The Second Sin of George Bush
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
Washington-USA THE SECOND SIN OF GEORGE BUSH BY STEVEN V. ROBERTS The Administration's decision to deliver food, tents and clothing to Kurdish refugees by dropping them from the air...
...should not be involved in fighting between Iraqi troops and Kurdish rebels," and only 32 per cent disagreed...
...it stems from his decision, made last November, to go to war in the first place...
...Seldom did we see the bodies blasted by those bombs and pilots...
...Will George Bush pay a political price for this policy...
...But as the woeful scenes of the Kurdish calamity fill our television screens, the clear image of victory is turning murky indeed...
...Their political aspirations for a homeland will almost certainly be thwarted, but their personal suffering could touch the hearts of Americans and cause the President some political pain...
...Why did the White House see the pillaging of the Kuwaitis as cause for a massive international crusade, and the slaughter of the Kurds as worthy of little more than feeble protestations of concern...
...In a recent USA Today survey, 55 per cent of those interviewed agreed that the "U.S...
...In eastern Turkey, where I visited the Kurdish region some years ago, the government denies that they actually constitute a separate ethnic group, referring to them as "mountain Turks" and suppressing the Kurdish language and culture...
...General H. Norman Schwarzkopf had wanted to press the battle and choke off the Republican Guard units that survived to carry out the decimation of the rebels...
...Most of the time, we saw smart bombs slamming through doorways and smiling young fighter pilots returning to their bases...
...The polls tend to support that view...
...The argument has some merit...
...Representative Henry Hyde, a conservative Republican from Illinois, warns that the President is losing "the moral high ground" by his policies, and a trio of New York Times columnists—A.M...
...Unable to extricate themselves from the political mess in Iraq, they would be a highly exposed target for a terrorist attack, like the ill-fated Marines in Beirut...
...Rosenthal, William Safire, and even Anthony Lewis—have reflected the deepening disillusionment among many scholars, commentators and editorial writers...
...In the United States, preserving one American life seems more important than saving hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Kurds...
...This was no mere police action, no mere rolling back of a border incursion...
...Today, through satellite pictures on the evening news, the Kurdish refugees have emerged as a distinct people for the first time...
...The White House has made a very clear and callous judgment that Americans are sick of the war and have absolutely no stomach for getting involved in endless tribal squabbling...
...Last December, Bush promised the American people that Operation Desert Storm would have "no murky ending," and that appeared to be the case for a while...
...USA Today reports that fully one-quarter of those surveyed "feel less proud than when the war ended...
...No matter what he says now, the man in the Oval Office clearly signaled to potential rebels that he would support them if they rose up against a foe he denounced as the moral equivalent of Hitler...
...If the failure of anticipation was Bush's first sin, the second was surely his constantly encouraging the people of Iraq to take up arms against Saddam...
...In fact, I find the current argument beside the point...
...One senses that such voices were not really heard by the White House...
...As Mikhail Gorbachev learned in Lithuania, though, if you stay behind your own frontier, and bash the hell out of a minority in your own country, you have less to fear from the guardians of the New World Order...
...Few Democrats have popped their heads above their political foxholes to criticize the President, a sure sign that they believehis judgment is correct...
...And yet he had been cautioned—repeatedly—that wars produce unintended consequences, that we could not expect to march through the Persian Gulf, casually pushing HumptyDumptyoff of his wall, without having a plan for picking up the pieces...
...The failed uprising of the Kurds, and its dreadful aftermath, have tarnished the glistening luster of Operation Desert Storm...
...During the Persian Gulf war, the Pentagon was able to control the images reaching American TV screens...
...But in the case of aiding the Kurds the White House contention that the United States cannot get involved in the "internal affairs" of Iraq simply makes no sense...
...At the moment, I tend to doubt it...
...He now insists that he never "misled" anybody, that it was never America's "stated policy" to overthrow Saddam...
...It was George Bush who raised Operation Desert Storm to a new level of moral righteousness...
...Got to be at least 500 Turks before it makes the front page," snarled the boss...
...He had a brilliant tactical plan for winning the military battle, but virtually no strategy at all for shaping the postwar world...
...Even the White House's stateof-the-art image-polishing machinery will have trouble scrubbing away the stain...
...That is also the way the public generally feels...
...Moreover, if they did catch him, they would then become an occupying army...
...The images flooding the news at present are of an incalculable, and very human, disaster...
...Every reporter knows that American attitudes toward foreigners exhibit healthy streaks of xenophobia and even racism...
...Democrats like Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell complain that Bush, and Schwarzkopf, should have blocked Saddam Hussein's employment of helicopters to carry out his lethal plans...
...This was a fight for a New World Order, a new era of international harmony...
...Thus the United Nations, for example, will adjudicate international disputes, yet will refuse to delve into the "internal affairs" of member states...
...By all means, don't get close enough to take moral responsibility for a people who made the unpardonable mistake of believing what the President of the United States told them...
...The answer seems to be in the President's preoccupation with the question of borders, although here they are rather arbitrary lines in the sand drawn by British officers after World War I. The Kuwaitis should be defended, goes this argument, because Saddam crossed a border to get at them, while the Kurds should be abandoned because they were already in Iraq when Saddam started shooting them...
...should "resume the war" to protect the rebels...
...It is further convinced that were American troops to march on Baghdad in an effort to purge Saddam, they probably would not catch him (the flailing and futile pursuit of Panama's General Manuel Noriega is still a fresh memory...
...If language has any meaning, bombing a country for weeks, and occupying 20 per cent of its territory, constitutes interference in its internal affairs...
...Bush's moral responsibility for the human tragedy in Iraq is not rooted in battle plans or shoot-down orders...
...The President can try to hide behind legalisms, he can point out how the United Nations resolution did not make the overthrow of Iraq'sdictator part of thecoalition's game plan, but that won't wash...
...Back on December 4, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, warned in an interview: "There's going to be alot of instability if there's a war, probably a great deal more than we can anticipate now...
...Bush thinks one move ahead, not two or three, and he approached the war that way...
...Steven V. Roberts, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, is a senior writer at U.S...
...Washington-USA THE SECOND SIN OF GEORGE BUSH BY STEVEN V. ROBERTS The Administration's decision to deliver food, tents and clothing to Kurdish refugees by dropping them from the air stands as a perfect symbol of George Bush's policy toward these bedraggled masses: Don't get too close, certainly not close enough to dirty your hands, literally or figuratively...
...But the scenes of devastation and grief playing out on the Iraqi-Turkish border are outside Pentagon control...
...Borders, however arbitrary, are important links in the chain of international stability...
...He now says history will secondguess the decision to stop short of complete military victory, and he is wrong only in terms of tense: The second-guessing has already begun...
...It all sounds a bit like a rogue who gets a girl into bed by protesting his undying love, and then says in the morning that it was never his "stated policy" to see her again, much less make a long-term commitment...
...No wonder the Shiites and Kurds thought the American President would do more than wash his hands of the mess he had created in Iraq...
...Yes, Saddam has been driven from Kuwait, and bullies around the world have been taught a lesson: If you cross a border to oppress people, you have George Bush to answer to...
...Already, voices of moral outrage are being raised against the decision to abandon the rebellions in Iraq to Saddam's tender mercies...
...The sobriquet, the "in-box President," is welldeserved...
...All of us have some version of the story I once heard from the Washington Post editor who raced up to his boss one night, screaming that they had to remake the front page because 100 Turks (or Pakistanis or Ecuadorans) had been killed in a flood...
...One White House official told my U. S. News and World Report colleague Kenneth T. Walsh: "It sounds harsh, but I don't think one American family wants to see its son or daughter endangered by a civil war in Iraq...
...Presidents are judged, in large part, by the standards they set for themselves...
...When the same question was asked another way, only 7 per cent said the U.S...
...But the situation could change...
...So, at least until now, Bush has remained immune from a political backlash...
...Much of the criticism aimed at the Administration has focused on what the American forces could, or should, have done to stave off the slaughter of the Kurds, and of their fellow insurrectionists, the Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq...
...News and World Report...
...The General's admission that he was "suckered" into approving the use of the helicopters is a refreshing note in Washington, where no one seems to own up to anything anymore, but it cannot help the Kurds who have been killed...
...In the heat of battle, his rationale—and his goals—for Operation Desert Storm escalated far beyond "stated policy...
...One of the great flaws in the Bush Presidency has always been its shortsightedness, its tendency to react to events instead of driving them...
...Until a few weeks ago, most Americans knew little about the Kurds, a people cursed by history and geography, divided among five states in the Mideast region andapariah in allofthem...
Vol. 74 • March 1991 • No. 4
