Selective Prosecution of War Crimes Saddam Hussein's attorneys do not deny that innocents were killed in the gassing of Kurdish villages in the 1988 "Anfal" campaign, but they argue that those deaths were not deliberate; rather, they were unintended consequences of Iraq's combat with Iranian and Kurdish belligerents during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Although this defense might not save Saddam at his war crimes trial, Israel's supporters make a similar argument in defending its invasion of and attacks on Lebanon that have left more than a thousand innocents dead, according to Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Independent Institute's Center on Peace and Liberty, writing in his latest op-ed.