A post from Instapundit.com:

READER JOHN KLUGE EMAILS FROM IRAQ:

I am in Irbil in Kurdistan northern Iraq. Someone explained the history of this place to me today. The mountains here are bare and devoid of trees. They used be forested. Covered with trees. There used to be so many trees in Irbil that you couldn't see around corners. Now it looks like Kansas or really more like parts of Montana.

The reason is that Saddam cut down all of the trees in Kurdistan in 1988. He bulldozed 4000 of the 5000 villages in Kurdistan and the Kurds ran to the mountains for safety, so he cut down all of the trees on these mountains and killed all of the game, so that the Kurds would have no wood for fires and no food to eat. He was incredibly effective. The Kurds are now replanting the trees. You can see hundreds of tiny trees if you look closely at the mountains. I didn't notice them until they were pointed out to me. In Kirkuk they found a mass grave of Kurdish children. One of the U.N. guys offered to take us out and show it to us. I haven't taken him up on it. I have no reason to go there and I feel like it would be disrespectful to go and gawk. I guess some of the children were buried with their toys and dolls.

It makes me sick everytime I surf the net and see all these people in Europe and back home saying that the war was not justified because we haven't found 50 tons of sarin gas yet. I wish those people would come to this country and look at ruined villages between here and Kirkuk and the bare mountains. Anyone who protested against this war and defended Saddam ought to be ashamed of themselves. Its just unimaginable the things that went on here.

From the Australian Herald-Sun:

A mass grave containing the remains of 200 Kurdish children has been discovered in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, the Kurdish newspaper Taakhi reported today.

"Citizens discovered on May 30 a communal grave close to Debs, in Kirkuk. But this is different from other mass graves discovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein's terrorist regime because it contains the remains of 200 child victims of the repression of the Kurdish uprising" in 1991, the paper said.

"Even dolls were buried with the children," it said.

Dozens of mass graves have been uncovered all over Iraq since Saddam's ouster by invading US-led forces on April 9.

Lileks on this subject:

I read today of another mass grave discovered in Iraq. This one was reserved for children.

I repeat: this was a special mass grave for children.

The article said that dolls were found among the bodies. Which meant that the little girls were clutching their dolls when they died.

Or they dropped them in terror at the edge of a grave. The soldiers kicked them in.

I don’t even know if the story will make the papers. If it does, some editorial cartoonist might turn that horror into a powerful piece of art. Most cartoonists will turn the page. I did Iraq yesterday; today’s it’s tax cuts. I know - weapons of mass deductions! Pulitzer, here I come.

Sorry, kids. Your bones had the misfortune of being unearthed in the same week Martha Stewart did a perp walk. That’s good material. Dead kids are a comedy killer, and if editorial cartoons are about anything these days, it’s the grins.

I found this in an Australian paper, and a Singapore paper. Funny--nothing in the New York Times yet.

People here have put forth the notion that if the American public knew more about the "truth" on WMD* that they would have had a different opinion about going to war. Well, if we are thinking along those lines, we'd have to also include in that hindsight equation the "truth" about the ghastly abuses of the Saddam regime that did not come to light until after the war either.

So, when you tell Mr. Average American that Saddam didn't have all the weapons we thought he did, you also have to tell him about the torture chambers, mass graves (for KIDS), children's prisons, attempted genocides, trumped-up sanction casualties, looted humanitarian aid, and all the rest of the stuff we've found after the fact. Then you get to ask him his opinion on the war.

*The premise that we have been lied to, and that Saddam did not have WMD, has not yet been proven, and doesn't even hold up on its own that well, but we'll let that go for now for the sake of the point.