Victor's justice

Interesting counterpoint offered in response to the "We got him!" crowd by David Walsh:

If every crime attributed to Hussein since the Baathists took power for good in 1968 were true, his hands would still not be stained with a fraction of the blood spilled by a series of US presidents over the same general period. Under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, four million Vietnamese lost their lives as the result of US intervention, along with an estimated one million Cambodians and half a million Laotians. In Indonesia in 1965, a CIA-supported coup resulted in the deaths of another half a million people. Between 1954 and 2002, 300,000 Guatemalans are estimated to have met their deaths as the result of US-backed government repression. Another 100,000 are thought to have died in El Salvador.

In Argentina and Chile in the 1970s, with the capable assistance of the Nixon-Kissinger and Carter-Brzezinski regimes, military butchers tortured and murdered 50,000 people. Hundreds of thousands, if not more, Iraqis, including half a million children, have encountered a tragic fate as the result of the two wars conducted by US forces, and a decade of devastating sanctions under Bush and Clinton.

The Afghan catastrophe since 1979 has resulted in another one million deaths, and one should add the lives of 3,000 innocent Americans lost in the terrorist attacks of September 2001, which was one of the byproducts of the disastrous US encounter with the Central Asian nation.

And for all the talk about the Kurds, the US has stood shoulder to shoulder with the worst oppressor of that people, the Turkish regime. Indeed, the arrest of Hussein, carried out with US assistance, resembled nothing so much as the capture of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan in February 1999.

Yes, yes. I can hear the cries of "moral equivalency" already.