots and morons - it lets them off the hook for their crimes.

Do you believe that the large-scale death of Arab Muslims committed by these White Christians is an unintended side effect? Of course not. Beyond the gung-ho kill-the-muslim ultra-fundie mentality of our armed forces' leadership, there's also the reality that in order for control to be maintained by the profiteering corporations, resistance must be smashed, populations must be removed, and social order must be eradicated.

Now, perhaps "genocide" is the wrong label - but ethnic cleansing, genocide's little brother, certainly applies.

No I don't believe this was the systematic and deliberate depopulation of Iraq by White christians.

I think it was a dumb ass move by incompetent leadership which caused the death of millions of people. Comparable to the driver of a car, cutting THROUGH the mall rather than drive around it, to find a better parking spot. Idiotic, totally incomprehensible, and resulting the the injury and death of many people. Caused though not by a hatred and desire to obliterate the people of that mall, but just total utter incompetence and idiocy.

Genocide is the wrong label. Ethnic cleansing is the wrong label.

What we have here is criminal negligence and manslaughter on a scale not seen in perhaps forever.

US World Dominance ("American Empire")
According to its critics, the PNAC promotes American "hegemony" and "Full-spectrum" dominance in its own publications featured on its website.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

Wanting to be dominate does not equate to this action being genocide.

"If you kill to achieve that dominance. Yes it is genocide. "

No-- that's Military Imperialism....

I think if you could get these thugs under oath, or subpoena the proper documents, you'd find that the postwar planning was *deliberately* fucked up for the express reason of fomenting chaos and an insurgency and the decimation of the Iraqi society.

Cultural genocide if you will. *Not* manslaughter because I think intent can be proven.

Warnings were *deliberately ignored*.
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB163/index.htm

A)1 genocide is the only one with no limitations. 5 years on everything else.

No. I'm sorry, but you cannot idiot your way into the deaths of over a million people. Statistically you'd kill yourself accidentally before you hit fifty other people.

No, this was planned. The less organized and more angry Iraqis are at each other, the easier it is for America to take their shit. The fewer Iraqis, the less contention for hte property grab.

It's a new take on lebensraum, but the concept is completely the same.

is that the driver of the car at the mall was not undertaking the commission of a separate crime when he drove though and not around.

A better analogy would be a bank robber driving through the mall as part of a getaway plan. In which case under U.S. law they would be charged with the same crime - 1st degree murder - as a serial killer. The reason is because the "unintended" outcome of their deliberate criminal action was entirely predictable. In the same way, the genocidal outcome of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq was entirely predictable.

Hitler was merely enforcing german law that made it illegal to be a jew. A crime punishable by death. No intent to destroy in whole or in part. Just enforce German law.

The intent was to destroy an ethnic group, ie it was Genocide. There was no other intent there. It was blatant.

just an oversite?

I hate all those people in the congo...

Oh wait, sorry that's a strawman.

a) Does Genocide require Intent as written by definition in the Geneva Convention?
b) Did the United States have this intent?

That's the conversation we're having.

Plenty of genocide going on. In Sudan too.

Doesn't mean what's happening in Iraq is though.

specifically what the intentions of the U.S. were in regards to Iraq\?

at the same rate as blacks browns and any other color

Specifically in regards to the intent of the United states regarding Iraq?

Only currently, or in the entire history of humankind?

If only currently, what are the specific and relevant reasons the answers should only be limited to the here and now?

Well... to use one of your earlier examples of the atrocities against the Irish.. well, they were white, yes? The Roma were white. Many of the homosexuals and mentally ill killed during the Nazi holocaust were white.

So, yeah... a LOT of white people have been victims of genocides. For what it's worth..

4 million Congo

12 million Native Americans

1 million Rwandans


For a starter that's 17 million off the top of my head, give me some numbers on white folks

Not even Hitler sat down and said we're going to commit genocide. Even though that was the end result of his policies. They always intend to do something else that some how accidentally becomes genocide.

So now you're arguing Hitler didn't intend to kill Jewish people because they were Jewish?

Are you trying to say that we aren't killing Iraqi's for being Iraqi's and defending their homeland from our illegal invasion?

He actually did state that-- quite emphatically in fact, along with numerous high ranking members of the cabinet, and the relevant SS commanders who were to be in charge of it. In 1942 and early '43...

(see Hershel Edelheit's book-- A World in Turmoil: An Integrated Chronology of the Holocaust and World War II. and Allan A. Ryan, Jr.-- Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, the Report, with Documentary Appendix, to the Attorney General of the United States.)

try reading Mein Kampf. And the laws were created specifically to perpetrate genocide. v

There's some evidence-slight- that he was influenced by the genocide of native Americans perpetrated by the U.S. gov't, but that doesn't begin to account for Hitler's genocidal determination or plans. To understand that, you have to understand his childhood, his background, the culture he came form, etc. The determination to commit genocide didn't spring full blown from his skull in some eureka moment when he found out about the genocide of Native Americans.

Hitler wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

than you ever will on this subject. I've actually formally studied it. I can speak and write in complete sentences. You have yet to demonstrate that you can do the latter. I'd rather no find out about the former.

Oh, and Hitler was almost certainly influenced by Martin Luther and the anti-semitic milieu in which he grew up and lived, to a greater degree than he was influenced by the Eugenics movement here and Grant- despite his admiration for Grant and his loony ideas.

Have you ever even read a biography of Hitler?

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

Something tells me you haven't read them.

GET OFF MY ASS

When I've got three posters on this thread giving me a hard time, I could possibly make a mistake but of course you'll be right there to make a point of it, too bad in 6 years and 30,000 you've only found two and I know you read EVERYTHING I post

in 6 YEARS here and 30,000 posts you found two insignificant sentences to BITCH about, makes you feel like a REAL man I suppose doesn't it greyl?

"Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible." -Edwin Black

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

You have no interest in this thread only came here to fuck with me

to...........just what are you here for greyl? Do you care anything about the genocide in Iraq or just my faux pas

had been doing for 1,100 plus years in persecuting and isolating the Jews ...
making Jews the enemy, dictating what their lives would be segregated from the rest of
society in ghettos.

Hitler also evidently stuided how the American government had wiped out the native American ---
and the use of concentration camps here!!

Not a pre-existing law, though-- and that's a precise and relevant difference. A law that was part and parcel of the Final Solution.

It's Genocide. What Texas is doing to the FLDS is also Genocide.

I don't recall it being their intent to destroy the Baath party. Even so the Baath party is not a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, so even if that was their intent, it wouldn't be considered Genocide.

Yes it was their was their Plan B intent. No WMD's then we'll go with genocide. Disband the Baath party. They were the national Shia party.

"What Texas is doing to the FLDS is also Genocide."

:eyes: That's all. Just some rolling of the eyes in response to your continued defense of FLDS based on... nothing.

And off we go again! (off to work, catch you later.)

Wonder how those 12 floors of lawyers are doing. Yup, think he missed the point. Glad someone else wanted to play before it got rough in here.

Blood is on our hands.

We're guilty of many things in regards to Iraq, but genocide isn't one of them.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/56124 /

Is the United States Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month? Or Is It More?

By Michael Schwartz
<http://www.afterdowningstreet.org >.
Posted July 6, 2007

300 Iraqis killed by Americans each day sounds like an impossible figure, but a close look at the reported numbers of violent deaths and rate of armed patrols makes it all too likely.

A state-of-the-art research study published in October 12, 2006 issue of The Lancet (the most prestigious British medical journal) concluded that -- as of a year ago -- 600,000 Iraqis had died violently due to the war in Iraq. That is, the Iraqi death rate for the first 39 months of the war was just about 15,000 per month.

That wasn't the worst of it, because the death rate was increasing precipitously, and during the first half of 2006 the monthly rate was approximately 30,000 per month, a rate that no doubt has increased further during the ferocious fighting associated with the current American surge.

The U.S. and British governments quickly dismissed these results as "methodologically flawed," even though the researchers used standard procedures for measuring mortality in war and disaster zones. (They visited a random set of homes and asked the residents if anyone in their household had died in the last few years, recording the details, and inspecting death certificates in the vast majority of cases.) The two belligerent governments offered no concrete reasons for rejecting the study's findings, and they ignored the fact that they had sponsored identical studies (conducted by some of the same researchers) in other disaster areas, including Darfur and Kosovo. The reasons for this rejection were, however, clear enough: the results were simply too devastating for the culpable governments to acknowledge. (Secretly the British government later admitted that it was "a tried and tested way to measuring mortality in conflict zones"; but it has never publicly admitted its validity).

Reputable researchers have accepted the Lancet study's results as valid with virtually no dissent. Juan Cole, the most visible American Middle East scholar, summarized it in a particularly vivid comment: "the US misadventure in Iraq is responsible for setting off the killing of twice as many civilians as Saddam managed to polish off in 25 years."

Are you saying these acts were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group? What evidence do you have that this was the intent, instead of the horrific consquence of another intent?

Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant because the consequences of the bombings and sanctions could have been predicted by any reasonable person.

most intelligent people knew this would be the result... an there is evidence and testimony to build a case showing the Bush administration wanted chaos instead of wanting to win the peace right after the invasion.

Intent can be found in the campaigns of the war, not in the mission statements of the war. The siege of Fallujah was not an aberration.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/13433 /

Thank you very much for coming to the Council. You’ve laid out a fairly detailed timetable for how you’d like to see the drawdown take place in Iraq and the eventual withdrawal. There’s some skepticism about the ability of the United States to affect things in Iraq once we do withdraw, and the possibility of a genocide is something you’ve made reference to. So, how does that change your figuring on what the United States would have to do if you did get out and then this happened?

First of all, the long-term stability and chance for success in Iraq is dependent on the Iraqi leadership itself. My view is that until and when we shift the responsibility for Iraq to the Sunni and Shia leadership, it's unlikely based on history that they're going to reach any political reconciliation. And so we need to do that in a smart, orderly way by telling them we’re doing it, withdrawing troops over a period of ten to twelve months. We ought to engage in every effort we can to help bring them together, to encourage political compromise, and we ought to engage the Iranians, the Syrians, and other countries in the region into helping stabilize Iraq. The Iranians clearly have an interest in a stable Iraq. They don’t want refugees coming across their border, they don’t want the economic instability, and they don’t want a broader Middle East conflict between Shia and Sunni. The Syrians have a similar interest, although they’re Sunni, not Shia.

And then, the president has a responsibility beyond that. We have interest in the region, that’s obvious, we need to maintain a presence there, in Kuwait, in Afghanistan, maybe in Jordan, depending on what we can agree to there, and we definitely need to maintain a naval presence in the Persian Gulf. And the president has got to prepare for the two things that you raise. One is the possibility that the civil war becomes all-out, so that it can be contained, and the second is the possibility of genocide. My view is that this is something that’s crucial for America to plan for. In the case of the civil war, there are strategies for dealing with it, to contain it—buffer zones, moving away from population centers. And in the case of genocide, this is something we clearly need to be doing with the international community, not America doing this alone. We have to prepare for that. I’m not going to say now this far in advance exactly what the mechanism should be, but America has to have a plan for that.

Genocide implies targeting. Iraq is more like 1.2 million cases of negligent homicide, and an additional 24 million cases of reckless endangerment. It's not like we intended to kill them--we just didn't give a fuck what we were doing.

By the way, this article contains a blatantly false statement, that 200,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, died in the first gulf war. The actual number of civilian dead is estimated between 2,300 (the official Iraqi government number) and 3,600 (Project on Defense Alternatives). The rest of the casualties, estimated between 20,000 and 35,000, were military.

It's hard to get accuratenumver out of Iraq on either war. But I do believe that 10,000 civillians were killed in shock & awe alone. That comes from Iraqi hospitals.

That's what the 200k figure was about.

That was part of teh accounting for some of the mass graves. Casualties from teh guld war and other mass graves the Iraq Iran war.

And when is there EVER an admission of guilty intent involving genocide?

and in Nazi Germany.

don't tell me, you have a tinfoil crazy theory about how FDR was complicit with Hitler in genocide.

by your logic.

:eyes:

with no remorse at all. It's all about the oil.

Here's the thread I did on this last week - pretty much ignored.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3289831&mesg_id=3289831


1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2, defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

US intervention in Indochina began and thus proceeded from support for the French attempt (with intent) to destroy the independent nation of Vietnam, in which no limits to the means employed were acknowledged. All subsequent US actions qualify as continuing this originally French attack on the Vietnamese.

In addition, the national group of the Vietnamese was designated originally for colonization by the French on the basis of a racist assessment of European superiority. Following directly from the failed French genocidal war, the US intervened with its own troops, using an invented incident as the pretext, and without valid grounds for intervention in any body of law. As we ultimately found out from the documents, the invalid (and immoral) motives of the planners valued the lives of Vietnamese and other non-whites or non-Americans as particularly expendable on behalf of geostrategic (and imperialist) considerations.

The US power thereupon created a bogus nation under a puppet government in the south of Vietnam. To impose its will against the resistance of the Vietnamese people, it employed all means normally associated with genocide: bombings and massacres of civilian populations, summary execution of captured partisans, rounding up of civilian populations involuntarily into concentration camps with conditions bringing about physical destruction in whole or in part (keeping them away from their fields, lower calorie intake ultimately results). This was accompanied throughout by a widespread racist rhetoric (not official) among troops and on homefront about gooks and slopeheads and how we should just kill them all, and political pressure to use nukes and bomb the dikes killing millions at a blow.

In general, I object strenuously on moral grounds to a definition of genocide under which a white government killing two million brown civilians in an unprovoked aggressive war is considered to have committed genocide only if it announced an explicit and official ideology that defined those civilians as an undesirable racial category; but the same government is off the hook for genocide if those two million people were "merely" "collateral" (but do note: predictable) casualties who happened to be in the way of an imperial quest for control over oil (for example). If we accept this definition, then killing all people in an area indiscriminately (but for their wealth) is considered less genocidal than a targeted killing of some of the people in that area. Anyone who insists on this definition perhaps needs to come up with a word for a crime worse than genocide.

In practice, the definition of genocide prevalent among some on this board, i.e., those who wish to exclude the US crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, effectively covers in particular for the crimes of Western imperialism. This is because by the mythology associated with Western imperialism, its crimes are almost never due to racism but only for national interest, or else arise from a noble desire to civilize the world. Perhaps even King Leopold's destruction and murder of 10 million people in the Congo in about 10 years (worked to death as slaves, arms hacked off for poor performance, starved to death, massacred) would not qualify as genocide, since the primary motive was not to kill Africans per se, but to plunder the region's wealth.

If anything, killing entire peoples incidentally with the motive of plunder should be considered equally criminal to killing them with the motive of hatred. Keep in mind that even Hitler has had apologists who claimed the Nazi crimes were committed in the course of a strict Realpolitik and struggle among the European powers. Killing masses of civilians, or taking actions that predictably lead to their deaths, should be roughly seen as equally criminal whatever the motives, which ultimately may be unknowable.

One larger point surely is that the Belgian destruction of the Congolese peoples would never have happened to the same extent if Leopold's ideology and religious beliefs had honored black people as human beings equal to white people. And the same is true of the US actions in Vietnam and Iraq, two nations that (unlike Germany and Japan) never attacked or provoked or declared war on the US, or even posed potential threats to its security. The one-sided killing of millions of people there by invading American troops is inconceivable outside the context of the racist worldview that values American civilization and interests as superior to those of other nations, especially insofar as these are predominantly non-white, non-European and non-Christian nations. Whether or not that racism is stated explicitly or even fully conscious is secondary.

The political will to attack or occupy Iraq would have never been formed if it had been a nation of white, mostly Christian (or Jewish) people; and it would have never been attacked if it could have defended itself. Those two facts are inescapable, and they amply justify an Iranian policy to build nuclear weapons, if that is in fact what they are doing.

Very... graphic!

Gazeta Mercantil is a Polish business newspaper?

Weird.

That people deny the comparisons between * and Hitler blows my mind, because I see very little difference.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=3060032

Can we expect another "Iraq is Genocide" post from you sometime in July?

Sid

I know for a fact there are more

you were sufficiently refuted in that thread that I didn't feel the need to find any others.

Sid

:rofl:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3060032&mesg_id=3073940

There's ~20 distinct posters who didn't agree that Iraq was a genocide.

Laugh all you want. Change the subject as much as you want. Lock those caps all day long, for all I care.

It's evil. It's reprehensible. It's shameful. But without intent, it's still not genocide.

Sid

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/NotesOnGenocideInIraq.pdf

That academic seems to be as misinformed as you are.

Strangely, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say nothing about your genocide in Iraq. Why you have this pathological need to classify the giant clusterfuck that is Iraq as a genocide is beyond me. As was posted in #130 above (and which you conveniently ignored)

"Do you agree that it can be wrong, and not be Genocide? That it's possible for the U.S. to hold responsibility without it being Genocide?"

Perhaps I'll even be interested enough to read your reply.

Sayonara, babe.

Sid

in jail proves that the crooks are in charge. That could well change if the Dems gain the White House and Congress.

"manifest practice"

Thanks for the link to the article and putting this up!

Thanks

I'd forgotten to bookmark it and tried to find it about a week later, with no luck!

Thanks, seemslikeadream, for pounding this point home so well. You really shouldn't wait "three months" to bring it up again, since the move is on to expand this American genocide into other nations of the Middle East. Failure to recognize it for what it is makes us complicit, with the blood on all our hands.

It is genocide. Still there are people who argue that Western transatlantic slavery was not genocide so don't be surprised at some of these responses.

or they don't want to concede it's genocide because then they will be held in the same regards as the German people were after WWII

It will be defined as an illegal war, an illegal occupation and genocide.

becomes impossible to ignore by our Western Media!

death of a nation, for what reason

Even sooner than that with non-conventional means. I believe we were careless and didn't give a crap if civilians happened to be killed in our operations, but I do not believe there was intent for genocide.

Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, etc., are all guilty of genocide.

Criminal war does not de facto signify genocide.