what follows is an interesting passage from fisk’s bigass book discussing the “betrayal” of shia uprising by coalition forces ast the end of the 1st ewar. really fascinating account of the contradictory way that leftists, including fisk here, support the end of saddam, but bitterly condemn u.s. occupation–an occupation fisk here all but says was inevitable in order to oust the tyrant. really, the u.s. is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t, take saddam out:

The children of Iraq are smiling at this moment, old men too. Our people under the regime of Saddam Hussein are suffering-all of us are suffering-execution, torture and deportation. But we are patient and united. My heart is with you. My hand is in yours. The intifada in Iraq needs your help … There is a limit to everything and for every crime there is a punishment …[–Iraqi poet Mohamed Mahdi Jawahiri on the need for U.S. support in the south.]
In the end, the Iraqi opposition could only end its deliberations with an uninspiring demand for a host of “committees”-those get-out institutions so loved by Arab leaders who want to avoid serious decisions-the most important of which was supposed to be the “Committee for National Salvation,” the nearest they could agree to a government-in-exile, and the most ridiculous of which was the creation of a delegation to tell the rest of the world what was happening in Iraq-as if the world did not already know. For it was now clear that when the American 1st Armored Division halted its tanks north of Safwan, the killing fields went on moving northwards into Iraq without them, consuming the land in fire and blood. As many-perhaps more-Iraqis were now perishing each day than died in the allied air assaults of the previous month. It was Ayatollah al-Mudaressi who graphically summed up his people’s tragedy. “Kuwait has been liberated,” he said, “at the cost of the blood of the Iraqi people.”
As the truth of this was made manifest in the execution grounds of southern and central Iraq, Washington watched in cruel silence. The administration, according to The Washington Post, could not decide whether it wished to keep U.S. troops in Iraq to restrain “Hussein’s ability to suppress the rebellions” or withdraw “so Iraqi military forces could consolidate control and then possibly challenge his claim to leadership.” The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was at his most craven. “What’s the better option to get rid of Mr. Saddam Hussein?” he asked rhetorically. “I really don’t know.” The Bush administration had taken no position on the issue “because it really is an internal problem” within Iraq. Powell had “no instructions to do anything” that would benefit either side.
American aircraft were now flying at will over Iraq, low enough for their pilots to see the battles with their own eyes. Their reconnaissance pictures picked up the street barricades, burning buildings and Iraqi tanks-and in some cases the attack ing Iraqi helicopters which Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled had obligingly allowed them to keep flying-in the streets of Iraq’s major cities. If the Americans would reluctantly move in to protect the Kurds-as they were later forced to do by public opinion-no such inclination was shown towards the Shia of southern Iraq. Despite the eyewitness evidence of terrible crimes against humanity, there would be no attempt to save the Shia population whose religious links with Iran so frightened Washington and its Arab allies in the Gulf.
[664]
On the American lines in southern Iraq, further descriptions of these atrocities were now being given by Iraqi ex-soldiers. Ibrahim Mehdi Ibrahim, a thirty-twoyear-old army deserter, told how Republican Guard units lured families from their homes with prpmises of safe passage and then trained artillery on them. Saddam’s soldiers, he said, were trying “to harvest them, the wheat with the chaff, with helicopter gunships while they hid in the fields.” A U.S. Army medic told of treating terrified Shia refugees who had been “beaten with pipes, with burns and a lot of kids beaten with barbed wire.
A lot had families killed off. A couple of girls, twelve and thirteen, were beaten on the face with fists or blunt objects.” Several weeping men arrived at an American checkpoint at Suq as-Shuyukh with identical stories of entire families massacred together by Iraqi Republican Guard forces. Another Iraqi army deserter said that “families that wanted to leave, they were surrounded and mowed down on the street. We saw with our eyes how they brought the wounded out of hospitals and shot them along with the doctors treating them. When the Iraqi army entered one week ago, the families that had fled the fighting returned with their children. They lined them up against walls and executed them.” The secrets of the mass graves outside Musayeb-revealed so many years laterproved that this man’s story was no exaggeration.
In America, The New York Times announced that the United States had “consigned the Iraqi insurgents to their fate,” quoting a “senior official”-as usual, anonymous-who said, “We never made any promises to these people…. There is no interest in the coalition in further military operations.” This was certainly the case among America’s Arab allies. For if the behaviour of the United States and Britain was both shameful and immoral, the reaction of most of the Arab regimes was humiliating. Many Arab journalists had expressed their revulsion that the Iraqi army-the largest and supposedly the most sophisticated in the Middle East-had been routed so ignominiously. In Arab newspapers, the destruction on Mutla Ridge was called a nakhba, a catastrophe-the same word used for the Palestinian exodus of 1948. But except in Syria, there were few words of sympathy in Arab capitals for the desperate men fighting on against Saddam in the ruins of southern Iraq or in the Kurdish mountains. The massacres in Basra and Najaf and, later, in Kirkuk elicited no expressions of horror from the Gulf kings and emirs, nor among the ageing presidents supported by the West. Almost all had their own minorities to repress-many of them Shia minorities-and were in no mood to rouse their people to indignation at the outcome of the Iraqi insurgency. To his disgrace, Yassir Arafat-a man whose own people’s exile should have awoken in him an equal sympathy for the fleeing Kurds-expressed not the slightest compassion for them.
The calvary of the Shia went largely uncovered by Western reporters–certainly by television-and its dimensions could only be gathered from the desperate men and women arriving at the American checkpoints north of Kuwait. In Kurdistan, however, television and newspaper reporters were on the ground, living-and in at least four cases dying-among the fighters and refugees as Saddam’s counter-attack set off a tragedy of biblical proportions. Journalists trudged [665] alongside the tens of thousands of Kurdish men and women as they fled north into the snow-thick mountains along the Turkish border, old men dying of frostbite, women giving birth in the snow, children abandoned amid the drifts. As The Independent was to say with bleak accuracy, “the mightiest military machine assembled since the Second World War watches the atrocity show from the sidelines.”
So, despite the anguished dispatches of their own correspondents, did the great American newspapers and the East Coast heavyweight “opinion formers.” The Washington Post was in favour of non-intervention, while The New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb complained that “the logic of intervention leads on, inevitably, to capturing Baghdad … While Iraqi troops failed to fight in Kuwait, we cannot count on similar timidity in their citadel. And who will fight on our side? No one. And what of civilian casualties? Many more, And what do we do after we have occupied Baghdad? And for how long? And at what cost?”
Here again, the ghosts of the future might visit the past. Yes, if American forces had continued towards Baghdad, as Schwarzkopf quite soon believed they should have done, what would have happened? The Arab coalition would have fallen apart. America-probably alongside Britain-would have had no “friends.” But there can be little doubt that if the Americans had pressed on to destroy Saddam’s regime, they would have received the welcome from the Iraqis that they confidently expected-but did not get-in 2003.
Indeed, after the betrayal of 1991, the Americans could never receive that welcome. In 1996, President George Bush Senior was to speak on television in a series of interviews that his own son would rashly ignore when he illegally invaded Iraq in 2003. If U.S. forces had pursued Saddam to Baghdad, Bush Senior said haltingly, “there would be, downtown Baghdad … America occupying an Arab land, searching for this brutal dictator who had the best security in the world, involved in an urban guerrilla war.”
Which, of course, subsequently came to pass, even if Bush failed to realise that it was the capture of Saddam that would encourage the “urban guerrilla war” of which he presciently spoke.* The moral issue, however, is that Bush had supported the call for the Iraqi rebellion. He had enthusiastically endorsed the rising. The CIA’s radio station had broadcast appeals to the Iraqi population to overthrow Saddam. These appeals, it was plain, burdened the Americans with a moral obligation to protect those they had called to arms on their side. To ignore these brave and desperate men when they responded-to leave them and their families to be exterminated-was not only an act of dishonour but a crime against humanity. Yet even after the American government was forced to offer military protection to the Kurds-albeit when their insurrection had been substantially crushed-they could still regard the Gulf War as a moral conflict, indeed an uplifting one for Ameri
*There were other eerie voices within the administration at this time. A Washington Post report on 14 April t99r quoted an anonymous (of course) official saying that “the thing that could make it like Vietnam was to go into Iraq and get bogged down, establishing a new government, protecting a new government against a hostile population. That would be a recipe for disaster,” Ouch.
[666] cans. By August I99i, U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney was able to describe the war as a “catharsis” for post-Vietnam America. “It was almost a healing process for a wound that had been open for a long time,” he said.
The real wounds-the tens of thousands of desperately wounded survivors of the Iraqi insurgency, the broken, decimated families of the Shias and Kurds, the even greater number of executed fighters and civilians now entombed beneath the sands of Iraq by Saddam’s killers-were not part of Cheney’s “healing process.” Their catharsis was to die. They did our bidding. They had served their purpose. They had failed to topple Saddam. This was their fate. But “we” had been “healed.” Bush had called for the overthrow of Saddam and then said he never intended to help the rebels in their struggle. An Associated Press report bluntly outlined the Bush policy in early April. The president, it said, “is betting that Americans are more concerned about getting U.S. troops back from the Gulf than helping Iraqi rebels topple Saddam Hussein ”
But the yellow bunting and the church bells with which we Westerners were enjoined to celebrate the “end” of the i99i Gulf War were now a mockery. The splintering of the fragile glass upon which the Middle East rests had now stretched 8oo kilometres up the Tigris and Euphrates. More human lives-most of them civilians-were being destroyed every day inside Iraq than at any time since Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “We warned them of this,” a senior Gulf Cooperation Council official told me in Riyadh. “We told the Americans that the liberation of Kuwait might set the region on fire. We told them they might have to stay, even though our people did not want this. But they never, never learn.”
You only had to talk to the Kuwaitis, let alone the Iraqi opposition or the Syrians, that dreadful spring to realise that for them the events in the Gulf represented not an isolated, dramatic moment in their history-bloody yet controllable-but a tragic continuum that began before the break-up of the Ottoman empire and which was now growing more terrible in the mountains of Kurdistan. Historically, no Western involvement in the Arab world has been without its betrayals, although treachery followed more swiftly on this occasion than anyone could have guessed. What was supposed to have started as a noble Western crusade to free Kuwait from aggression had turned into a tragedy of catastrophic proportions. “Future historians,” I wrote in my paper in April 1991, “may well decide that the liberation of Kuwait marked only the first chapter of the Gulf War, the massacre of Shiites and Kurds inside Iraq the second. History itself suggests the West will not be able to avoid involvement in the forthcoming chapters.”

Posted by: slothrop | May 6 2007 15:52 utc | 201