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Comment by arcadeparade | Hacker News Reader

Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5. It was called genocide by both men who were in charge of it, both of whom resigned in protest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimate...

I also find it interesting that many people who deny that this many people were killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion will have no problem believing the 100,000 figure of people who were killed in the Syrian Civil War so far, which has been a much smaller conflict than Iraq.

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>>Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5

Saddam wanted to get rid of the sanctions, it was in his direct interest to inflate the statistics. (There were reports of e.g. multiple funerals for a given dead child, too.)

His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot. These resources weren't used for that, as far as I've read.

I never got a good answer to my standard point, when this was a hot subject:

It is arguably bad to give in to extortion from dictators. In this case a dictator isn't using his resources to alleviate the suffering of civilians in his own country!

To let dictators get their will through by the suffering of their own civilians is obviously a very, very bad precedent.

Let us not play politics on deaths, that too of Children. It is plain truth that the illegal invasion of Iraq by US in 2003, and the sanctions prior to that exterminated millions and millions of lives - on what basis can we defend loss of innocent lives?? On what basis can anybody defend violence - war? When will we see a civilized humanity and not war mongering nations and industrial complexes?

>>exterminated millions and millions of lives

Wow, many times more than the Wikileaks data and even the most extreme academics.

HN is going downhill :-(

>His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot.

Because he was a horrible dictator who had little regard for human life. Would you expect him to put any of his people's needs ahead of his own? If not, then it's a bit stupid to pretend it's not your fault if when you reduce the resources available to Iraq, children die and Saddam's control gets even tighter.

If you hear that someone is abusive to their 5 children, is your solution to cut their wages in half?

>>If you hear that someone is abusive to their 5 children, is your solution to cut their wages in half?

My point was that it is very, very bad to let dictators use their own civilians' suffering as an argument.

But you knew that.

Edit: To the downvoting idiot -- if you check my history, there is a comment I made yesterday on another subject that is not too old, so you can still downvote it :-)

You can justify anything that way; just find somebody bad who's against it.

The reason not to do something bad is that it's wrong. How a dictator feels about it is beside the point.

You misunderstand what I wrote, it seems? I argue trivial game theory.

If brutal dictators can get their way by hurting their own civilians, it will be very bad for a lot of civilians.

For a parallel, there would be very few kidnappings if no ransom was paid.

It is funny when you present an argument, like I did a few times here, to a bunch of True Believers which can't disprove it -- and they instead down vote you. :-)

You're funny enough to be worth the Karma, idealists. You do make me a bit sad.

Let me tell you how serious people, with at least a smattering of science education, think:

We know most of our opinions are wrong and that these positions will be updated repeatedly during life, so they are less and less wrong. The trick is to identify with the process of learning, not to identify with a certain position.

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