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Why We Are In Iraq

The United States’ military lost many lives in Iraq for freedom and justice and to make good our promise to the world that we, and other countries in the free world, will prevent and punish those committing crimes of genocide.
Saddam Hussein's notorious hatchet man "Chemical Ali", Ali Hassan, ordered villagers to be executed in batches of 25 at a time and brutally crushed a Shiite rebellion in Iraq in 1991. Witnesses have testified that people were executed at a sports centre in batches of 25 at a time. Ali Hassan was present for the execution of the first and then he told his guards to continue executing the others. Hassan, along with others were convicted of other war crimes and crimes against humanity for their role in the brutal crackdown known as Operation Anfal, in which as many as 180,000 Kurdish civilians and guerrillas were killed two decades ago. They used chemicals and other weapons of mass destruction for this deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic and religious group.
The UN General Assembly, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in December 1948, following the outcome of the Nuremburg Trails. They defined genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The UN Security Council’s Resolution 1674, 28 April 2006, reaffirms the provisions regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
My conclusion is that we, the United States’ military are in Iraq because Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan committed crimes of genocide and used weapons of mass destruction. We are, and other countries should be, upholding what was ruled and reaffirmed by the UN General Assembly.

George Bockius
September 24, 2007