Talk:Saddam Hussein/Archive 6

On a second thought, I removed the info box, which appears to emphasize formal office-- inappropriate here because Saddam, of course, could rule without reference to formal institutions. 172 17:23, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Dear Wikipedia ""Neutrality"" guardian, Re Saddam Hussein entry, no one has yet to answer my question, why do the live palestinians deserve mention in the primary intro for a non palestinian leader, but the Slaughtered Kurds, Saddam's countrymen, gassed by him, do not?

You could have Written "Some parts of the Arab world admired Saddam for standing up to the west". Without mentioning the Palestinians, just like you refuse to mention the slaughtered Kurds. But you insist on mentioning the Palestinians, and further conceal any remnant of opposing POV with the fascist's friend, the term "human-rights situation" which you hope anyone can interpret as anything. Are you claiming that the horrors both existed and didn't exist, depending on who you ask? where are all those dead kurds, then?

revive them! I'm sure they will be glad to read in wikipedia that what was done to them was only "a situation". A situation is good. Elain in Seinfeld has situations. comes and goes. They can dig up their graves and go home to watch the reruns, check out some situtions in bars, and generally have a good situation.

Never mind the bodies, they will soon rot and everyone would have forgotten all about it. Shhhhhhh. But Only one thing as sure as the Sun existed, didn't it? The palestinians and their glee! thats as solid as Iron! who needs proof? its the Palestinians! Amen! I want to know a rational arumgent of why it is so important and humanitarian to disguise Saddams undisputed, proven horrors. It must be VERY important. there must be some divine logic here beyond my rationality.

Oh, It will upset the palestinians? sure! don't you think Saddam's other little hobbies (other than encouraging palestinians, and better documented than something so nebolous as street reaction) have upset at least the same number of people or larger? why do you stifle their emphasis then? Either you stifle ALL non Iraqi effects of Saddam, or you mention them NEUTRALLY that means not ONLY the palestinians, but other groups affected. Are you perhaps saying that 10,000 gassed kurds and their millions of grieving relatives/supporters are less important than 2 million live palestinians whose sole influence by Iraqi affairs is a blushing glee at Saddam's deeds?

if so, how many? how many non-palestinians does it take to die till that issue becomes important enough to mention it alongside the palestinian POV? a million? 6 million by any chance? does this number mean anything to you or do you just file it in you head as "Human rights situation"?

and how many palestinians angry that 1+1=2 would it take for you to remove all the henceforth controversial entries on mathematics? 3 palestinians? 4 perhaps? and dont be too slow then, they might otherwise cause something to your own "Human rights situation" that you won't like.

And this pargraph:

an increase in human-rights abuses, notably acts of genocide against Iraqi Kurds. The United States continued to view Saddam with deep suspicion, however, primarly due to his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction

do you have any factual references that dispute any of this? supported FACTS not 'liberal' wishful illusions! all of it is corroborated in the links!

And this,

"Thanks for pointing this out. I suspect that it was removed because an anon is getting a kick out replacing non-controversial matter-of-fact statements like the above with overtly emotive, deliberately provocative ones."

Are you hinting that this sentence: "While he remained a popular hero among many disaffected Arabs for standing up to the West and for his unflinching support for the Palestinians"

is a NPOV? what proof do you have of his support of the palestinians? are there any references of this, or just hearsay?

is hearsay enough to mention when supporting the palestinian cause, but against it one needs to split the atom in your lab first?

Just call wikipedia the Western Edition of Pravda, and be done with it!

Again, in case you did not get it: The Palestinian POV in this matter is merely an issude of morale, and the opposing POV rests on actual crimes of war! how in your humane conscience can you condone this state of affairs?

And I dont wan't to skewer anyone either. If I wante to Skewer Saddam, I would have called him a Hitler wannabe; Little Stalin, the prince of evil and so forth. This is skewering. Mentioning FACTS is never skewering, even if the palestinians don't like them!

P.S. I'm glad there were no palestinians involved in Europe in the second world war, or a description of one of them dropping his apple might have completely eclipsed the "Holocaust" entry.... I guess he just didn't come forward yet.

I want to know, why "removed politically charged Saddam and Arafat link, it has nothing to do with Iraq" thats all right,

but the kilometer of text about the palestinian is not irrelevant to Iraq? are the palestinians Iraqi? why are so many people are so insistent on beautifying dictators and oppressors living and operating in other countries except for America? you call yourselves democrats?


 * Dude. You need to calm down. Be a little more approachable. Learn spelling and diction. All that stuff. It will get you far. Also, you should create a login. People will respect you more if you sign your posts and have a talk page. No one respects anonymous IP editors. At least, I don't... and I think I speak for everybody.
 * Anyway, that's enough of being whimsical! As to your actual points, such as they are: obviously, there's a huge buttload of documentation on Saddam's support for Palestinians. Look around. Also, your article-link about "Saddam and Arafat" was an article about Arafat and Israel, and included a tiny line about how Arafat supported one of Saddam's actions. Don't cry when it was removed for being irrelevant.
 * I agree with you that the article underplays Saddam's atrocities. However, you're way off the mark on all your rants about Palestinians. If you can make rational, conservative, and appropriate (and grammatically correct) edits about atrocities you think need mentioning (in the correct places), they'll get a lot more support. Graft 05:49, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

external links issue
Hello, I added the following external link, which is a report congress about the evidence of saddam's attempted assasination of former president bush. -	*Information about Saddam's attempted assasination of former president George Bush I believe this is important because it's cited as a cause for the recent war. It was immediately removed by another user, and I'd like it added back.

-please, I beg of you! from the rich supermarket of Saddam's atrocities, we have to concentrate on the most awful ones, not blur the focus with relative trivialities - and in any case, the people who removed this reference probably view Bush's assasination not wholly negatively (probably watched too many re-runs of Farenhype 9/11 and the propoganda got in their bloodstream till they see Bush's face in red street lights)

The most important cause for this war is his acts of genocide and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. This is enough.

Proposed article split
At 52KB this article is too long and must be split in 2 in order to guarantee editorial freedom. Please put your proposals about how to split the article here. I hope to split the article, according to a consensus reached here, on Sunday. I am putting a note at the top of the article so readers can participate in the debate. Squiquifox 21:39, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

People don't really care about the 32KB limit anymore. WhisperToMe 22:43, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Seconded. Don't split the article. There are other Saddam-related articles, but the bio piece must be comprehensive over time. 172 01:18, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Internet Explorer for Mac (including the most recent version) has a hard limit of 32K on text fields. So if someone edits the article and saves it using IE for Mac, half of the article will disappear. Therefore to guarantee editorial freedom for Mac users we must split the article. I am not trying to get consensus on whether to split the article, but on how to do so. If you don't like the 32KB warning try and get the policy changed. How do we split this article? --Squiquifox 21:10, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * There is no need to split this article, just as there is no need to split the numerous other articles that go above 32K. Mac users can simply copy the text and paste the first half of the article in (say) Saddam Hussein/temp sandbox 1 and the second half of the sandbox in (say) Saddam Hussein/temp sandbox 2 and ask another user to consolidate the changes and post his/her new version. 172 22:41, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

While I don't think we need to strictly adhere to the 32 KB limit, especially in a case like this, we should treat it as a general guideline that shouldn't be greatly exceeded. Not for technical reasons so much as simply to ensure that individual articles deal with specific subjects and are accessible to the reader. What we have here should be a reasonably concise biography of Saddam; greater detail should be available in subarticles, or in articles on the various political and military events in question. Just a matter of organization. So it would be fine with me to see some effort made towards reducing the size of the article, as long as the content is preserved in other articles. Everyking 00:42, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have brought the issue of whether articles should be split/slimmed or not to Village pump (policy).Squiquifox 02:51, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

something else
Sorry, I don't understand why its so important to present this dictator in a favourable light. (is someone afraid of him? he is not roaming around anymore, remember) It is essential that at least a crumb of his brutality is described in the summary:

Saddam initiated Iraq's nuclear enrichment project in the 1980's, with French and Italian assistance. The first Iraqi nuclear reactor, Osiraq (named after the Egyptian God of the dead) was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 1981. There were several public threats by Saddam to use weapons of mass destruction, and actual useage, against Iraqi Kurdish communities.

Israeli strike
According to wikipedia guidlines, contrasting viewpoints must be equally represented. You know most people only read the summary, so it has to be finely balanced on its own. If you spend half a paragraph, flashing in neon letters near the title, extolling the intoxicating effect and inspiration Saddam's brutality gave to the Palestinians (which hardly are worth mentioning since the man was not a palestinian, we are not discussing them here but Saddam and Iraq) then you have to also mention the undisputed negative effect of his actions and policies on other nations of the world, and not 5 kilometers below this where (you hope?) no one will read.

Either you discuss the effect on New York of all butterflies who flap their wings in Sumatra, or you don't. You can't just discuss the ones you adore and call it a neutral discussion.

There is a vile insinuation that the Allied suspicion of saddam is baseless- because it is mentioned but not supported with evidence in the same section. that is also why the Israeli strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor has to be mentioned there, because Allied suspicion was certainly not baseless. Saddam was (at some point during his rule) actively pursuing and using WMD's and there is no doubt of that. The only doubt is on whether the American response was justified but that discussion has no place here. You have to learn to accept neutrality even when its implications aren't to your liking. And as to the other claims that this is already mentioned under "The Gulf war" well no, the israeli strike nor the existence of an Iraqi nuclear reactor are nought to be found anywhere there, in accordance with the wikipedia "thou shalt try to praise any enemies of zionism regardless of irrelevancy or the contents of their closet" act... not to mention that the French and Italians built it, that really is too much for the standard issue Liberal Horse (or rather, donkey?..) blinds to bear...


 * I moved your reference to the Israeli strike to where you should've placed it in the first place (not in the intro)... I suggest that you take a course in writing. First, the introduction should be designed to attract the reader's attention and give the reader an idea of the article's focus. In the intro, it is sufficient to lay out the focus on Saddam's conflict with Israel and later with the West in general terms, and later in the article detail Saddam's particular actions... Please stop reinserting that paragraph in the intro; continuing to do so will be considered vandalism and may result in a block on your account. Second, do not screw up the order of the footnotes. (You kept inserting a fourteenth footnote following the fourth footnote.) If you add a footnote, add one to the number of every footnote following the new insertion. This may be tedious, as Wikipedia lacks a program for generating them automatically at this time, but you are responsible for this if you insist on adding one. 172 16:10, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree with 172 on the matter of the intro. A lead section should be kept reasonably concise. It's not a question of any POV, just organization. Everyking 16:42, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

If it is sufficient to lay out Saddams profile in general terms, the effect on Palestinians deserve no mention there, that is a secondary detail, and not a major element of Iraqi history or Saddam's history. If it desreves mention there, then other secondary details deserve mention too. "it is sufficient to lay out the focus on Saddam's conflict with Israel " that pargraph which I have added does exactly that, without it is not clear at all why the west is suspicious of Saddam, only that he raised the morale of the Palestinians. That is certainly not one of his significant career achievments, by any POV, because his actions in Iraq come first. It is not logical to mention a leaders' secondary influece in external countries as an introduction, overshadowing his achievements in his own country. But if you insist on mentioning such things, at least do it even handedly.
 * it is not clear at all why the west is suspicious of Saddam. Nonsense. The intro mentions the Gulf War and the human rights situation, and makes no value judgments about his relationship to the Palestinians. 172 19:56, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"While he remained a popular hero among many disaffected Arabs for standing up to the West and for his unflinching support for the Palestinians, 4 the United States continued to view Saddam with deep suspicion following Iraqi defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War."

Why did we remove this? It appears to be true, and even uncontroversial. DJ Clayworth 16:03, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing this out. I suspect that it was removed because an anon is getting a kick out replacing non-controversial matter-of-fact statements like the above with overtly emotive, deliberately provocative ones. I reverted the changes. Please keep an eye on this article in case the anon POV warrior returns. 172 19:29, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

>> News for both of you guys... there ARE controversial topics!! it does not mean they do not exist and should not be discussed! When Bush is controversial, then its ok to hang him on a skewer, right? but Saddam the modern Sister Theresa should be handled with rosewater gloves since his papa beat him, poor lollypop, and then its completely understandable why he has these orientalist urges to drop a few Kurd villages for breakfast, right? only natural. See it from his position. and I removed the 'matter of fact statements' about the palestinians because you insisted on removing my matter of fact statement about Saddam and Arafat, on the pretense that Arafat is irrelevant to Iraq. Well why oh why, Araft is irrelevant but the palestinian joy at foreign Dictators is relevant? because it presents saddam in a more favourable light in time for his trial? are you getting percentages here?

You guys are driving civilization downhill.


 * Wikipedia's purpose is to be NPOV. We are trying to show the facts to people. We aren't tryin' to skewer anyone. WhisperToMe 01:04, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

WhisperToMe 01:02, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)