In the heat of battle against Saddam Hussein, George Bush urged the people of Iraq to “take matters into their own hands” and force the dictator to “step aside.” After the war they made just such an effort, led by long-suffering Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. When the rebels looked to America for help, however, the White House sent a different message. “We don’t intend to involve ourselves in the internal conflict in Iraq,” spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said last week. In a sense, U.S. troops were involved already. They occupied about 15 percent of Iraq’s territory and controlled the skies over the entire country. They dictated to Saddam what weapons he could use, and could not use, against his own people. They provided a haven for tens of thousands of anti-Saddam refugees. But the Bush administration was determined to stay out of a military morass. As Saddam’s forces began to overrun rebel strongholds, U.S. troops stood by and watched.
So far, the administration’s refusal to get into another Mideast conflict has drawn few complaints from Congress or the American public. But a small chorus of commentators, many from the right, is complaining about unfinished business in the Persian Gulf, urging Bush to help the rebels finish off Saddam. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer argues that “not intervening is tantamount to tacitly supporting him.” A television interview with Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander, added to the impression that Bush may have stopped the war too soon. Schwarzkopf said he had wanted to “continue the march” against Saddam’s Army, implying that it would have been more or less annihilated if the allies had fought on for “one more day.”
Suddenly caught in a political sandstorm, Schwarzkopf apologized to Bush, and the president told him to forget about it. His advisers insisted that Bush would not give in to calls for military action. “Our mission was to liberate Kuwait, not to reform Iraq,’ said one. “We have no intention of getting bogged down in that mess.” Instead, the administration accelerated its plans to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. The status of the occupation was one subject of a secret trip national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft made to Saudi Arabia last week. And the United Nations Security Council was expected to pass a resolution this week imposing severe cease-fire terms on Iraq and calling for a small U.N. observer force to be deployed along the Iraq-Kuwaiti border. “The first blue helmet that lands there, we’re history,’ said a senior U.S. official.
The civil war may have reached a turning point last week. At first the rebels had widespread success against Saddam’s demoralized forces. “We really didn’t attack anyone,” Dr. Mahmoud Osman, a senior Kurdish leader who was touring Europe to drum up support for his movement, said last week. “People simply rose up and handed the cities to us.” But last week Saddam began to take them back. His forces attacked rebel-held Kirkuk in the northern oilfields. In the south, the holy city of Karbala reportedly changed hands more than once. As Saddam established his control over most of the southern region, thousands of refugees fled into the U.S. zone (page 20).
The Americans weren’t ready for them. “Set up a camp, and it will act as a magnet for every refugee in Iraq,” complained one officer. Sources said the International Committee of the Red Cross had to remind the Americans that, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, U.S. occupation forces were responsible for the care of refugees. “You don’t turn away the wounded, the hungry,” said Brig. Gen. Robert McFarlin, who was in charge of logistics for the U.S. VII Corps. “But we’re not trained for it.” On one of his daily helicopter trips into the occupied zone, McFarlin flew an injured 8-year-old Iraqi girl from an aid station to a field hospital. She died on the way.
At home, critics took Bush to task on two main grounds: for allowing Saddam to hold onto power and for destroying much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure with the wartime bombing. “A new world order would be easier to build, it somehow seems to us, if the war planners had taken out the troublemaker and left the country’s power plants alone,” said a Wall Street Journal editorial. In The New York Times, liberal columnist Anthony Lewis said Bush’s policy was “to sit by passively while Iraqi helicopter gunships spray napalm and acid at the rebels.” The Times’s conservative columnist William Safire charged that Bush was becoming “the third U.S. president to sell out the Kurds. Richard Nixon did it in the ’70s, at the behest of the Shah of Iran for regional stability; Ronald Reagan did it in 1988, by rewarding Saddam Hussein with greater commodity credits despite the poison-gassing of 12,000 Kurds in Halabja.”
The Kurds are an ancient Muslim people who perhaps deserve a country of their own but are unlikely to get one. There are significant Kurdish minorities in contiguous parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. None of those governments would welcome the creation of an independent Kurdish state. The rebels in northern Iraq say they do not want an independent Kurdistan; they will settle for autonomy in a united country. They seek political support from the West, and they hope the Americans will keep Saddam’s warplanes grounded. So far, they have been disappointed. “I am very surprised by the indifference of the great powers,” Jalal Talabani, one of the key Kurdish leaders, said after returning from exile last week. “The West has given us nothing.”
It wasn’t for lack of careful study. Bush’s advisers drew up a list of what one source called “graduated options,” starting with the most benign political moves in support of the rebels and escalating all the way to unilateral U.S. military intervention. The first step on the ladder, direct U.S. contact with some opposition groups, was approved. The administration said it would meet with the Kurds if they so desired. At the other end of the option list, sources said, Bush and his aides rejected overt military intervention by the United States, with or without its allies. Somewhere in the middle, covert military aid to the rebels was not ruled out, but one source said: “The harder you look at that, the bigger the problems.” There was some talk, for example, of giving the rebels Stinger antiaircraft missiles. But the Kurds aren’t trained to use them, and Washington was not eager to give such weapons to the pro-Iranian Shiites.
Last month Washington told Iraq not to use fixed-wing warplanes against the rebels, and U.S. fighters shot down two of them to underscore the point. But it has ignored helicopter attacks, partly because Schwarzkopf got “suckered,” as he himself put it, into allowing the Iraqis to use helicopters for transportation. Obviously, that permission could be revoked, and the Americans could shoot down helicopters that attack rebel forces. “That was everyone’s favorite military option,” said a senior U.S. planner. “It’s limited. It’s clean.” The catch, he added, is that “there’s no evidence it would do much good.” The main assaults on the insurgents have come from tanks and artillery. “We could destroy Saddam’s helicopter force in a day, but then what?” said the official. “Next there would be pressure to go after Saddam’s tanks, his artillery, the rest of his assault forces. We’d have to start refighting Desert Storm, but deep inside Iraq this time.”
Saddam has more military force at his disposal than the Americans thought when the war ended. Bush stopped the fighting on Feb. 27 because the victory had turned into a rout. The killing of Iraqis became so easy, a senior Pentagon source said last week, that U.S. forces had “serious morale problems–talk of pilots refusing to fly.” But while Bush and his advisers avoided a massacre of Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait, they paid less attention to units that were making their escape father north. “We all thought we had cornered more of the Iraqi forces than turned out to be the case,” said the Pentagon source. “We didn’t realize how many would get away.”
Although they all want to see Saddam fall, allied Arab governments firmly oppose U.S. military intervention. “If the United States gets sucked into this conflict, it will nullify the clean, clear-cut victory that Bush won, a victory with no bitter aftermath in the Arab world,” said a senior Egyptian diplomat. “There is still a lot of allergy in the region toward the United States, and it can be reactivated quickly.” If they did intervene, U.S. forces would have no clear objective beyond defeating Saddam. Even after his fall, they could get mired down trying to keep order and establish a new government. And with Saddam gone, the country might fall apart, creating fresh instability in the region.
The Bush administration assumes that, if there is no foreign intervention, Saddam will defeat the Kurds and Shiites with the help of Iraq’s elite, the leaders of the armed forces and the ruling Baath Party. “Right now, they are fighting alongside Saddam for their survival,” says a senior official, explaining Bush’s view of the situation. “But once the rebels are put down and the dust settles, the military and other elites will begin to blame Saddam for the death and destruction he has caused.” At that point, Saddam’s inner circle may do the job that Washington does not trust the Kurds and Shiites to do: get rid of the dictator without destroying the country.
