Jacques Verges Quotes
This mass destructive weapons were sold to Iraqi government by the United States. And Mr. Rumsfeld has been one of the man responsible for this sale, for this bargain, for this market.
Ironically Germany which has publicly usually been so sensitive and responsible after their massive chemical extermination in the concentration camps of WWII, was embarrassed by their own private companies which, to make money, sold the chemicals and the technology to the then worst murderer in the world.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
This quotation is a good example of how tolerant some nations can be in terms of maintaining diplomatic relations and trade relations with other countries. The American and English governments chose to simply protest and condemn the slanderous statement but decided that the Prime Minister was pandering to his political local Islamic base, so took no further action and kept open diplomatic relations. Mahathir had a history of being very accusatory of the West with respect to anything that affected the Arab Muslims. The number of Muslims killed by the Americans and British in the Iraq War was very small compared to the huge number of Muslims killed by other Muslims in their Sunni Shiite civil war. While Bush and Blair both generated support for the Iraq invasion by making claims of WMD development in Iraq that were false, it is not clear whether or not they knew their statements were false, should have known that they were false, created an atmosphere against Iraq that was likely to produce false accusations, or were simple misled by poor intelligence. Mahathir, of course, chose to assume the worst case, and claim it was true, which is what many people think Bush and Blair did in analyzing the intelligence on Iraq.
The claims of the President that Hussein even had weapons of mass destruction were untrue. Eagleburger’s criteria for war would have been even more stringent as is clear in this quotation. Foreign affairs experienced members of the President’s own party tried to dissuade him from this disastrous plan of invading Iraq but were unable to.
See {618460} for the kinds of statements that stimulated this type of political attack.
Bombing had reached the point where conventional bombing raids on industrial cities like Tokyo and Hamburg produced even more civilian casualties than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Tibbets’ view, through the lens of hindsight, was developed by many of the Allied servicemen who had been forced into war by expansionist and militaristic nations like Japan and Germany both of which placed much of their war material manufacturing capability in the midst of their otherwise civilian cities. Both brutally violated the laws of war and committed atrocities many times over before the allies began retaliating. There are still some who believe that it was wrong to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Some even feel that the mass bombing of Japanese and German cities in retaliation and in furtherance of the war effort was morally wrong. But at the time, the millions of casualties anticipated in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, persuaded virtually every American soldier and civilian that there was nothing wrong with use of the Atomic bomb, and many saw it as an absolute Godsend to prevent all the American and Japanese causalities that would have come otherwise. Many scholars remark on how it was virtually impossible to find any significant number of misgivings before or just after Hiroshima. Tibbet’s view was typical.
They almost certainly did when they put down some protests / demonstrations during the Arab Spring. Sophisticated allies point out that the United States (Ohio National Guard) troops that killed the peaceful anti-Vietnam War protesters did so with American made weapons.
Jacques Vergès was a Siamese-born French lawyer, writer and political activist, known for his defense of FLN militants during the Algerian War of Independence. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1960 and temporarily lost his license to officially practice law. A supporter of the Palestinian fedayeen in the 1960s, he disappeared from 1970 to 1978 without ever explaining his whereabouts during that period. He had been involved then in legal cases for high-profile defendants charged with terrorism or war crimes, including Nazi Klaus Barbie in 1987, terrorist Carlos the Jackal in 1994, and former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan in 2008. He also infamously defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy in 1998.
