Ever since the whole "preventing the use of WMD" rationale for the war in Iraq fell apart, hawks have been pretending we did it because the Bush Administration is so concerned with human rights, particularly for those poor Iraqis who we "liberated" but whose land we do not "occupy."

You, dear readers, cannot let people get away with that kind of bullshit statement. The U.S. actively supported Saddam while he committed most of the atrocities we supposedly care so much about. Now, usually I try not to fault the current administration for the mistakes of the previous one, but eerily, in this case, the current administration <b><i>is</i></b> the previous administrations. Why, where do you think Donald Rumsfeld was on the very day the world found out about the infamous gassing of the Kurds (March 24th 1984, for you history buffs)? Why, he was President Reagan's "Special Envoy" to Saddam, palling it around with the dictator in the Presidential Palace. While we supported Saddam against Iran, he felt free to be his brutal worst.

Then came the sanctions, which, as previously noted, killed at least a million and a half Iraqis, most of them children. Not that everyone refrained from trading with Saddam on human rights grounds; Halliburton's French subsidiary Dresser International did plenty of business with Iraq during the embargo. Strangely enough, Halliburton was headed by one former George H. W. Bush Chief-of-Staff Dick Cheney at the time. The list goes on and on; the same failed policies are recycled by the same failed White House staffers.

Now, we've killed at least 30,000 (some say more like 60,000) Iraqis, and who knows how many more will die. It looks like we're back to what we're good at–burning the village to save it. Plus, we're setting ourselves up in the colonial overlord role in Iraq's revolutionary war theater, which makes it a lock for our newly-installed puppet government, wouldn't you say? Sure, as long as we keep plenty of troops there. Which means we will continue to repress Iraqis in the name of… keeping Iraqis safe from repression.

But there's more to the human rights argument than just acting as a hastily erected cover-up for our naive instincts to punish the bad man. So we got rid of Saddam. OK, but then what? There's no such thing as just removing a government from power, you <b>replace</b> a government (unless the whole state falls apart, which is always a tempting and chaotically bloody option). Saddam didn't exist in a vacuum. The deposition of a government doesn't end when they kick the President-for-life out of the palace. Iraqis have to live with it after the war movie is over. And so do we.

UPDATE (11/2/04): Latest figures are saying about 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed.