Memorial service for Ayatollah Muhammed Baqir Al-Hakim - Speeches - Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - Transcript

US Department of Defense Speeches, Sept 27, 2003

I saw these achievements coming together when I was in Iraq. And that was wonderfully encouraging. But I saw other things as well, evidence of the incredible crimes of the Saddam regime. I don't have to tell members of this audience how painful that is.

During my trip, I visited the mass graves at al-Hilla. More people were probably buried there than in Srebrenica, which was commemorated recently, and that is only one of dozens and more yet to be found. I went to Abu Gharib prison where we saw what can only be described as an industrial-style execution chamber, where at least 30,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 people died. I spoke with individual victims who survived, and with families of others who did not.

In the south--in a setting that one of the reporters with us said looks like the landscape of the moon, a desert the size of the State of New Jersey, created by one of Saddam's great crimes against the environment and crimes against humanity. We met with a surviving remnant of Marsh Arabs, a people whose ancient culture and way of life were ruthlessly destroyed and deliberately destroyed when Saddam drained the marshes. Today there are less than 200,000, and perhaps much less than 200,000, of a people that numbered half of a million just 10 years ago.

I saw the cruelty that was visited on Kurds and Turks, Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shi'a, in a regime of equal opportunity oppression. All the people of Iraq suffered horribly under that regime.

But I was especially moved by what I observed and heard about the cruelty to the Shi'a, who throughout history had been no strangers to suffering, in Iraq and elsewhere. I was reminded of Imam Hussayn and the sacrifice of his followers at Karbala, and how--more than a thousand years ago--they rose up against tyranny. And I was reminded again of what happened in 1991, and how the Shi'a rose up with great courage against Saddam, and how tens of thousands perished.

The one bright spot I remember from that horrible tragedy of 12 years ago concerned a group of some thirty-to-forty-thousand people, who had sought refuge in the area of southern Iraq occupied by our forces, but who were in imminent danger of being killed when our troops withdrew. When I learned of their plight, I informed my then-boss, Dick Cheney, who at the time, as you know, was the Secretary of Defense. And he immediately directed the U.S. military to intervene and to get those people out of Iraq when we withdrew. Some of them had lived in camps in Saudi Arabia ever since, waiting for the day, this day when it would be safe to return home again.

Others of those same people have been able to resettle in the United States and elsewhere. And I was privileged when I was in Baghdad to meet with one of them, who left a successful business in San Francisco to join our Special Forces on a heroic 2,000 kilometer march through Iraq, capturing many key positions and ultimately occupying the road between Baghdad and Tikrit.

He and others are participating now in the post-war rehabilitation of the country. To call it reconstruction is a misnomer. It is a country that has to recover from 35 years of deliberate and vicious misrule, 35 years of allocating the resources of the Iraqi people not for their welfare, but for torture chambers and prisons, for palaces and weapons of mass destruction. Now Iraqis have a chance to own their own resources and to rebuild their lives in peace and freedom.