In My Time - Dick Cheney [119]
In the south, Saddam, using his helicopters, began a brutal crackdown on the Shia. At one point I learned that more than ten thousand refugees had fled to the part of Iraq where the U.S. Army was still in control and were pleading with our soldiers to take them with them. Schwarzkopf, I was told, had given orders that our forces should have nothing to do with the refugees. I sent word to Scowcroft’s deputy, Bob Gates, that we couldn’t leave Iraq until some honorable arrangement was made for these people. The Saudis agreed to set up a refugee camp.
A year and a half later we established a no-fly zone in southern Iraq, but Saddam continued his oppression of the Shia with ground forces. He ordered the draining of the marshes near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, displacing thousands of the predominantly Shiite Marsh Arabs. Our failure to do more to protect the Shia from Saddam contributed to a sense of betrayal and suspicion that affected our relationships twelve years later when America was confronting Saddam once again.
Our reaction to the Shia uprising was guided in part by a mistaken perception about the Iraqi Shiites—one that would persist until we were confronting Saddam again in 2003. Many in the U.S. government, and in the Department of State in particular, viewed the Iraqi Shia as natural allies of Iran—also a predominantly Shiite country. Iranians are Persian and Iraqis are Arab, but the State Department view held that sectarian ties among Shiite Muslims were stronger than cultural ties among Arabs. This notion overlooked the fact that thousands of Iraqi Shiites had fought Iran for eight years in the Iran-Iraq War. It also, I believe, misjudged the divide between Arabs and Persians. However, the fact that Iran began expressing overt support for the uprisings in 1991 seemed to confirm the State Department’s view of the situation and highlighted the complexity of the choices we faced.
At the time we had accomplished a tremendous military victory and the impetus was to be good for our word. We’d told our Arab allies, the Saudis in particular, that we’d bring enough forces to liberate Kuwait and that we’d leave when we were done, that we were not interested in becoming an occupying power or leaving our combat forces in the desert for the long term. In addition, neither the United Nations nor the U.S. Congress had signed on for anything beyond the liberation of Kuwait. Now that our mission was done, we would begin to bring our troops home.
Twelve years later, when we did go all the way to Baghdad, toppled Saddam, and liberated Iraq, the world looked very different. We had suffered a mass casualty attack on the U.S. homeland. We worried that Saddam was a dangerous nexus between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction capability. We had attempted for twelve years, with sixteen UN Security Council resolutions and international sanctions, to contain the threat he posed. By 2003 that sanctions regime was crumbling, Saddam had corrupted the UN’s oil-for-food program to buy prohibited materials and enrich himself, and he was biding his time planning, as soon as he could, to reconstitute programs that had been halted or slowed in the aftermath of Desert Storm. The calculation about the nature of the direct threat Saddam posed to America and the military action required to defend against that threat was very different in 2003.
But those decisions were many years ahead of us. No one on President George H. W. Bush’s national security team was arguing in 1991 that we should continue on to Baghdad to oust Saddam. And though there were arguably some misjudgments at the end of the war, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that they fundamentally altered the strategic landscape.
AS OUR TROOPS RETURNED