Bush Ignores Separatists in Favor of an Intact Iraq Without Saddam

By Kurt Holden

"The worst nightmare the region faces is the Lebanonization of Iraq, as Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis complete the devastation of seven months of sanctions and six weeks of a punishing war."—Christine Helms, The New York Times, March 30, 1991

Wars always have unpredictable consequences. For US President George Bush, however, only one thing hasn't gone according to the script of Desert Shield-Desert Storm. After suffering a devastating military defeat, Iraqi President Saddam Hussain was supposed to disappear.

Until he does, the Bush administration will be criticized for having a war plan but not a peace plan, and will be under pressure to intervene on the side of whatever rebel factions seem, from day to day, to have the upper hand in Iraq.

In fact, however, Bush said early that the US did not want to see Iraq "dismembered. " The revelation by Desert Storm commander H. Norman Schwarzkopf that the president ordered him to halt the rout of the Iraqi army ahead of schedule to save lives and leave an escape route for defeated Iraqi soldiers confirms it.

The overall US strategy for stability in the Gulf depends upon maintaining intact all three existing regional powers: Iran, with its population of 55 million, Iraq, with 18 million, and Saudi Arabia, with 8 million.

It proved itself when Iran began to win the eight-year war with Iraq. Saudi Arabia, along with its Gulf Cooperation Council neighbors with another 4 million inhabitants, and with strong political commitments from the US, weighed in with almost unlimited financial aid to Iraq. Thanks to US protection of the tankers that took GCC oil to world markets, the combined weight of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and its neighbors turned the war into a stalemate.

Bush, like Reagan before him, still was pursuing the three-nation strategy when Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait caught the US and the Arab world by surprise. The strategy worked again, however, as the US came to the defense of the GCC countries, and Iran, while criticizing Western intervention, nevertheless fell into line with the UN embargo on Iraq and made Iraq's defeat, either by sanctions or military power, inevitable.

Bush can properly be criticized for overkill in bombing Iraq "into a pre-industrial stage," in the words of one UN report. The American people won't fault him for this, however. His military planners reduced allied battle deaths to fewer than 100, while subduing an army of half a million Iraqis, liberating Kuwait, and perhaps saving Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries from a similar attack.

There are political quagmires waiting to engulf any Western occupiers of Baghdad.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration already is being subjected to a din of media criticism for not taking further military action to "liberate Iraq" from the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussain. Setting Iraq on the right track, however, is not just a matter of driving US tanks up 150 miles of yellow brick road to the Iraqi capital. There are political quagmires waiting to engulf any Western occupiers of Baghdad.

Of Iraq's 18 million people, nearly 10 million are Shi'i Arabs, more than 3.5 million are Sunni Kurds, another half million are Christians, and the remaining 4 million are Sunni Arabs. The Christians include Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Armenians.

Sunni Arabs have run things politically since the country became an Arab monarchy in 1921 and turned into an Arab republic in 1958, just as they did earlier when present day Iraq consisted of three provinces of the Ottoman Empire of the Sunni Muslim Turks. Although the ruling Ba'ath party is identified in Western minds with the Sunnis, in fact there also are Shi'i and Christian Ba'athists.

There also are Kurdish collaborators with Saddam Hussain's Ba'athist government. They have done much of the fighting against Kurdish separatists.

There are other political parties, such as the Arab nationalists and the communists, whose membership also include adherents of both Islamic sects and the Christian communities. The situation is different, however, with the Kurdish and Shi'i separatists presently in revolt.

There are Sunni, Shi'i and Christian Kurds, but none of the 80 percent of the Iraqis who are Arabs are represented in any of the contending Kurdish parties.

Similarly, although 55 percent of the Iraqis are Shi'i Arabs, and the Shi'i rebelling against Saddam Hussain are split into at least three political parties, they have no allies among the Sunni Arabs or the Kurds. Instead, probably a majority of the soldiers fighting on behalf of Saddam Hussain against Shi'i separatists also are Shi'i.

Some of the Shi'i rebelling against Saddam Hussain would set up a sectarian Islamic Revolutionary Republic closely allied with Iran. Others would set up a Shi'i Arab Republic, but keep Iran at a distance. But Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Christians would be excluded from whatever government either Shi'i separatist faction set up, which means the south would split away from the center and the north. That is why there are Shi'i soldiers fighting both kinds of separatists to preserve the secular state that Iraq has become and would remain under Ba'athist, Nationalist or Communist tutelage.

This is the background to the Bush administration's reluctance to intervene in Iraqi domestic politics any further, perhaps, than leveling the playing field, by restricting the use of combat aircraft. Iraqi rulers traditionally have relied upon a strong (and ethnically and religiously diverse) military to hold together the varied population, usually in the shadow of a real or imagined outside enemy.

Unification Against the US?

If US troops occupied Baghdad, they might set things in order for a while. Very likely, however, they would eventually find they had unified Iraq's diverse population against whatever rulers emerged under US tutelage, and against US occupation itself.

Such US action also would unify popular opinion in most Arab and Islamic nations against the Western occupation of an Arab and Islamic state.

So would dismemberment of Iraq. If just one of the several competing Iraqi Kurdish leaders sought to outbid the others by calling for Kurdish independence instead of autonomy, the Turkish army would probably occupy all of Iraq's Kurdish areas within a week.

Since the area includes a Turkish-speaking minority and valuable oil fields, which Turkey lacks, it might tempt the Turks to stay. In that case, Shi'i Iran, although it is a non-Arab state, would almost certainly move to the assistance of its Arab Shi'i co-religionists in Southern Iraq, which happens to be where most of the rest of Iraq's oil fields are located.

Second only to Saudi Arabia, Arab Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the Gulf. Loss of those oil fields to non-Arab Turkey and non-Arab Iran would be regarded by 20 other Arab states as an even greater catastrophe than the loss of Arab Palestine to Israel—a wound that festers dangerously for the US 43 years later.

The Arab states would, correctly, blame the United States for the loss of Iraqi oil fields. The first to feel the consequences, however, would be our Arab allies—Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries.

You get the picture, and so does President Bush. He feels certain that Saddam Hussain will go, whether in the next few days or the next few months. Painful as it is to watch the Arab tyrant slaughter potential enemies among Iraq's people, eventually his opponents will prevail. And, if Iraq's army, drawn from all sectors of the population, liberates the country by itself, Iraq's new leaders will be able to mobilize the entire population to work with the outside world to rebuild their country into a force for peace and stability, not aggression and revenge.

Whose Advice?

What kind of people, then, are advising the Bush administration to exceed its stated goals, its mandate from Congress, its mandate from its coalition allies, and its mandate from the United Nations and impose a made in America" government on Iraq?

One is A.M. Rosenthal, former managing editor and now columnist for The New York Times, who venomously proclaimed in his newspaper's March 27 edition:

"Washington has now decided to let Saddam Hussein slaughter Iraqi rebels with the helicopters and tanks we allowed him to keep after his defeat ... Can you keep from vomiting when you read stories about the tyrant's killers hanging, butchering, raping, descending on their victims in helicopters we could deny them with an order?. . . "

If, by the time this magazine reaches its readers, the US has done just that, we can be certain to hear promptly from Mr. Rosenthal what the US should do next.

William Safire, writing in 7he New York Times of March 28, already has formulated his proposal, which starts with a dubious accusation:

"The only outcome Mr. Bush—and his Saudi and Syrian advisers—will accept is a military dictator of the Sunni elite not named Saddam. To this inglorious end, we are ready to turn our face away from the wholesale slaughter of innocents, and to abandon the last best hope of the beginning of freedom in Iraq ... We should dispatch a high-level emissary to [second generation Kurdish rebel leader] Massoud Barzani. We should send a message to the Iraqi high command in Baghdad: Depose Saddam Hussein in 48 hours and begin negotiations with the Kurdish rebels—or else."

Writing March 29th in The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer proceeds to the rationale underlying such recommendations:

"We can influence the outcome if we want ... The fear is that if the Ba'ath, which has brutally held the country together, is defeated, Iraq might fracture into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite states. The breakup of Iraq into three parts may not be a happy outcome, but it is far happier than Saddam terrorizing Iraq and loose in the region. "

It's obvious to readers of this magazine where Rosenthal, Safire, and Krauthammer, all notorious Israel firsters whose personal journalistic lines follow Yitzhak Shamir's political line, are going. In fact, like Shamir's Likud government, they want Iraq to break up into three ethnic-confessional states, squabbling with each other over boundaries, and involving the Turks, Iranians, Arabs, and, yes, Americans in a series of new military adventures.

It is the same policy they, and Israel, followed, unsuccessfully, to break Lebanon into Maronite Christian and Shi'i Muslim confessional states. It is the same Israeli policy that tried to keep the Iran-Iraq war going forever, paralyzing the Arabs while Israel built Jewish settlements to "create facts " in the occupied territories instead of trading them for peace.

Although few would object to the recommendations of these journalists about the helicopters, their advice about the Kurds would be deadly to the Kurds themselves. In fact, it is the Israeli obsession with breaking up Iraq that has brought so much grief to Iraq's Kurds. In the 1960s, Israel and Iran financed a Kurdish rebellion that, after heavy losses, in 1969 brought Iraqi Kurds more autonomy than Kurds have ever been granted by Turkey, Iran, Syria or the Soviet Union.

As Iraqi observance of the agreement weakened, however, Israel and Iran, this time in conjunction with the CIA while Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, instigated another Kurdish revolt in 1974. To end it, Saddam Hussain foolishly signed away to Iran Iraq's rights to its only route to the sea, the Shatt-Al-Arab. Iran withdrew its support from the Kurdish rebels and hundreds were killed.

The Iraq-Iran agreement, in turn, set in motion the train of events that led first to the Iran-Iraq war and, eventually, to Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait, and US involvement in its liberation.

Before, during and after the Iraq-Iran war, moreover, Iraq relocated tens of thousands of Kurds, bulldozed their villages, and killed any Kurds who got in the way. That's what Israeli and Iranian instigation of Kurdish revolts has done for Iraqi Kurds in the past, and what it can do to them again.

There are some 20 million Kurds in five countries in the Middle East. Fewer than 4 million live in Iraq. There is no chance that four powerful neighboring countries with restive Kurdish minorities will let Iraqi Kurds achieve independence. If there is ever to be an independent Kurdistan, it will be created by voluntary international cooperation in a more peaceful era and a more stable Middle East.

Separatist Kurdish revolts are prescriptions for massacre. The Israeli Mossad agents who incite these revolts in Iraq, however, don't care. Their only interest is to buy more time for "Greater Israel. " Their lack of concern for Kurdish best interests mirrors the lack of concern among their US journalistic supporters for American best interests. These American Likudniks, too, are only interested in buying time for "Greater Israel."

Kurt Holden, a retired educational film maker from Southern California, divides his time between the Middle East and the United States.