No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 
Why the exagerations??

OK. I don’t question that Saddam’s regime was a nasty one. At least as nasty as the Argentine Generals and Chile’ Pinochet, both of which were supported by our conservative leaders.

But why did we get bombarded by such a collection of exaggerations and misleading statements regarding the invasion of Iraq??

By now, if either Bush or Blair says to look up, my reaction by now is to look down to see what they don’t want me to look at.

Based on this report, among other things, I really doubt that the Butler Report has any connection to reality.

Needless to say, Bush's recent statements that our economy was "turning the corner" led me to suspect that either it was getting worse or not changing.

Sad to say, today's employment report shows that it is getting worse.

Sad. But not surprising.
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PM admits graves claim 'untrue'

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1263901,00.html
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday July 18, 2004
The Observer

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.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead.

The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam Hussein's murders.

posted by Richard at 2:17 PM