A war criminal speaks

L. Paul Bremer was vice-roy of Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004. He barred all Bath Party members from public life and disbanded the Iraqi Army. No, he is not the worst of the war criminals. This distinction has to be reserved for the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. But his decisions as Supreme Ruler of Iraq sure made things worse for the Iraqi people, and come to think of it, also for the American occupiers. And now the Washington Post offers this criminal an opportunity to defend his “honor”. (The Washington Post: What We Got Right in Iraq)

He says only 1% of Baath Party members were affected by his decree, while everybody knows it was 99%. He compares the Baath Party to the Nazi Party. “Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell”, he writes. You can also argue that every American neighborhood has a Republican Party cell where Karl Rove is riding roughshod over every political opponent. Bremer also disbanded the Iraqi Army, creating the nucleus of the Sunni insurgency, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers without pay and angry at the Americans.

“In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds,” Bremer writes. It sure did, at a time when Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad to offer Saddam America's goodwill.

Bremer is being blasted for his incompetence and Nazi-dictator attitude not only by the Democrats, but also by many Republicans. Why is the Washington Post giving this criminal a place to voice his lies? Did the Washington Post ever give any opportunity to the 650,000 murdered Iraqis or their family members to write even one sentence in its blood-stained pages?

Bremer is a war criminal who should be on death row, not writing lies on the pages of a “respectable” newspaper.