No humanitarian case for Iraq war, says rights group

[54anickel]

Well, there goes Shrub's argument

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=485143

The United States and Britain had no justification for invading Iraq either on the grounds of alleged threats from illicit weapons and terrorism, or as a humanitarian mission, an international civil rights group said yesterday.

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has left President George Bush and Tony Blair claiming that the invasion was on humanitarian grounds, said a hard-hitting annual report of Human Rights Watch. It said that the West had done nothing when Saddam massacred Kurds and Shias in the past, and there was no evidence of any continuing mass killings at the start of the war in March 2003.

The report claimed that the US and British occupation forces had "sidelined human rights... as a matter of secondary importance. The rule of law has not arrived and Iraq is still beset by the legacy of human rights abuses of the former government, as well as new ones that have emerged under the occupation." The reasons given for war by Mr Bush and Mr Blair - WMD and Saddam's alleged links with international terrorism - hadnot been proved, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the organisation.

more...

[pacifictiger]

1. that also has been

my perception since the war began. The article does not mention specific dates, but my impression was that the mass chemical genocide killings were around the time of the iran/iraq war and again right after gulf war 1 to quell the shiite uprising. Does anyone know if they found any mass killings subsequent to the US implimentation of the no-fly zone in the mid after that? If not, this point should be talked up everywhere.

[papau]

2. UK papers have story - but not US Media?

Ousting Saddam 'no cause for war' (Human Rights Watch )


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3430331.stm

Ousting Saddam 'no cause for war' -
The reasons for the war are still being questioned

A leading human rights group has said the US and UK are wrong to use the toppling of a brutal regime in Baghdad to justify going to war against Iraq.

In its annual World Report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said:
• Human rights are deteriorating in Afghanistan due to a reliance by US-led forces on warlords to defeat Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters
• The Bush administration uses threats to national security to justify putting executive action in the United States above the law
• Russian authorities justify the war in Chechnya as their contribution to the war on terror, while European and other governments ignore appalling human rights abuses there
• There was a "moment of hope" in Africa with African leaders trying to stop regional wars and the associated abuses, through bodies like the African Union <snip>

"Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life in using military force for humanitarian purposes," it said.
"Brutal as Saddam Hussein's reign had been, the scope of the Iraq Government's killing in March 2003, was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention.
"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair." <snip>