Are you concerned about accommodations the U.S. might make with other Iraqi leaders in an effort to ease the way for an American occupation?
If you look at Saddam’s crimes, you have crimes like the Anfal genocide of 1988, in which 100,000 mostly Kurdish men and boys were rounded up and executed. Now Saddam may have directed this, but this is not something any single man can do by himself. There were other people, like Ali Hassan al-Majid — otherwise known as “Chemical Ali” — who oversaw the gassing and executions of many Kurds. There were other lieutenants. It would be awful if under some misguided effort to retain a viable Iraqi state people like this were given a “get-out-of-jail-free card” in return for simply cooperating with the U.S. invading forces. We think it’s important — not only as a matter of respect for Saddam’s victims, but also as a matter of deterring future Saddams — not to forget the crimes that these people have committed, but to hold them accountable. We want the Pentagon to resist the temptation to forgive and forget with the hope that it will somehow make a U.S. occupation of Iraq easier. Are we in
