The Kurds have no friends." In the mountains of northern Iraq, the old maxim is the stuff of common sense. When the gulf war began, it also held true in the corridors of Washington. Last August, within a few days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Jalal Talabani, exiled leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, phoned Peter Galbraith, a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Peter,” he said. “Should I come to Washington?” “Absolutely,” Galbraith replied. “If there was ever a time that the U.S. government needs to know what is going on with the Kurds in Iraq, this is it.” But when Galbraith called to arrange an appointment with the assistant secretary of state for human rights, he got nowhere. Word had come down from the seventh floor. No meeting.
Eight months later Secretary of State James Baker stepped out of a helicopter at Cukurca, a military base in Turkey. He hopped into a jeep and set off on a twisting mountain road that led to Iraq. As he came around a bend, he suddenly saw 50,000 Kurds clinging to the mountain and a valley below. Pushing through the reporters and photographers, a haggard Kurd begged for help against Saddam. Baker listened impassively. He stayed for only seven minutes. But when he got back to Diyarbakir, he called his aides to the forward cabin of his plane. “We can’t let this go on,” he said. “We’ve got to do something-and we’ve got to do it now.”
The epiphany on the mountain was long overdue. If the president showed strategic courage and imagination in prosecuting the war, he tumbled into flip-flops and errors in waging the peace. His hope that a palace coup would rid the world of Saddam–“the 7.62-millimeter retirement plan,” in the gallows humor around the Pentagon–went aglimmering. The White House underestimated the dictator’s staying power and the loyalty of his Army. It failed to predict a bloody civil war. No one anticipated those images on television: the burned, blood-streaked faces, the children’s graves that marked the path of the Kurdish exodus from Iraq. Trying to eliminate Saddam even as it needed him to preserve Iraq’s territorial integrity, the administration lurched from high principle to low expediency.
The contradictions of Bush’s policy emerged the moment the ground war against Saddam ended. “We thought there would be a political revolt by the Army and the power structure,” one top White House aide recalls. “No one expected the Kurds to rise up.” That was because no one was listening. That same week in late February, Talabani returned to Washington with a group of Iraqi opposition leaders to make the rounds of the think tanks and talk to senators. Once again Galbraith phoned the State Department. Richard Schifter, assistant secretary for human rights, didn’t return his call. Later that week, when Schifter was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on another matter, chairman Claiborne Pell asked why he was ducking the Kurds. “A misunderstanding,” the diplomat replied blandly. He agreed to see them.
Encouraged, Galbraith then tried to score a meeting at the National Security Council, too. With delphic evasiveness, a top Mideast hand told him, “Our policy is not to overthrow the regime, it’s to get rid of Saddam Hussein.” And when the hapless Kurds arrived at the State Department, Schifter was “regrettably” busy. Two junior aides met them in the C Street lobby and hustled them out of the building to a corner coffee shop.
The president had his reasons for being elusive; many were well considered. His mandate from the United Nations was to liberate Kuwait, not to occupy Iraq. Victorious Kurds might demand a country of their own, a prospect that appalled the Turks and Iranians, which have sizable Kurdish minorities of their own. To meddle in the civil war, the United States would have to create a gawky puppet government. There was the danger of Lebanonization. Bush had promised the Saudis and the Egyptians a quick withdrawal. In the United States, there were yellow ribbons on every other front porch. America wanted its sons and daughters home.
Although the president had called on Iraqis to revolt, he never believed civilian dissidents would be able to topple Saddam. His scenarists had spun a different plot: the Iraqi Army, embittered after its drubbing, would march back to Baghdad and dump Saddam. To encourage such a putsch, CentCom salted the first 20,000 POWs to be sent home with senior officers, those thought most likely to lead a revolt. But in the end, the Army chose to stand by its dictator. “When you get the crap kicked out of you, the way you recover is to kick the crap out of someone lower than you,” one of the president’s men now concedes.
Obsessed by Vietnam, the president wanted to avoid being “sucked into” a civil war. He sought to get out cleanly and quickly. The cease-fire he declared only 100 hours after the ground war began took even his own field commanders by surprise. “We were shocked,” a CentCom aide told NEWSWEEK last week. “Another two days and we would have taken out everything the Iraqis had in the south.” Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf knew Saddam could use escaping troops to suppress the Kurds and Shiites. Stormin’ Norman seethed.
Slamming on the brakes was the idea of Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From the outset of the gulf crisis, Powell was leery of landing the United States in another Vietnam War that would cost lives and reopen old domestic wounds. His political instincts told him he had no choice but to go along with his commander in chief’s desire to get Saddam. But he set the military requirements for intervention extremely high. His calculation was that the buildup would take so long that diplomacy would have time to resolve the crisis, according to a critic high up in the Army. It didn’t work out that way.
Then, when the Iraqis crumpled, Powell worried about the impression the United States would make on television if it shed too much blood in cutting up Saddam’s retreating forces. He didn’t worry much about the Kurds or the consequences of a quick cease-fire on a civil war. “He was thinking in White House terms,” recalls the senior military critic. “What we needed perhaps was a military voice saying, ‘Mr. President, the job has not been done yet’.”
Given another 24 hours, American and allied armored units swinging eastward out of Kuwait would have sealed the trap. As it was, at least three heavy divisions of Iraqis escaped. Saddam used these to suppress Shiite rebels in the south. Even before the cease-fire, he issued a secret general order that whisked senior officers and headquarters personnel out of harm’s way. To boost morale, he gave a pay bonus to troops straggling in from Kuwait. Within a week he rebuilt badly scarred units like the Hammurabi Division of the Republican Guards. Even in defeat, he wound up with perhaps 300,000 combat-ready troops and 2,000 tanks-enough to savage the Shiites and Kurds.
The first intelligence reports of the Shiite revolt in Basra came on March 1; within a week the Kurds were rising up in the north. The administration was still smarting from the criticism it took for failing to warn Saddam forcefully enough to keep him out of Kuwait; it knew it could not stand by and do nothing.
When intelligence intercepts showed Saddam was authorizing the use of poison gas, the State Department warned Iraq’s representative in Washington to stop it. After the president warned against the use of fixed-wing aircraft to attack rebels, the Air Force destroyed an Iraqi fighter over the northern part of the country.
The president had encouraged the insurgents in other ways. From Saudi Arabia, Radio Free Iraq urged Iraqis, specifically the Kurds, to rise against Saddam. The Saudis paid for the station, but sources close to them say the CIA helped to supply the transmitters and other equipment and to recruit broadcasters. British special forces worked with the Kurds to foment an uprising. And while Bush said last week that his object had never been “the demise and destruction of Saddam personally,” that was not entirely true. “We didn’t send in hit teams against Saddam because we didn’t think they would succeed,” says one allied source. “But we certainly targeted anywhere we thought he might be.” The list included every leadership bunker the targeters could find, including one disastrous attack that killed more than 400 civilians in a bunker near Baghdad. One of the raid’s planners now says, “We bombed it that night because we thought Saddam was sleeping there.”
The Kurds believed mistakenly that the token gestures foreshadowed more military help from the United States. For a time they pummeled Saddam. In mid March the CIA confirmed Kurdish claims that the rebels held most of northern Iraq. By March 20, Kurdish leaders in Damascus said virtually all of Iraqi Kurdistan had been liberated. On March 26 Talabani returned from three years of exile to his hometown in Iraq. At the peak of the Kurds’ success, Saddam struck back hard and the course of battle reversed. The White House froze. Not wanting to tip the balance, the president decided to do nothing.
Not everyone within the administration agreed with the policy; younger officials, less spooked by Vietnam, called for tougher action. They wanted to warn Iraqi soldiers to stay in their barracks. Anything that moved-choppers, tanks, artillery or troops-would be attacked. They thought they had the support of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Vice President Dan Quayle.
On March 26 the president convened a White House meeting of his Big Eight: Quayle, Cheney, Baker, Powell, White House chief of staff John Sununu, national-security adviser Brent Scoweroft and NSC deputy Robert Gates. Among other things, they considered shooting down Iraqi helicopter gunships. Powell argued that the job was complex and would take too many men and weapons. Not everyone in the Pentagon agreed. “Of course we had the assets,” says one senior officer. “Don’t get me wrong–there may be decisive political arguments against getting involved in Iraq. All I’m saying is that the idea that taking on a bunch of Iraqi helicopters posed some kind of big military challenge is bullshit, and whoever says that is playing polities.”
Quayle argued mildly that it might be a good idea for the United States to take a “less neutral stand” toward rebels willing to fight Saddam. Cheney kept his counsel. Powell offered another tempting prospect to the president. He said it would be possible to get all American troops out of southern Iraq in four days.
By March 31, Saddam’s advancing troops forced Kurdish guerrillas to stage what they called “a strategic retreat” in the north. Knowing what would happen when Saddam arrived with his enforcers, panic-stricken Kurdish civilians headed for the hills. Short of using military power to remove Saddam, the administration could not have prevented the flight of the Kurds, but it could have done a good deal more to anticipate the exodus and to mitigate its human suffering. “The moment the Kurds and Shiites picked up guns, we should have seen their defeat as imminent and planned for relief operations,” says Court Robinson of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a private monitoring group. In fact, the Pentagon did begin in late March discreetly planning a major relief operation. It had already stockpiled supplies for perhaps 100,000 refugees. But planners had believed they would be mostly Shiites, not Kurds, and that they would leave through the south and by way of Jordan. Plastic sheets for tents were in Saudi Arabia. There were only modest supplies at a British base on Cyprus. “Nobody had warned us to expect a tidal wave into Turkey,” recalls one Pentagon topsider.
On April 2 Turkey’s President Turgut Ozal alerted the U.N. Security Council that 30,000 Iraqi Kurds had entered Turkey in two days and that an additional 220,000 were on the way. France proposed a resolution that would have ordered Saddam to stop shooting. The rest of the world was still more interested in getting the United States out of the gulf than in helping the Kurds. Washington, London and Moscow all wanted the United Nations’ permanent cease-fire resolution passed before attending to the Kurds’ plight.
Then the TV evening news began to run footage of desperate Kurds, ragged men and women and blood-spattered children trekking through the mountains. Conservative columnist William Safire attacked the president for a “loss of nerve … and sense of purpose” and the “worst humiliation” since Desert One, Jimmy Carter’s hostage-rescue fiasco, and JFK’s disastrous Bay of Pigs. “People like the too trusting Kurds now know they can get killed by relying on Mr. Bush,” he sniped. Stung, Bush launched a $10 million relief program. Otherwise, he refused to interfere. “There are no gives, takes, ifs, ands or buts whatsoever,” said one top White House aide. “A hundred Safire columns will not change the public’s mind. There is no political downside to our policy.”
The president still hoped international relief agencies could handle the problem. But mounting pressure from Turkey’s President Ozal forced a compromise. On April 6 Bush authorized Operation Provide Comfort, a limited relief effort confined to airdrops of food to the starving Kurds. Fearing that they might become staging areas for guerrillas, the president would not support relief camps.
Ozal said it was not enough. At Bush’s order, Secretary of State Baker went to Ankara on Sunday, April 7. He went immediately to the presidential palace. Over dinner Ozal told him, “Turkey is being overwhelmed.” The president said the only way to stop the flood toward Turkey was to install a United Nations peacekeeping force inside Iraq. Baker was noncommittal. After dinner Ozal pointed toward a television and VCR at the end of the room. “Now, Mr. Secretary, there’s something I want to show you,” he said and flicked on the VCR. Baker found himself looking at pictures of Kurds trudging barefoot through ice and snow, and a mother weeping over the body of her child, a 3-year-old who had died of exposure. The images were of total chaos. When Baker got back to his hotel he ordered soundings on the prospects for getting the Security Council to launch a peacekeeping force. They were bleak. It was one thing to send troops to protect Kuwait from Iraq, quite another to send them to protect a people from its own government. The Soviets, who have their own problems with restless ethnic minorities, didn’t like the idea; and China would probably veto it.
The next day, as Baker made his trip to the mountains, British Prime Minister John Major weighed in with the idea of setting up enclaves to protect the Kurds. The American reaction was tepid. No one wanted to create a new West Bank or Gaza Strip in Iraq. But by now, the Baker team knew it had to devise some way of moving the Kurds back down from the mountains and of keeping Saddam from massacring them. The question was how to do it without creating an embryonic Kurdish state. On the way back to Washington Baker stopped in Geneva. After spending half an hour with the grumbling heads of the largest international relief agencies, he knew one thing for certain: they were not up to the job.
At about the same time, Bush convened another meeting at the White House. “Let’s go out on the patio,” he said, and everyone trooped into a patio by the Rose Garden. Colin Powell set up an easel and reviewed the airdrop. The only decision was to order CentCom to issue a statement over the weekend accelerating the pace of the American troop withdrawal. The Sunday talk shows went badly for the administration. By Monday the morning intelligence reports put the Kurdish body count at 1,000 a day.
Then Ozal called the president. “I’m being overwhelmed,” he said once again, and he pleaded for help, He appealed to Bush to send large numbers of American troops deep inside Iraq to persuade the Kurds to return to their villages. His plea was backed by similar pressure from the French and British. On April 16, after 10 days of dithering, Bush committed U.S. ground forces to set up relief camps inside Iraq. “It’s hard to have a lot of hope for this,” said one gloomy administration topsider. “The truth is that everyone was opposed to it, but everyone realized it had to be done.” Huge numbers and searing images had overwhelmed the cold calculations of policy. Temporarily. The Kurds still had no real friends.
