Iraqi President Jalal Talabani today countered former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s claims that abuse of prisoners was “as bad as Saddam era” crimes. I do not take Allawi’s accusations seriously, and see the former prime minister acting either out of sour grapes, or as trying to put the spotlight on his new coalition’s run in the December 15 elections.

Yesterday,

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has said that human rights abuses in Iraq today are as bad as those during the rule of Saddam Hussein. …

“These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam Hussein, and now we are seeing the same things.”

His remarks came two weeks after US troops discovered 170 apparently abused captives in a secret prison inside an interior ministry building in Baghdad.

While any form of torture is completely unacceptable, a comparison to the Saddam era is ridiculous. As a result of the Butcher of Baghdad’s rule, an estimated 300,000 dead Iraqis lay in some 260 mass graves, 40 of which have been confirmed to date. Saddam’s rule meant torture chambers, dropping poison gas on civilians, starting an 8-year war with Iran which claimed a million lives, etc.

I am a bit perplexed by Allawi’s emphasis now, as 26,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly Shiite, have been murdered by terrorists, and Allawi is a Shiite.

Today,

Mr Talabani, a Kurd, told the BBC everyone opposed torturing or harming detainees and there were no parallels to be drawn between the present and abuses that took place under Saddam Hussein.

“If you go back to Saddam’s Iraq, we see that Iraq was turned by Saddam to concentration camps on the ground and mass graves underground,” he said.

Mr Allawi, he said, “cannot compare this situation with that situation”.

“I cannot convince myself or imagine that such nonsense has been said by Dr Allawi,” Mr Talabani said, pointing out that Iraqi now enjoyed a range of democratic rights - from free expression to free elections.

I can only conclude that Allawi is still smarting from his resounding defeat in Iraq’s last round of parliamentary elections. Sour grapes? Or knowing what subjects are likely to draw the most attention from the press.