We discussed this ad nauseum last fall, and I believe no one then came up with any proof GB senior incited any riots. Did the CIA hope that would happen, Yes. Did GW senior promise any help, not sure; and I bet you can't prove it either.
"Baghdad Rules"
by William Norman Grigg
In the CIA’s lexicon, they are called the "Budapest Rules" — the operational guidelines that permit covert operations to "destabilize" totalitarian regimes as long as no explicit assurance of active U.S. support is given to opposition groups. The term derives from the abortive 1956 anti-communist uprising in Hungary, which was encouraged by the Eisenhower Administration — and which was pitilessly crushed by the Soviets after Eisenhower pointedly announced that the U.S. wouldn’t interfere. The U.S. foreign policy establishment’s treatment of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein should inspire a new coinage — the "Baghdad Rules," under which the CIA and the State Department actively assist a tyrant to identify and liquidate his domestic rivals while ostensibly opposing him.
The betrayal of Saddam’s domestic opposition by its supposed allies in the U.S. government began with a speech by President George Bush delivered on February 15, 1991, while the air campaign in the Gulf War was still raging. In remarks that were translated into Arabic and broadcast into Iraq by the CIA, Mr. Bush urged "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step down." This invitation was taken at face value by Saddam’s Shi’ite Muslim opposition in southern Iraq, and by his Kurdish opposition in the north. By March 1991, 14 of 18 Iraqi provinces were in open revolt — and winning. General Wafik Samarii, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, told ABC News that "the uprising almost succeeded.... At the very end, we had only two days of Kalashnikov bullets left over in the warehouses of the Iraqi army." Saddam was rescued by what seemed an unlikely ally — the U.S. government.
Crushing the Kurds
For reasons that were never adequately explained, Saddam’s military was permitted to keep its fleet of helicopter gunships after the Gulf War ceasefire. This gave his military a decisive advantage when the Iraqi government’s counter-offensive against the rebels began on March 28th. Two days before Saddam mustered his forces to put down the revolt, U.S. presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater pointedly declared that "it is good for the stability of the region that [Iraq] maintain its territorial integrity" — a statement that precluded support for independence-minded Kurds and Shi’ites. Within a week, the anti-Saddam rebellion incited by Washington had been crushed.
"The exact details of White House discussions about the uprisings are not known," observes intelligence analyst Mark Perry in his book Eclipse, "but circumstantial evidence indicates that the [Bush] Administration purposely decided to allow Hussein to slaughter his opponents in the south. The murderous response to the Shi’ite uprisings was fine-tuned: the White House allowed Hussein free rein in southern Iraq, drawing the line at his use of chemical weapons and fixed-wing aircraft. What protests there were in the United States against this policy were muted by the celebration of the overwhelming American victory."
In an interview televised by ABC News, Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi charged that U.S. officials "deflected the uprising and they permitted armed helicopters to fly and kill people and shoot them. They were the most significant factor in the suppression of the uprising. They made it possible for Saddam to regroup his forces and launch a devastating counterattack with massive firepower on the people."
Why would the U.S. government allow Saddam — a tyrant supposedly of a magnitude comparable to Hitler — to regroup and retrench? Because, as a CIA deputy later explained, U.S. policy at the end of the Gulf War was "to get rid of Saddam Hussein, not his regime." Speaking of the post-war anti-Saddam upheaval, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft told ABC News, "I frankly wished it hadn’t happened." Nor was this sentiment confined to Scowcroft, as the Bush Administration’s treatment of Iraqi opposition leader Jalal Talbani illustrates.
Shortly after the end of the Gulf War, Talbani visited Washington, DC to solicit help from the Bush Administration. When Peter Galbraith, who at the time was staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attempted to arrange a meeting between Talbani and White House officials, he was (in Galbraith’s words) "angrily rebuffed." Why was Talbani spurned? ABC News anchor Peter Jennings points out that "until the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States, and American officials were not allowed to talk to his enemies. Somehow the rule had not been changed."
The U.S. foreign policy establishment was determined to leave Saddam in charge of Iraq. "We recognized that the seemingly attractive goal of getting rid of Saddam would not solve our problems or even necessarily serve our interests," Scowcroft recalled in a 1996 Newsweek op-ed column. "So we pursued the kind of inelegant, messy alternative that is all too often the only one available in the real world" — that is, "containing" Saddam’s foreign adventurism while simultaneously controlling his domestic opposition. |
