Why Saddam Still Rules

...All this was uncovered by a House investigating committee, whose report I arranged to publish in 1976 after the House voted to suppress it...

...Perhaps that was his way of saying, more tactfully than General George B. McClellan in the Civil War or General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War, that the military commander bridled at the political decision to leave the Gulf war unfinished...

...Massoud al-Barzani, who led them, is the son of the legendary General Mustafa al-Barzani, head of an insurrection against Saddam Hussein that President Richard M. Nixon and his national security aide, Henry Kissinger, organized in 1972 as a favor to the Shah of Iran...

...At the outset of the war General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had asserted that his mission was to "cut off and kill" Iraq's Army...

...In the Middle East "democracy" can mean giving voice to unruly Shiites and Kurds in Iraq and to grass roots (sand roots...

...As the Kurds and Shiites—peoples an American President might once have designated "freedom fighters" —rose up in the vanquished nation, the Bush Administration debated whether democracy for Iraq was really a good idea...

...All of these governments have been quick to condemn the mistreatment of blacks in South Africa and Palestinians on the West Bank...

...Making Good on a Promise On February 22, the Friday before the commencement of the ground war, the President found himself in a difficult situation...

...While American forces stood by watching Saddam's military machine slaughter thousands andsend hundreds of thousands fleeing from his vengeance, the circumstances and consequences of the abrupt unilateral cessation of hostilities announced by President Bush on February 27 came into sharper focus...

...But they cannot crush us...

...The Harvard scholar Laurie Mylroie, a close student of the Iraqi situation, says a Saudi intelligence officer told Iraqi opposition leaders in Damascus they had to accept two Saudibacked candidates in their coalition or they would lose Saudi money and American political support...

...Iraqi tanks, artillery and armored personnel carriers were fleeing across the Euphrates toward the city...

...The Kurds must have had an uneasy feeling of déjà vu...

...Secretary of State James A. Baker III said on television, "We would like to see a change in government...

...I do not know who will take my place one day...

...That was, in fact, the scenario supported by Saudi Arabia, to which Washington had apparently given its proxy...

...We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility toward our people, who have committed themselves to your country's policy...

...We want sarbasti—freedom...

...The Kurds, meanwhile, found themselves being raked by helicopter gunships that the President had said once should not be used before dropping the subject...

...Twelve years later he was leading the Kurds into fruitless battle again while America stood by...

...The Saudi "favorite sons" were exiled Iraqi politicians named Saad Jabr and Salah Omar al-Takriti...

...There is also reason to believe that the Bush Administration, all along, thought Iraq should be allowed to keep enough military strength to maintain its "territorial integrity" (read: defend against Iran) and "internal stability" (read: fend off uprisings...

...Suddenly democracy was aproblem...

...On the initiative of France, the United Nations Security Council voted to condemn the mass killings in Iraq, demanding that the Baghdad regime "immediately remove the threat to international peace and security...

...In Iraq, America had burst the flood gates and then raced to escape from the flood...

...China and India abstained...

...Baghdad clearly did not wish to slow the departure of American troops...

...When the Shah reached a settlement of his border dispute with Saddam in March 1975, he pulled the plug on the insurrection without warning the Kurds...

...The pictures of desperate refugees streaming across the mountainous border into Turkey were almost too much to bear, and President Bush announced humanitarian aid, including the airdropping of food and medicine and blankets over northern Iraq...

...According to Mylroie, Takriti initiated the Saddam Hussein reign of terror in 1969 with the public hanging of Jews...

...If this was to be the fruit of victory over tyranny, it would seem to be pretty meager...

...He wanted to squelch the Soviet-negotiated cease-fire agreement with the Iraqis, which Mikhail S. Gorbachev was threatening to bring up for a vote in the United Nations Security Council, by issuing a noon Saturday ultimatum for Iraq's unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait...

...No bones about it...

...Saddam Hussein could decide later how far he wanted to go in complying with the resolution...

...It could mean upsetting the familiar order based on the rule of the minority Sunni Muslims, the Baath Party and the military caste—that is, Saddam Hussein's regime...

...OnFebruary 27, justhours before the end of the fighting, General Schwarzkopf said at a briefing in Riyadh that "the gate is closed...

...General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of Operation Desert Storm, let drop in a television interview with David Frost that he had been planning to go on fighting and was taken aback by the sudden order to stop in his tracks...

...Indeed, this had been quite evident even without the general's slip (if that's what it was...

...Thousands were killed in an Iraqi offensive, and 200,000 fled into Iran, of whom 40,000 were forcibly returned...

...Among thesegovernments, though, the right to kill their own citizens has certain support...

...The word was not mentioned once in President George Bush's conquering hero speech to a joint session of Congress on March 8. One could understand the omission...

...what isn't escaping is heavy tanks...

...This was the actual situation on the ground: Night and cloud cover had brought a pause in a titanic 16-hour tank battle—described as the biggest since World War II—on the plains west of Iraq'sport city of Basra...

...Egypt and France, for example, thought it was too peremptory and foreshadowed an unlimited invasion of Iraq...

...An anonymous White House official told the New York Times that there seemed to be no credible alternative to the Baath Party...

...But in the end it could not avoid returning to deal with the catastrophic problem of the Kurdish refugees...

...Too Much to Bear On February 15, President Bush had said that he was hoping "the military and the people" of Iraq would overthrow Saddam Hussein...

...Iraq denounced, but accepted, the Security Council's stiff conditions for a permanent cease-fire: giving up weapons of mass destruction, and promising to pay reparations and respect Kuwait's border...

...Takriti, from Saddam's hometown, was an early associate of his in the Baath Party's internal secret police before the party seized power in 1968...

...The resolution won just 10 votes—one more than the necessary minimum...

...We want our autonomy...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Why Saddam Still Rules The New Order in the Middle East seemed off to a most unpromising start after the victory over Iraq in the six-week air war plus the 100-hour ground war...

...But, "forever" is too long to wait to examine why Saddam Hussein, stripped of the power to threaten his neighbors, was left with enough to commit genocide against his own people...

...Some 700 Iraqi tanks, as well as other military vehicles, were spared, and subsequently they were deployed to mow down the Shiite rebels...

...On February 27, all of Kuwait was cleared of Iraqi forces, and the President felt obliged to make good on his promise...

...In a blitz of telephone calls seeking to overcome these reservations, the President pleaded that conquering Iraq was not his purpose and that the fighting would stop as soon as Kuwait was liberated—in accordance with the UN mandate...

...He said in several ways that if the military could overthrow Saddam, there could be a new beginning with Iraq...

...The Middle East is not Europe, where supporting democracy means backing the good guys, like Poland's Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel, against the Communist bad guys...

...He had already decided that the ground war would start Saturday evening (American time...

...By early April, as he discoursed on golf courses in Florida and California, the President made it clear that he hadn't really meant the "people" part...

...So, what the Bush Administration really hoped for was not a revolution, but a coup—a new order that would be the old order, led by a different military figure, a sort of Saddam Hussein with a human face...

...Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe voted against the resolution...

...But he ran into trouble selling the ultimatum to the Soviet Union and to some of the coalition allies...

...opponents of the reinstated Sabah family in Kuwait...

...Standing militarily astride a region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, the United States found old obstacles to a durable peace still intractable and ne w ones appearing...

...At the cost of thousands of Iraqi lives, the life style of Kuwait had been defended...

...We are an ancient people...

...General Barzani subsequently came to the United States as aguest of theCIA, was treated for cancer and died in McLean, Virginia in March 1979...

...First and Third Armored Divisions were poised to resume the assault—artillery firing had already begun—when the hold-fire order came...

...General Barzani wrote Kissinger in anguish on March 10,1975: "Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone...

...At dawn the U.S...

...In an interview with New York Times columnist William Safire a few months before his death, Barzani said, "We do not want to be anybody's pawns...

...General Schwarzkopf said halting the hostilities was a decision "historians are going to second-guess forever...

...Present during the interview was the General's young son, Massoud...