Freedom! Freedom! Democracy! Democracy! - an email to Johann Hari

Dear Johann Hari,

In “I was wrong, terribly wrong - and the evidence should have been clear all along” (The Independent, 20 March 2006), you write, among other things:

“So after three years and at least 150,000 Iraqi corpses, can those of us who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis' sake still claim it was worth it?”

“I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush administration screwed it up.”

“I, like most Iraqis, failed to see that the Bush administration's warped motives would lead to a warped occupation.”

“Just as the opponents of the war would never have faced Saddam's torture chambers...”

Do you call this a “A melancholic mea culpa”, as the subtitle to your article reads on your website?

The “evidence” were “clear all along” indeed. Since Hiroshima Day 1990, for the past fifteen years and with the complicity and silence of most of the so-called “international community” (and those “who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis' sake”), Washington and London have waged a war against the people of Iraq that has slaughtered over 2,000,000 people. Most of them women and children. Proportionally to its population, it’s as if a war against the United States had killed 23 million of innocent Americans.

And here you are still singing Freedom! Freedom! Democracy! Democracy!

As the saying goes, God is always on the side of the winner. So, it would seem certain intellectuals.

Best wishes,
Gabriele Zamparini


Hari's reply:


Gabrielle, you have deliberately misread me. You quote the part where i say
"I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush
administration screwed it up", witout quoting the part where I then say
this argument is wrong and untrue!

Have a look at the article again...


My reply to him:


Dear Johann,

Thanks for your reply.

I have read and re-read your article. I was writing an email to you. I was not writing an article about yours and quoting you out of context. I guess you know what you wrote.

Just out of curiosity, when you write “I, like most Iraqis, failed to see that the Bush administration's warped motives would lead to a warped occupation”, who were all these Iraqi?

Strange you didn’t mention the Iraqi intellectuals against the war, many of whom had either been tortured (Haifa Zangana) threatened with it or fled.

There were countless Iraqis on demo after demo against the war, who had suffered, or whose family had, but railed against further suffering for Iraqis.

Again, the “evidence” were “clear all along” indeed. Since Hiroshima Day 1990, for the past fifteen years and with the complicity and silence of most of the so-called “international community” (and those “who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis' sake”), Washington and London have waged a war against the people of Iraq that has slaughtered over 2,000,000 people. Most of them women and children. Proportionally to its population, it’s as if a war against the United States had killed 23 million of innocent Americans.

And here you are still singing Freedom! Freedom! Democracy! Democracy!

A ‘mea culpa’ would demand much more humility and intellectual honesty.

Best wishes,
Gabriele Zamparini

PS Again, out of curiosity, could you please tell me where you get that number, “150,000”? According to Les Roberts (Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the world’s top epidemiologists and lead author of the Lancet report) there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?, By Les Roberts, AlterNet, February 8, 2006)