MetaMap Saddam Hussein 1937-2007:
a visual navigator to on-line representations of power & violence in graphs, maps and ceremony
by Tjebbe van Tijen/Imaginary Museum Projects, October 2006
references last updated 20 October 2006
| < back strong teeth below a bristly moustache: a symbol of powerful men  |
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  Iraqi cartoonist Amer Rashad at work, he lives in exile in Jordan For a short article on him in the St Petersburg Times click the picture above  This cartoon by Bennett originally published by the Christian Science Monitor was found on one of those 'political humour web-sites that I need not describe, I just give the name: "America's Mad As Hell Humor Page" Humor in a time of grief". Bennett's work is one the more subtle examples of humour that can be found there... |
One more cartoon from Fritz Behrendt, published in
the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf; could not yet find the precise
date and occasion of this drawing, but the message is clear anyhow...
This picture was found on a cartoonist index web-site (cagle.msnbc.com)  |
| <back he was born in a hut of mud near Tikrit and ended his political career in a mud hole  |
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  This one came through a Google search from a Blog and they refer to the NYT... "By now, everyone and their dog must know that Saddam Hussein has been caught by the U.S. military. Most of the coverage and press has discussed the hole where he was found hiding, but pictures have been sparse" |
Picture that come from one of the many on-line time
lines/life stories of Saddam Hussein: "Saddam's Violent Road
to Trial" The caption of the picture reads: "Saddam Hussein visits the clay home in which he was born near Tikrit. His daughter Raghad (front row, wearing yellow sweater) is now directing his team of defense lawyers. This undated photo was taken by an official regime photographer" The idea for the mud hut and hole section of the scroll came from this "psychological" study I found on the net: "Saddam Hussein of Iraq: A Political Psychology Profile Jerrold M. Post, M.D. Not that I am very fond of this kind of interpretations, but it triggered my inspiration... better read the quote yourself: "It was predicted that Saddam would not take the path of Idid Amin, who recently died, waiting in exile. He remained concerned with his historical reputation and would not take any steps to diminish his stature as heroic pan-Arab leader. For the same reason, it was not anticipated that he would suicide as Hitler did in the last flaming bunker or permit himself to be taken alive, but would likely go out as his sons did, in a blaze of guns. In fact, he was taken alive, and without a struggle. How ironic that it should have come to this: Saddam Hussein, who began life in a mud hut near Tikrit, ended his political career in a so-called “spider-hole” in the ground, beneath a mud hut near Tikrit. But considering Saddam’s psychological makeup, his end was, if not inevitable, certainly fitting. From mud hut to mud hut, this represented the economic and psychological poverty at Saddam’s core, his wounded self. Indeed, as the mud hut is the architectural motif for the inner layer of Saddam’s psychology, in projecting the likely conduct of Saddam Hussein in the second trial of the (new) century, after that of Slobodan Milosevic, it is necessary to understand his complex psychology. In these regards, it is useful to consider the three principal layers of Saddam’s psychology, layers for which the architecture of his three principal residences provide an apt metaphor. The mud hut represents the wounded self at his very core. He has devoted his life and career to overcompensating for this profound insecurity. [source is a pdf] and the quest for detail is unlimited (thanks to dessert-voice.net) that copied it to their site... (it is like a newspaper cutting without source and date in the old days)  |
| < back full speed images of his life pass by  |
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The following picture map of portraits
and related iconography of Saddam Hussein is ordered quasi chronological.
The pictures comes from many different web-sites. Only a few web-sites
have a meaningful contextualization of Sadam's pictures, so I have
not taken too much trouble in giving sources and links everywhere.
Some less known captions and links have been added though: just move
your mouse slowly over the gallery and see if a link/caption appears.... |
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| Below two rarely shown pictures of Saddam that do not fit today's vision of Saddam Hussein - as a kind of monstrous beast - taken in the 70's of last century (pictures are from an interesting web site by Frontline: "the survival of Saddam, how has Saddam Hussein survived so long and what explains his hold on the Iraqi people") | |
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| Saddam "promoting women's education and literacy" | His policy was secular, forcing unity on a nation with a potential of religious strive. He was also a writer (or had his ghosts to do it for him) and even Dutch libraries preserve the fruits of that activity. The national Dutch Catalogue gives 43 entries with Saddam as an author. It is curious to name some of his Western publishers: Crrom helm 91979); Longman (1977); Le Sycomore (1980); Sartec (1978). |
| < back melted charts and graphs representing oil and arms trade, war and mass killing  |
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| a whole big city
of dead souls, or ghost victims Each war is also a war of statistics... depending on one's position and situation, numbers are raised or lowered, or simply not given at all. The debate about the number of dead as result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq since 2003 will not come to any final conclusion, there simply is no truthful tally possible under the actual circumstances. For a while there seemed to be some commonly accepted magnitude, ranging in the tens of thousands with a slowly but regularly growing factor arriving at 40/50.000 in autumn 2006. One of the most quoted sources for this number is the initiative Iraq Body Count (IBC). Since 2004 there is also a study of epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, published by the medical journal The Lancet (commonly called the Lancet Report), that arrived in their 2004 report at a much higher number than US and UK government and anti-war activist sources, putting the number of Iraqi victims in the range of 100.000. In October 2006 the Lancet Report was updated and came to a tenfold higher estimate than that of Iraq Body Count: 655.000. It needs to be pointed here that these numbers are produced by two completely different methods: Iraq Body Count uses publicized news sources of victims, only counting what has been established by several news sources (so leaving out all incidents/accidents that remain outside any press coverage). The Lancet Report is an estimated figure based on a nation wide household survey in Iraq (1.849 households) and the numbers of birth and death of all causes that had occurred over a certain period, from which - through a well established epidemiologist methodology - an estimate is made of those who died of violence that can be directly related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (For an explanation of the method used see this link Below are several examples of this fight of figures... the occupying
soldiers and functionaries seem to be neatly counted, but it is
the Iraqi civilians that fail to be rightly accounted for. In between
the highest and the lowest estimates (655.000 and 50.000) there
roams a whole big city of dead souls or ghost victims that never
existed. |
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| First I give here two
recent (20 October 2006) links to the debate about the Lancet Report
and the Iraq Body Count (IBC) number of Iraqi victims: - MediaLens ("correct the distorted vision of the corporate media") that has been criticizing the methods and public strategy of Iraq Body Count for some time; - OpenDemocracy ("free thinking for the world") that tries with an article by Michel Tieren to reconcile the two methods to arrive at the number of dead Iraqi civilians (actively gathering data for estimations and extrapolations, versus passively counting the incidents of violent death that have been reported). |
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 The
media response to the latest Lancet report consisted of initial,
relatively high-profile coverage in the broadcast media and more
subdued coverage in some print media. Coverage focused heavily
on government dismissals and on the alleged 'controversy' surrounding
the figures. Expert commentators were few and far between, with
journalists exhibiting the usual confusion on the methodology behind,
and significance of, the figures. Passing mentions aside, the story
was dropped within 24 hours from media coverage, with essentially
zero meaningful follow up reporting or analysis since.From: "MEDIA ALERT: DEMOCRACY AND DEBATE - KILLING IRAQ" click thumbnail above for link |
 The
story these two numbers convey does not lie and should not be understood
to lie in their respective size. Regardless of their absolute divergence
and methodological approximations, each figure, when properly analyzed
and broken down, reveals the inhumane and intolerable story of
approximately 27 million people trapped in escalating violence
and revenge killings.Tieren quotes researcher Gilbert Burnham of the Lancet Report: "Our key message is not to produce numbers but to ask in conflict situations, how can we think more effectively about protecting (a) population ... The general pattern ... in conflicts (is) that the host population takes more and more of the hits, which is what we are seeing here." From: " Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters" click thumbnail above for link |
 www.thelancet.com Published online October 11, 2006 DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9 |
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| 2006 October 11: Second publication by "The
Lancet" Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional
cluster sample survey by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy,
Les Roberts from John Hopkins University. Click the title of the report above to download the full report in PDF format. (the first Lancet survey ("Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey" by Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham) was published in October 2004). The map/graph below is taken from page 6 of the report. |
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 Summary
Background An excess mortality of nearly 100 000 deaths was reported
in Iraq for the period March, 2003–September, 2004, attributed
to the invasion of Iraq. Our aim was to update this estimate. Methods
Between May and July, 2006, we did a national cross-sectional cluster
sample survey of mortality in Iraq. 50 clusters were randomly selected
from 16 Governorates, with every cluster consisting of 40 households.
Information on deaths from these households was gathered. Findings
Three misattributed clusters were excluded from the final analysis;
data from 1849 households that contained 12 801 individuals in
47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported
during the observation period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were
5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4·3–7·1), compared with 13·3
per 1000 people per year (10·9–16·1) in the 40 months post-invasion.
We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392
979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which
corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion
deaths, 601 027 (426 369–793 663) were due to violence, the most
common cause being gunfire. Interpretation The number of people
dying in Iraq has continued to escalate. The proportion of deaths
ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, although the
actual numbers have increased every year. Gunfire remains the most
common cause of death, although deaths from car bombing have increased.Mortality data from the 2006 study reaffirms 2004 estimates by Hopkins researchers and mirrors upward trends measured by other organizations • Researchers recommend establishment of an international body to calculate mortality and monitor health of people living in all regions affected by conflict The mortality survey used well-established and scientifically proven methods for measuring mortality and disease in populations. These same survey methods were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions. |
San
Francisco Chronicle gives o.m. dit commentaar: oktober 12: The study, funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, drew on data obtained by eight Iraqi physicians during a survey of 1,849 Iraqi families -- or 12,801 people -- in 47 neighborhoods of 18 regions across the entire country. The researchers said they based the selection of geographical areas on population size, not on the level of violence. Then they projected the findings to the 26.1 million Iraqis estimated to be living in the survey areas. The surveyors put Iraq's prewar mortality rate at 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people per year. In the post-invasion period, according to the survey, the rate grew to 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The surveyors used the difference between these rates to calculate deaths that were not brought on by natural causes. The survey suggests that of more than 650,000 Iraqis who died since 2003, 601,000 were killed since the war began. Polling experts supported the methods used by the surveyors. "The sampling is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets," said John Zogby, whose Utica, N.Y.-based polling agency, Zogby International, has done several surveys in Iraq since the war began. "It is what people in the statistics business do." Zogby said similar survey methods have been used to estimate casualty figures in other conflicts, such as Darfur and the Democratic People's Republic of Congo. Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, told the Washington Post the survey method was "tried and true." He said that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." From: "Critics say 600,000 Iraqi dead doesn't tally But pollsters defend methods used in Johns Hopkins study" by Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, October 12, 2006 |
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| The U.S. president stated that he believes that the study methodology "is pretty well discredited", and added: "I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life. Six hundred thousand - whatever they guessed at - is just not credible." | Mrs. Beckett (British government spokeswoman) said: "No-one disputes that there have been many deaths in Iraq and that all of those deaths are regretted and tragically many of them are deaths of civilians," she said. "That doesn't mean that one has to accept every figure someone comes up with. "All I can say is that the [Lancet] report gives a figure which is orders of magnitude different from that which comes from any other source. |
| Graph from the Lancet Report 2006, page 5: Violent death by cause and time | |
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| Comparison of different victim surveys, apaty from the total number diffrences all showing a strong upward trend in number of victims. | |
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| Graph from the Lancet study published in 2004 comparing non-violent and violent death; note the high violent death toll of the military action in the town Falluja. | |
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| Press visualization of results of the 2004 Lancet report.... | From the 2004 Lancet Report: Figure 1:Crude mortality per 1000 people per year, by Governorate, before and after the invasion Bar graphs represent number of deaths per 1000 person-years. Governorate rates are on a scale of 15 deaths per 1000person-years, except for Anbar governorate, where deaths were more than ten times higher. |
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| Click picture below to see the lates number of victims as counted by Iraq Body Count | 50.000 dead, but who is counting? |
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 September
21, 2006: -Iraq Body Count: War dead figures The number of civilians
reported to have been killed during the Iraq war and subsequent military
presence is being recorded by the campaign group Iraq Body Count.
On 15 September 2006 it put the total number of reported civilian
dead at 40,775 to 45,559 and the number of police dead at 2,437. |
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| Say we know more or less the number of casualties, how many deaths, how many wounded, one needs to know who was killed for what reason to get to an understanding what is taking place.. An example of this can be found in a discussion on a seemingly |nice| graphic of a bad situation and the arguments that arose from it... the picture somewhat shrunk it does not really fir an average size computer screen). The original introduction text in the New York Times was: Op-Chart; 31 Days in Iraq By ADRIANA LINS DE ALBUQUERQUE AND ALICIA CHENG Published: February 6, 2006 In January more than 800 people -- soldiers, security officers and civilians -- were killed as a result of the insurgency in Iraq. While the daily toll is noted in the newspapers and on TV, it is hard for many Americans to see these isolated reports in a broader context. The map below, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths for the first month of the year. Given the fog of war, the information may be incomplete. Nonetheless, it is our effort to visually depict the continuing human cost of the Iraq war. Adriana Lins de Albuquerque is a doctoral student in political science at Columbia University. Alicia Cheng is a graphic designer at mgmt.design in Brooklyn. | |
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  This chart published in the New York Times has been criticized in an article in the magazine Seven Oaks, a magazine of politics, culture and resistance: Lins de Albuquerque's introduction to the chart asserts: "In the first two weeks of January, at least 202 people died as a result of the insurgency in Iraq. The killings have been indiscriminate."2 As Dave Lindorff notes, however, the chart conceals more than it reveals, as it admittedly "does not include Iraqi civilians accidentally killed by coalition forces,"3 and the US and coalition troops have been killing civilians at "a rate both higher than the rate they are being killed by insurgents and higher than the rate that the U.S. forces have been killing insurgents." |
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| While it is clear that the US and coalition forces have been killing more civilians than combatants and that more civilians have been killed by the US and coalition forces than by guerrillas, questions still remain. First of all, do Iraqi guerrillas themselves in fact attack more civilians than combatants, as the corporate media regularly suggests? M. Junaid Alam published an excellent article in LeftHook to answer this question: "Does the Resistance Target Civilians? According to US Intel, Not Really."7 Drawing upon Anthony H. Cordesman's report "The Developing Iraqi Insurgency: Status at End-2004"8 and "A Report Card on Iraqi Security"9 that accompanied Eric Schmitt's article "U.S. Commanders See Possible Cut in Troops in Iraq" in the New York Times,10 Alam graphically illustrates the fact that "the number of attacks on 'Coalition Forces' far exceeds that of any other category. . . . Indeed, attacks on military occupying forces, and by extension mostly US military forces, accounts for 75% of all attacks. Meanwhile, civilian targets comprise a mere 4.1% of attacks." | |
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| A newer study by the Brookings Institution for the period 2003-2006 comes to the same conclusion: most attacks are on the coalition forces In other words: who are the coalition troops protecting, apart from themselves? | |
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| One of the web-sites (iraq-kill-maim.org) with American soldiers that died in Iraq ... just some screen shots from one page; click the picture below for a direct link ... | |
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 As
numbers are growing, representations are compacted ... like this
US army personnel casualties web poster |
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Examples of visualization how the forces casualties
hit back at home in the USA ... different from the Vietnam War blacks
do not seem to have a higher casualties range ... The web-page (Blo Cadre.com) that posted it has the following technical comment: "I just came across a Google Maps hack
that geocodes the home towns of Iraq war casualties and displays
a visual timeline of the progression of U.S. soldier casualties
throughout the war. This is the most recent in a whole slew of
Google Maps hacks, where the service has been tweaked and augmented
to map things such as housing, cheap gas, crime occurances in
Chicago, and sexual predators in Florida." |
 Here
I have lost the link and context... but will try to find it again... |
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| < back loose pages from a non existing atlas of Saddam  |
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| The expansion of the Ottoman empire from 1300 till
1699 [1997 Encyclopaedia Brittanica maps that can be found on many educational web sites] |
The decline of that same empire from 1807 till 1924. |
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A map of the 1916 agreement between Britain, France
and Russia on the carving up of the Ottoman empire, establishing
on forehand their zones of interest and power. The Ottoman empire
was on the side of Axis power. The agreement is named after the main
negotiators, Mark Sykes and rancois-Georges Picot: "The 1916
Syjkes-Picot Agreement". [This map and further comments can be found at the web site of israelipalestinianprocon.org.] |
| Rado, Alex (1899-1981): - Atlas fur Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung : I der Imperialismus (1930) [Verlag für Literatur und Politik; Wien/Berlin] This atlas made by a Hungarian geographer (who later became an important spy for the Soviet Union) shows how some of the strategic spots of today had that kind of importance already in the twenties of last century. One can see an early airline hopping from Great Britain to Gibraltar, Malta, Cairo, Baghdad and Basra ultimately to British India, Malaysia and Hong Kong. A curious thing is the partly realized, partly projected railway line: Berlin-Byzantium-Baghdad with an extension to Basra ... This was an old plan form the time that the Ottoman and German Empire were closely collaborating. The plan would have given the Germans free access to Iraqi oil, the Persian Gulf and their East African colonies, without passing the British controlled Gibraltar and Suez. The railway was only partly build and feared by the British, Russians and French, so after the defeat of both empires in World War I, only the Baghdad Basra part was build (by British troops) but the connection through the mountainous border region of nowadays Turkey and Iraq was never completed. This story of failed long distance railways in this part of the Middle East tells something of the lack of cooperation and integration and a long history of strive... | |
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 More information on the atlas of Rado can be found at my web pages about "Mapping Human Violence" (2.19) |
| To get an understanding of the economic
scale of these oil into weapon affairs a map from one of the neo-Marxist
atlases on world affairs published by Kiron at the end of the seventies
and the beginning of the eighties of last century (curiously the
Dutch publisher is the well established educational publisher Wolters
Noordhoof, while the original Brutish publisher is the Left wing
firm Pluto). [more pages from this atlas on my web pages on "Mapping Human Violence", clcik map for link] |
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| This map on the Iran Iraq war of the eighties
of last century is a my scan from "Zones of conflict : an atlas
of future wars" (1986) [Cape; London; XVII, 158 p. : ill., krt.,
tab.; 26 cm] I have not yet put this one on-line yet...The introduction
- now twenty years ago written - is interesting: Chess was, originally, a 'war game' and the board a simplification of the battlefield on which the ancient armies of cavalry and footmen met each other. Is it possible, in this apparently all-threatening world of military power in which we live, to apply a similar technique of simplification to its military geography? We believe it is. For all that there are now 140 armies in the world, a dozen major navies and air forces, five strategic nuclear forces and the beginnings of a military apparatus in space, the places in which military power can actually be applied are comparatively few. Geographical or climatic factors prevent military action over wide areas of the world. In many areas, where military movement is possible, the absence of targets worth capturing or destroying, or mere distance itself, makes strategic action unlikely. Many states, moreover, pursue good-neighbour policies or, even when they do not, are too weak to put bad intentions into effect. The result is to reduce to a mere handful the spots on the globe where the strategic chess-player will focus his attention. 'When' and 'how' trouble will happen he cannot predict. But 'where' is something he can identify with considerable accuracy. The original book can be found at the University Library of Amsterdam: UB : Kaartenzl: V 2 D 1 |
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| Just some pictures of one of the most
murderous post World War II conventional wars fought: total victims
between 650.00 up till 1,5 million dead. Trenches, mustard gas, rocket
attacks and the like ... hardly anybody demonstrated against this
crime of two regimes... the answer why is hard to hear, but many
must have thought: "it is only Muslims, let them kill each other..." In
a way we (us Dutch, Westerners) pay now the price for this attitude
of non-involvement. |
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| Below a statistical overview I made this summer during what I call The Holiday war between Palestine, Israel and Lebanon. I felt that the reactions to this war were out of proportion, as it was a minor case and it brought back to me the bad feelings of the eighties concerning the Iran Iraq War... here as another addenda to the map this exercise...(Note: the much higher numbers of the Lancet studies on the Iraq invasion/occupation from 2003 onward are not yet included in this statistic, but it would raise the number from 44/58.000 to over 6500.000, which ian astonishing magnitude jump) for the full context of that ongoing research click the graph for a direct link ... | |
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| Part of Iraqi oil is found in a nation without a state: Kurdistan. This map and cartoon taken from one of the many Kurdish nationalist web-sites show what the borders of Kurdistan would be if they could manage to establish their own state | |
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 The web site from which I took this map is one of the many personnel initiatives on the web. Let me quote the introduction to the web page to understand the picture above to understand something of the prevailing mood: "Welcome To My Site. Here are pictures of my country, Kurdistan. Kurdistan is located in Meddle East, it is not a country because we are surrounded by enemies. Four countries make up Kurdistan and they are Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq." Click cartoon map above for link... The map on the left (telling how Kurdistan was before the Arabs, Persians and Turks reduced it) comes from an American Kurdish site www.kurdmedia.us; click the map for a link ... |
 This
map shows where the Kurdish hold a majority, were they are mixed
with other nations and where they are a minority population. When one compares the two maps (maximum size Kurdistan above with these demographic realities below) it becomes clear that the creation of a Kurdish state could generate a lot of bloodshed. Just think about the recent and actual strive in the Balkans and the Caucasus... |
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 This
is one the many available maps showing ethnographic diversity and
distribution of Iraq. The web site calls itself "MidEast Web
GateWay and provides a great variety of maps and other sources
on Iraq...click map on left for the link to the map section Directly below a small map that shows the Post Gulf War "No Fly Zone" from 1992 that would somehow protect the Iraqi minorities in the South and the North from aggression by the Saddam regime. One notices how ethnic areas are roughly translated in American Air Force flying strategies... By the way it did not stop Iraqi governmental from perpetrating violence in those areas  |
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| The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds in 1988 one of the crimes for which Saddam Hussein and his associates are on trial now... | |
 This
seems to be a Human Rights Watch map, which I found on a Kurdish
site with the following comment:Kurdish Genocide Just a few example of a narrative account of a campaign of extermination against the Kurds in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq) is presented in this homepage. It is a product of tons of captured Iraqi government documents and carried out field interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of them survivors of the 1988 campaign known as Anfal. It concludes that in that year the Iraqi regime committed the crime of genocide against the Kurds. Like Nazi Germany, the Iraqi regime concealed its actions in euphemisms. While Nazi officials spoke of "executive measures", and "special actions," as well as "resettlement in the east," Ba'athist bureaucrats spoke of "collective measures," a "return to the national ranks," and "resettlement in the south." Beneath the euhemisms, however, Iraq's crimes against the Kurds amount to genocide, the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Click map for a link to the web site |
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 The map below comes from this site... click logo or map |
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| Another world view on oil from a brochure of the ARAMCO oil company - using the distorted scaling of world areas to express quantity - the major importance of the Arab countries made visible in relation to other parts of the world. What is interesting in this map is that in several cases 'grand' geophysical entities are used instead of national borders, indicating the irrelevance of national borders from a transnational, imperialist view. (this map comes from a personal Japanese web-site by Kanzo Kobayashi with an astonishing wide range of subjects | |
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| < back oil industry from the beginning of our era only a short moment in time  |
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 It is well known that oil and gas are finite resources representing stored solar energy. Consumption of these resources is reaching recently huge dimensions. Yearly we are consuming so much oil and gas as the nature produced in several million years. In the light of different, particular contrary statements to the availability of oil and gas the question arises, how long the hydrocarbon era will continue? Figure 1 shows schematically the oil production in the time frame between birth of Christ and the year 2500. In this scale the hydrocarbon era is a short episode. (from web site oilcrisis.com: "Will the hydrocarbon era finish soon?") |
 "OPEC
Ability to Offset Lost Iraqi Oil Doubted: Watchdog Implies Reserve
May Be Tapped in a War; Ministers Fear a Price Drop," [3.13.03,
A2]. "The International Energy Agency said OPEC alone won't
be able to make up for lost Iraqi oil exports in the event of a
war. The statement suggests that the agency, the oil-supply watchdog
for the industrialized world, may need to tap into emergency oil
reserves to maintain adequate supplies of crude and keep prices
from skyrocketing. The IEA said the global oil-supply system is
'running on empty.' The warning countered a pledge made Tuesday
by Ali Naimi, the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, the world's largest
oil exporter, that 'there will be no shortage of oil in the event
of a war. Yet the IEA data showed that Saudi capacity to offset
losses was less than many had thought.(source infoimagination.org) |
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 The
background image of this section of the scroll is Kuwait oil fields
at the Persian Gulf, taken from one of the amateur satellite picture
collectors sites... click the thumbnail to
see the full scale version |
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| < back grandiose monuments with lists of engraved names shout: “never forget” 
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 Kanan Makiya: The Monument. art and vulgarity in Saddam Huseins Iraq. A quote in the right hand column: |
During the 1970's and 1980's money from oil revenues was allocated to building of new monuments in Baghdad. Saddam Hussein laid out new ceremonial avenues and ordered large monuments raised at the city's major -intersections. He has built two victory arches in the capital, an unknown soldier's tomb, a martyrs' memorial and dozens of small statues and fountains. An amusement park is located at the martyr's memorial, a playground is next to the triumphal arches, and a theater is located within the complex of the triumphal arches. According to Kanan Makiya [writing under the pen name Samir Al-Khalil], author of The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (1991), many of Iraq's war memorials were commissioned before the supposed victories they celebrate were even declared. Certain types of property are identified by the laws of war as exempt from attack (unless misused) or seizure. The exemptions are made on both an humanitarian (schools and hospitals), cultural (museums and monuments) and legal order (prevention of looting and pillaging) basis. The following sections deal with those exemptions based upon property types. Note, however, that the protection is not absolute. There must be some reasonably close connection between the destruction of property and the overcoming of the enemy's army. during the Gulf War the Allies avoided bombing numerous Iraqi cultural monuments, including the statute of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. According to General Schwarzkopf [It Doesn't Take A Hero, (Bantam, 1992) p. 455] "I had spoken to Powell regularly throughout the day. ...At ten p.m., I called to give him a final update. I was tired; at the end of the conversation I heard myself say how much I'd like to blow up the giant Saddam statue and the Victory Arch in downtown Baghdad. The Victory Arch, a monument to the war against Iran, was a huge sculpture of two hands, said to be Saddam's, holding two swords crossed. We'd spared both the statue and the Victory Arch during the air campaign because they weren't military targets. To my surprise, Powell was all for it-- although he suggested we check with the president first. Pentagon lawyers vetoed the idea a couple of days later..." | ||||||||||||
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Tuesday March 4 2003: I
went with Trish and Muhammad (our driver) this afternoon to see
the Monument of the Martyrs, an enormous structure honoring the
Iraqi soldiers that died in the war with Iran. From a half-mile
away as we approached the site, we saw a blue sphere, shaped
like an upside-down heart, broken into two parts, forever divided.
~ Once we arrived, we passed through a gate into a one hundred
yard marble court leading to the monument. We passed two Iraqi
soldiers along the way that were happy to pose for photographs. At
the base of the upside-down broken heart was a fountain that
filled a basin, which overflowed into a waterfall that landed
one level below. The stairs we descended wrapped around the waterfall
and led us to a dimly lit, subdued, marble interior, where a
wall loomed before us. ~ Name after name of dead Iraqi soldiers
from the Iran-Iraq war was etched from floor to ceiling on this
wall that curved around and seemed to go forever. Around a million
Iraqis, I'm told, died in that war. From a population of 20
million at the time, the staggering loss was felt in every home
in this country, and the senselessness and grief was palpable
all around me as the water falling from the broken heart rang
in my ears. I asked Mohammad what he was feeling (he fought
and was injured in this war), and he seemed confused at first.
Nobody had ever asked him this question, perhaps. He said, "it's
like Vietnam." In broken English he explained that he fought
because he was told to, and after eight years both countries
were destroyed. (Description on an American peace oriented
web-site, Louisvile.peace.org of
a visit by a peace activist Doug Johnson) Some sources say that there are (only) 200.000 names etched in the monument, although the death toll of the Iran-Iraq War just on the Iraqi side has been much higher. |
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| Monument for the approximate 5.000 inhabitants of the Kurdish village of Halabja killed by a poison gas attack in 1988. In the inside names of the victims have been engraved in stone. | |||||||||||||
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 For
detailed photo-documentation see the Hellebje web-pages |
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| Some more monumental works initiated by Saddam Hussein: the victory arch and the unknown soldier tomb ... | |||||||||||||
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| < back contemporary iraqi art may express the suffering better  |
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| The small collection of artworks at show
on the web-site maps the mood of the country under
Ba'thist rule during the last quarter of last century. The picture
to the left below is by Iraqi artist Baldin Ahmad, made in 1979.
The full collection can be found at the web-site of the Iraq
memory Foundation |
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 This picture comes from an exhibition of contemporary Iraqi book art in the USA: Kareem Rissan, Pilot Vision of Baghdad, 2003 35 x 25 cm. Mixed media on handmade paper. Click picture for link |
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| < back I can not see a singular truth; so many double roles played  |
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| Saddam had a great admiration for pre-Islamic Mesopotamia culture... he has studied some law in Cairo when in exile from Iraq and later posed as Justitia with sword and scales. One of the oldest known written law is the Codex of Hammurabi (1728-1686 BC) , it has 282 articles engraved in cuneiform script in stone. The original codex pillar has been robbed by the Persians and landed in the beginning of last century in the Louvre in Paris. | |
 When
Marduk sent me to rule over men, to give the protection of right
to the land, I did right and righteousness in . . . , and brought
about the well-being of the oppressedIf any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser. If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death. If a judge try a case, reach a decision, and present his judgment in writing; if later error shall appear in his decision, and it be through his own fault, then he shall pay twelve times the fine set by him in the case, and he shall be publicly removed from the judge's bench, and never again shall he sit there to render judgement. |
 VOS, Marten de (b. 1532, Antwerpen, d. 1603, Antwerpen) The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint in Antwerp 1594 Oil on panel, 157 x 215 cm Rockox House, Antwerp. click picture for a link to a bigger version on the excellent Hungarian Web gallery of Art... The painting, which is a tableau representing justice, was painted in 1594 to hang in the Law Court of the 'Minters' of the Duchy of Brabant. Such paintings were intended to remind both Judges and those seeking justice of their duty and responsibilities. The members of the Brabant League of Minters commissioned the painting, and had themselves depicted (from the waist up) in the background, behind the symbolic figures from classical antiquity surrounding Justitia herself. Justitia, crowned with laurels and holding the scales of justice and a sword, triumphs over deceit and violence, symbolized by a masked woman caught in her own web and a violent miscreant who has been disarmed. In the foreground on the left, Moses is depicted with the Tables of the Law, and on his right the Emperor Justinian, the codifier of Roman Law. On the right there is the bearded Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, who compiled sacred laws inspired by his wife, the nymph Egeria. On the far right, Pliny the Elder can be seen, with his left hand resting on the 37 scientific works he wrote. In a nutshell, the message of this scene is that justice triumphs over deceit and violence, and that judges should judge according to sacred and civil law, guided by knowledge and science. |
| The first forensic investigation into the murder by Saddam Hussein of hundreds of thousands of his people was made public yesterday after the excavation of a mass grave containing the bodies of blindfolded women, some with babies in their arms. An American-led team has been secretly investigating a mass grave near the village of Hatra, in northern Iraq, where about 300 bodies have been found. Thousands more may be lying undiscovered. Michael Trimble and Greg Keboe at a mass grave near Hatra The Iraqi government has identified 40 mass graves. But this is the first time that a proper study has been carried out because previous graves in the centre and south of the country were generally excavated by distraught relatives determined to give the victims a decent burial. The findings will be used by investigators for the Iraqi special tribunal which is seeking evidence to try Saddam and other leading Ba'ath Party members for crimes against humanity. (...) Since July 5, investigators from the tribunal have been compiling evidence from documents seized after the fall of Saddam's regime, as well as first-hand accounts and mass graves that have so far been unearthed. Human rights groups say the former regime killed an estimated 250,000 Shia Muslims and 50,000 ethnic Kurds. | |
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| But, also this must be noted: Tony Blair admidst that claim of '400,000 bodies in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered... | |
 -July
18, 2004: Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated
claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi
mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far
been uncovered. The claims by Blair in November and December of
last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely
published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet
on Iraq's mass graves. In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror:
Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution
agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already
discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass
graves.' |
|
| < back however malicious a regime, it has its international relations and support  |
|
 Jacques
Iraq aka Jacques Chirac: French Policy Against Ousting Saddam Hussein
in 2003, is a pro Israel, anti Iraq view on the friendship between
these two man of state.. click image for link to Australian site |
I can leave the old friendship between Chirac and
Saddam to the reader... one search and titles like this pop up constantly -La France est aussi responsable que les Etats-Unis de la guerre qui s’annonce - L'amitié franco-irakienne - IRAK: Saddam Hussain a trop de sang sur les mains.. |
 This
book was first published in the USA in 1991 by an American journalist
Kenneth Timmerman (1953-) who has been following the wars in the
Middle East since 1982. The book details among other subjects the
French and USSR arms sales to Iraq. Some excerpts are on
line."A devastating and persuasive indictment of Governmental stupidity, bureaucratic incompetence and corporate greed that enabled the Iraqi war machine to become the monster we had to face in the fall of 1990." Frederick Forsyth |
 Published
in 2001 with the subtitle "The Terrifying Inside Story of
the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons" By Jeff Stein and
Khidhir Hamza: "The Iraqi scientist who designed Baghdad's
nuclear bomb tells how he did it in secret with the cynical
help of U.S., French, German, and British suppliers and experts, and
kept it hidden from U.N. inspectors after the Gulf War. Today,
he says, Saddam Hussein is only months away from making a workable
bomb and has every intention of using it." |
  You
can access the SIPRI database directly to check this or other findings.
There is also a more detailed version of this graph relating it to
membership of The United Nations Security Council and the decisions
related to the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Solport web
site) |
|
 |
 Quiet another perspective (February 1998) on the Iraq positions in relation to arms in the Middle East comes from what seems to be a moderate (critical on Israel but not overtly anti-zionist) American Foundation called 'The Wisdom Fund' (to advance social justice and interfaith understanding by presenting The Truth About Islam.) The title of the article reads: "Iraq's Arsenal Dwarfed by Israel's Weapons of Mass destruction". |
| < some even lost their name and are just a number  |
|
| Mass graves in the aftermath of the Gulf War, a product of false promises of protection and a call to revolt by Bush senior (who is neither on trial himself, nor a witness in the tribunal of Saddam Hussein). | |
| Recently we visited Human Rights Watch of Karbala (HRWK), an organization founded on April 5, 2003, immediately after the fall of Saddam's regime. HRWK was the first organization to discover mass graves in the region, and has been involved in opening them, documenting the identities of the victims, and notifying the families of the victims' whereabouts. Forty-one of the forty-three mass graves near Karbala date back to 1991, when Saddam crushed a Shiite uprising seeking to depose him shortly after the first Gulf War. Estimates of the total number of victims in mass graves throughout the country range as high as 300,000. Many Americans would agree with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who commented that, "Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me." But unlike Friedman, many of those Iraqis whose relatives were murdered and dumped in these mass graves had something other than praise for the US government. As one Iraqi from HRWK told us, "The U.S. let Saddam's regime do what it did and therefore the mass graves are also the responsibility of the United States. For this reason we don't believe the US came [in 2003] to bring freedom to Iraqis." See for details Christian Peacemaker team web site CPT.org |
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| Open burial trench | Remembering the dead |
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| One of the grave markers | Some graves have only numbers
to identify them |
| Epilogue This long, long page with links ends here and the choices I have made of images and texts are nothing more than desperate attempts to make some sense out of a mass of information and disinformation that is beyond the capacity of any of us... You need not approve of my choices; I may have quoted a bastard here or forgot about a very good person elsewhere; it is hardly possible to get a complete understanding of a subject so complex as Iraq and its former leader who stands on trial now... Tjebbe van Tijen/Imaginary Museum Projects 17/10/2006 |
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| references last updated 20 October 2006 |