Saddam's Silent Partner
by Jeremy Carlos Foster

One of Saddam Hussein's more ghastly crimes against humanity — of which he will never see a trial for — was his brutal suppression of the '91 Iraqi uprising against his Baathist dictatorship. Though it's mostly forgotten by the public at large, it's a widely known fact that the first Bush Administration incited the rebellion only to stand by while an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, mostly Shiites and Kurds, were slaughtered and millions of others fled into neighboring Turkey and Iran.

So while few of us are displeased that the perpetrator of this crime has been executed, his crime and the US role in that crime should warrant a humbling revisit of history.

This disastrous geopolitical blunder on the part of the US is not only a sufficient indictment of George Bush Sr. for international crimes, but also goes far in explaining why Shiite fundamentalism is rampant in Iraq today, and why garnering trust among Iraqis is an essential ingredient for success in Iraq.

The fateful call was heard through Voice of America on February 15, 1991, when former president George H.W. Bush told "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside..."

Taking Bush's announcement as a pledge for military support, Shiites almost immediately staged revolts that began in the Shiite-dominated cities of Basra and Nasiriyah and quickly spread across southern Iraq; soon after another rebellion exploded in the Kurdish north.

The US not only stood by while Saddam's regime bombed Shiite towns, sacred Shiite shrines, and slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis in the streets, but allowed the Baathists to violate the cease-fire agreement by using helicopter gunships to squash the rebellion.

Bush Sr.'s pathetic excuse, which came three years too late, was that he had not misled anyone and had made it clear to the Iraqis that the US had no intentions of helping the rebelling Iraqis overthrow Saddam's regime.

Did the former head of the CIA and then-president really think Iraqis "taking matters into their own hands" without US military support would succeed against a weakened but significantly stronger and better equipped Baathist army? Was it not anticipated that Saddam would likely "prevail because of the rebels' lack of organization and leadership," as was later acknowledged by Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joints Chiefs of Staff at the time, thereby making a call for revolt with no intention of backing it dangerously irresponsible?

A June 1992 Human Rights Watch report suggested the doubletalk coming out of Bush Sr. "may have reflected a lack of sufficient concern for the consequences of the call to rebel; it may have been due to miscalculation; or it may be attributable to a preoccupation with political considerations unrelated to the well-being of the residents of Iraq."

None of these possibilities are mutually exclusive. To put it another way, it is possible that the first Bush Administration incited the revolt without due concern for the welfare of the Iraqis. That concern should have been illustrated by some reluctance over the grave consequences of inciting a bloody rebellion. As it was, Bush Sr. betrayed the Iraqis by allowing — if not supporting — the subsequent slaughter. The decision cost thousands of lives on the ground, but averted the possibility of an Iran-friendly Shiite theocracy in Iraq.

You don't have to search far into the American justice system to find a law whose logic could easily be applied to Bush Sr.'s mistake, namely manslaughter by gross negligence. If I'm driving recklessly and fatally slam into someone, the prosecutor need not prove malice to have me convicted and thrown in jail. Similarly, if I'm an American president and my reckless foreign policy results in the loss of thousands of innocent lives, I should be held accountable. Of course, I'm enough of a "realist" to not demand the incarceration of a former president. What I am calling for is that everyone, including him, accept that he deserves much of the responsibility for what happened then and in subsequent years as a result.

It seemed ironic that when the Iraq Study Group was congressionally commissioned to find a way to remedy the current Iraq debacle, some in the media and elsewhere were speaking of Bush Sr. as the wise father who swept in — by way of John Baker, his former secretary of state — to save the day. The truth is, Bush Sr. is directly responsible for much of the problem his son inherited in the current Iraq venture.

Because while it is easy for those who weren't directly affected to shrug off Bush Sr.'s crime as mere carelessness, many Iraqi Shiites and Kurds took it as a sign of malice; and within more than a decade of subsequent persecution, enough resentment against the Americans had fomented to create an increasingly fundamentalist pool of Shiites who, while benefiting from the 2003 overthrow of Saddam, still did not trust the motives of the US-led forces.

Juan Cole, professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, made this case convincingly when he wrote in his report, "How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq," that several radical clerics arose among the Shiite population after the failed revolution, including Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who "increasingly defied Saddam" by "organizing poor Shiites into a puritanical form of religion."

Muhammad al-Sadr was later assassinated in 1999 and in a sense the baton was handed to his son, Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric who quickly ascended from underling to poster boy for Shiite radicalism in Iraq. As a testament to his influence, he is supported by 67 percent of Iraqis, according to a 2004 US-sponsored poll, and commands the loyalty of the Mahdi Army, which, since 2004, became more than a thorn in the side of the US when it violently confronted coalition forces after al-Sadr's newspaper was banned and attempts were made to arrest him. Sadr, who desires an Islamic theocracy similar to that of Iran, is now one of the most onerous obstacles to achieving a unified government in Iraq, as we were reminded of recently when a leaked video showed guards taunting Saddam and invoking the name "Muqtada" before the former Iraqi was executed by hanging.

If there is anything fruitful to be learned from Bush Sr.'s "mistake," it is that getting Iraqis to trust US motives and reliability is tantamount to success.

Recently, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick W. Kagan, military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, two of many neoconservative thinkers who supported the war but not its execution, have finally gotten the ear of the Bush Administration with suggestions that are a step in that direction. They have advocated a new counterinsurgency plan that will focus less on killing Iraqis and more on earning their trust by taking US soldiers out of large bases, which are often isolated from the Iraqi communities, and spreading them across Iraq at small outposts in troubled communities.

But that policy has to be coupled with something more than cold community policing. Soldiers should also be allowed to interact with Iraqis as a way of legitimizing that trust. Convincing the Iraqis that our current occupation is humanitarian (implicit in that is not allowing one party to kill off another) has to be accomplished with something more than lip service. It has to be something tangible.

E-mail Jeremy Foster at jcarlosfoster at gmail dot com.