mostly nuggets

blessed britons

The Baath party regime of 1968 was also immediately welcomed by Britain: ‘The new regime may look to the United Kingdom for military training and equipment and we should lose no time in appointing a defence attache’, the ambassador in Baghdad wrote. The regime’s new Defence Minister, General Tikriti, was invited to the Farnborough Air Show and was told by the ambassador that ‘it seemed to me we now had an opportunity to restore Anglo/Iraqi relations to something of their former intimacy’. In reply, ‘General Tikriti said that during the Ba’athist regime of 1963 he had greatly appreciated the cooperative attitude of HMG’.

— Mark Curtis

Unpeople

mad world

The million Iraqi deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction” of the 1990s is unmentioned in Samantha Power’s ludicrous treatise on genocide (“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide), just as she fails to deal seriously with the Indonesian massacres in East Timor. The U.S.-coalition invasion-occupation of Iraq from 2003 has added another million to the Iraqi toll, but the idea that this is “genocide” is inexpressible in the U.S. mainstream media, which is focused on the more politically convenient killings in Darfur - attributable to a Western target, the Arab government of the Sudan, hence subject to the invidious word genocidal. This is implicit but real denial, which follows from the political basis of naming and concern.

— Edward Herman

Genocide inflation is the real human rights threat

one population was white, the other black

Submitted by antarchi on October 29, 2007 - 02:24.

In 1982, Britain's treatment of the Chagossians was being contrasted in the United Nations with its expenditure that year of £2 billion defending the rights of the Falkland Islanders. The Falklands and the Chagos each had a population of 2,000 British citizens. One population was white, the other black. While the Argentine invasion of the Falklands was furiously resisted by British forces sent 8,000 miles for the purpose, the American invasion of Diego Garcia was accommodated in every detail by the British government, which even arranged for the inhabitants' expulsion.