TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041591/0415003.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13KB | 249 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

The Course of Conscience


America and its allies confront a new dilemma: how to oppose
military intervention but still take responsibility for the
victims when the Saddams of the world run amuck

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Dan Goodgame and Christopher
Ogden/Washington and William Mader/London


    "The Kurds don't need talk, they need practical action. It
should not be beyond the wit of man to get planes there with
tents, food and warm blankets. It is not a question of standing
on legal niceties. We should go now."

    -- Margaret Thatcher, April 3, 1991


    As she did so often during her years at 10 Downing Street,
Margaret Thatcher cut to the heart of a policy question. A fiery
debate over whether the U.S. and its allies should have helped
Kurdish and Shi`ite rebels topple Saddam Hussein raged in Europe
as well as America. But as far as current policy goes, the
wrangling is meaningless because the fighting is effectively
over. Right or wrong, the decision was made not to get involved
in an Iraqi civil war. Saddam has smashed the revolts; he will
stay in power at least temporarily -- and for the moment that
pretty much is that.

    But what does demand an immediate answer is what the U.S.
and its friends will do to prevent more deaths among refugees
from the failed rebellions and Saddam's bloody vengeance. They
number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and their
plight has drawn all the passion of hindsight debate. But the
argument is critical -- especially since the early response of
Washington was pitifully inadequate.

    If Saddam is rightfully the target of public fury and
condemnation for his brutal suppression of the rebels, George
Bush has borne the brunt of the blame for Western inaction. The
President not only failed to explain clearly why the U.S. was
unwilling to support the insurgents, but he seemed to show no
mercy when their rebellion turned into a rout. Declared
Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory: "The sight of those
wretched souls streaming into Turkey . . . as Bush abandons them
on the 18th hole of a Florida golf course, makes you wonder if
in this case it is peace, rather than war, that is hell."

    Others did step in. France proposed an amendment to a
resolution passed last week by the U.N. Security Council, making
an end to Saddam's oppression of his own people another of the
conditions that Baghdad must meet to bring a formal cease-fire
into effect. When the amendment failed to attract a majority,
Paris substituted a resolution condemning Iraq's repression of
rebel supporters that did pass, but it did not specify any
measures to be taken if Baghdad refused to stop. Neither the
international community nor the Kurds put much faith in Saddam's
announced amnesty.


    French President Francois Mitterrand dispatched his
Secretary of State for Humanitarian Action, Bernard Kouchner,
to northern Iraq to distribute two planeloads of relief
supplies. Asked what would happen if Baghdad objected to
Kouchner's dropping in uninvited, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas
replied, "Although one must abide by international obligations,
sometimes it is necessary to violate international law."

    Britain pledged $40 million to help the refugees. After
Thatcher phoned Primer Minister John Major and gave him an
earful, London quickly sent three planeloads of tents and
blankets for distribution among Kurdish refugees in Turkey and
across the border in Iraq. Germany planned to send four planes
with supplies, and France, two planes.

    But where was Bush? The answer: bonefishing in Florida.
The argument over military intervention aside, there was
nothing to stop Washington from dispatching planeloads of
humanitarian aid to the borders. The U.S. surely had stockpiles
of food, tents and medicine at hand in southern Iraq, not to
mention plenty of transport. In January it gave a
drop-in-the-ocean $1 million to the Red Cross and Red Crescent
to study setting up refugee camps in southern Iraq when U.S.
forces leave. That was about it.

    By Friday, it finally dawned even on the White House that
the U.S. had a moral responsibility to do much more -- and
quickly. From Newport Beach, Calif., en route to Los Angeles to
help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the USO, Bush ordered
American planes to air-drop food, blankets, clothing and other
relief supplies to refugees suffering in the border mountains.
He promised up to $10 million in emergency aid to the refugees.
And he called for a major international effort to keep the Kurds
from starving and dying while someone figures out what to do
with them.

    Washington will also confer about relief efforts with
Ankara, which Secretary of State James Baker visited last
weekend. But if the U.S. expects Turkey to take in thousands of
refugees, it must deliver enough aid to enable the Turks to care
for them. So far, the U.S. has not shown the generosity in
adversity on which it prides itself -- nothing, for example,
like the massive relief dispatched to Armenia when a 1988
earthquake decimated the region.

    In this case, the U.S. bears a much greater
responsibility, if only because it went to considerable lengths
to urge the rebels to rise up against Saddam. Washington could
meet that responsibility by distributing aid directly to Kurdish
refugees in northern Iraq and by treating any objections from
Saddam with the same contempt voiced by the French. It could
send similar aid to refugees reaching Iran. Such cooperation in
concert with a country that has been hostile to the U.S. for
more than a decade might even help to draw Ayatullah Khomeini's
more moderate successors back into the world community.

    Still, no amount of humanitarian aid to the refugees is
likely to still the retrospective debate over whether the U.S.
and its allies should have extended military support to the
rebels to keep them from becoming refugees. Critics such as
Democratic Senator Thomas Daschle of South Dakota and columnist
William Safire charge that the U.S. made a terrible mistake by
not helping the Kurds and Shi`ites. The argument is usually
couched in moral terms: having repeatedly called on Iraqis to
overthrow Saddam, the U.S. is disgracing itself by standing idly
by while those who heeded its word are slaughtered. New York
Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal bitterly asked Bush: "Why do you
sully your name, and our country's, by deliberately allowing
Saddam Hussein to massacre the people you urged to rise against
him?"

    But as a practical matter, could the U.S. have intervened
effectively without committing itself to a march on Baghdad and
a lengthy occupation of the whole country? The critics mostly
say they would not have favored that course. But many insist the
U.S. would have needed only to shoot down Saddam's helicopter
gunships, as Bush once threatened to do. Deprived of air power,
argued the critics, Saddam would have been toppled by the rebels
or at least forced to come to terms with them.

    Bush aides respond that this would only have prolonged the
agony. "Going after the helicopters would have been a symbolic
gesture, not a serious way to change the outcome of the
fighting," said an Administration official. The best U.S.
intelligence estimates, he asserted, indicated that "Saddam
could have put down the insurgencies even without helicopters
by using his armor and artillery. If we were really going to
help the rebels, we would have had to target tanks and
artillery. That would have turned very quickly into full-scale
fighting." And then to extricate its own troops the U.S. would
have become involved in deciding who should govern Iraq, a
treacherous choice in the best of times. Organizing a government
that could keep the country together among rival Kurds, Shi`ites
and Sunni Muslims would have presented as formidable a task as
all those doomed attempts, starting in 1963 and continuing for
a decade or so, to devise a Vietnamese government that could win
popular support.

    Nor, say Administration officials, would further fighting
have attracted support abroad or at home. No allies urged the
U.S. to move in, and most of the Arab coalition members remain
anxious to get U.S. troops out. Bush aides charge that many of
the critics either were indulging in moralistic posturing or
were just eager to knock the President. "Can you imagine how we
would be pounded if we were `bogged down' in an `inconclusive
civil war' in Iraq?" asks one official.

    Which does not take Bush off the hook. He utterly failed
to discern the line between military intervention and
humanitarian aid. He could have justified rejecting the first
without forgoing the second. His unconscionable silence
reflected a recurring problem of his foreign policy. The White
House apparently believes the public will not understand
decisions taken for hard-boiled reasons of national interest;
it thinks those reasons must be given a pious cloak. The U.S.
launched the gulf war in part to safeguard oil supplies, in part
to protect allies and punish a naked act of aggression -- all
of which should have been moral enough. But Bush in addition
preached a crusade against a demonized butcher of Baghdad, as
if Washington would settle for nothing short of Saddam's
departure or demise. That no doubt encouraged Iraqi rebels to
expect help the U.S. was unwilling to supply -- and led to
today's recriminations. It also makes it hard to explain to
Americans that while the President has not given up hope that
Saddam will be overthrown by his own military, it may not
happen.

    The problem may be eased by the Security Council's
adoption last Wednesday of a resolution setting out the terms
for a permanent cease-fire. As expected, the measure requires
Iraq to destroy its chemical and biological weapons and
ballistic missiles with a range of more than 93 miles, set aside
a portion of oil revenues to pay claims arising from its
invasion of Kuwait, and swear to respect its 1963 border with
that country. On Saturday, Baghdad formally accepted in a
23-page letter to the U.N. that also complained the resolution
was harsh and unjust. But, said Saadi Mahdi Saleh, speaker of
Iraq's parliament, "we have no alternative but to accept." A
U.N. observer force will move into the border areas, allowing
the U.S. and allied troops occupying southern Iraq to head home.
The Saddam regime, if it survives at all, will be too weakened
to threaten its neighbors for a long time to come.

    But another question that looms ever larger remains
unsettled: when, and under what conditions, is intervention in
a country's internal affairs justified? The principle of
noninterference is a cherished one, in theory if not always in
practice. But moralists have argued that the global community
must do something when the Saddams of the world rampage through
their own countries. The U.N. cease-fire resolution addresses
what has always been considered internal matters, notably by
requiring unilateral disarmament. The condemnation of Saddam's
repression of the Kurds takes the international body even
further in that direction -- however ineffectively.

    Neither act, however, spells out any new principles for
deciding exactly when intervention is justified. Threats to
world stability may come increasingly from eruptions in one
nation that send floods of refugees across borders and upset a
regional or international balance of power. The next such
explosion might come in Yugoslavia; further -- but perhaps not
much further -- down the road looms the specter of a bloody
dissolution of the Soviet Union.

    Unhappily, any attempt to spell out such guidelines seems
doomed to failure. The old no-intervention-ever principle is
immoral; besides, countries disregard it whenever it suits their
interest or when they think they can get away with it. Any
attempt to codify principles that the U.N. could make a pass at
enforcing would meet insuperable resistance from nations with
festering internal disputes. So decisions to intervene will
continue to be made on a case-by-case basis and, like the U.S.
deter mination not to aid the anti-Saddam reb els, usually for
reasons of realpolitik. That is a messy and unsatisfying answer
to a pressing question. But then, that is the way wars usually
end.