Post (or rant) of of the month

SIAW in superb form, after their break. Some short (relatively) extracts :

'our position is in favour of democracy - even in the limited and corrupted form of liberal or bourgeois democracy - and against dictatorship, for the simple reason that the former at least offers openings for further progress (along with all the crap it also offers), while the latter offers only (as a certain far too frequently quoted British socialist once said) the prospect of a jackboot stamping on a human face forever.' Ah, but it's difficult to avoid quoting him, isn't it ?

'It’s not a question of good versus evil - in the real world it never is - but of a very great evil, potentially going on unseen and unpunished for still more decades under one or other of Saddam’s sons or henchmen, and a much lesser evil that has been seen and stopped, and will shortly be punished.'

Roula Khalaf's article that I mentioned in an earlier post is mainly concerned with the failures of the US occupation, but there are some reminders of the (unseen) atrocities of the Saddam era.

When  Mohamed Baqir al-Sadr. was arrested in 1979, his sister, Bint al-Huda, herself a religious authority, was taken with him. Her body was never found but Shi'a scholars believe she was raped before she was murdered.

When Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr (Muqtada's father) was, everybody presumes, assassinated in 1999, there were riots among the Shi'a. 'Tanks and artillery forced their way in... As many as 800 people are believed to have died in Sadr city.