Mick Hartley

Prior to Wednesday's Chilcot Report publication, here's an eloquent defence of Saddam's overthrow from Julie Lenarz:

Saddam Hussein’s regime is responsible for the disappearance, torture, and killing of so many people that it is still impossible to say how many exactly perished under his reign of terror. However, what is clear is that his regime was one of the worst criminal dictatorships of modern times.

According to Bakhtiar Amin, Human Rights Minister in the Iraqi Interim Government from June 2004 to May 2005, the Hussein regime was directly responsible for the death of at least one million people. Others put the number as high as twice that enormous figure of men, women and children butchered.

Two million people died or were injured in the war between Iran and Iraq. 200,000 people lost their lives in the first Gulf War. During the 1991 uprising, approximately 200,000 Shi’a Muslims were brutally slaughtered. 500,000 Kurds were subject to the Ba’athists’ genocidal policies. Of the half a million Marsh Arabs who lived in the country in the 1950s, as few as 20,000 now remain.

Saddam’s Iraq holds the world’s record in forced disappearances with over 200,000 people vanished forever. Half a million had to flee into the desert and an additional 4 million became refugees. 4,500 villages and towns were completely destroyed and hundreds exposed to chemical agents – it was the first time a regime used chemical weapons against its own civilian population. 110 torture prisons and concentration camps were in operation across the country. The mass graves are countless and still being dug out to this day.

We have all heard it before, the mantra that “Bush lied, a million died” and some even go as far as to suggest that the US-led coalition killed more people during the intervention than Saddam Hussein in his 35 years in power.

It is a grotesque and irresponsible misrepresentation of reality…..

But read it all.