The Big Lie

MORE THAN one hundred thousand people dead. A nation without water, sewage, power: the United Nations says the scene is "near apocalyptic," "the pre-industrial age." Three million refugees "will die in vast numbers without aid," the headline says. "Foreigners" expelled, tortured, or killed and gold faucets installed in liberated Kuwait. Hussein still in power.

I have seen the new world order and it sucks. Maybe the war was necessary. Maybe we did need to destroy much of Iraq's military and free Kuwait by force. But given President Bush's hideous betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, only the willfully ignorant can trust anything this man says about the Middle East.

BEFORE THE WAR, Bush called on the Iraqi people "to take matters into their own hands" and force Hussein "to step aside." According to a report in The New York Times, the CIA--under orders from Bush--"probably directly counseled" opposition groups to rebel throughout the war. Shortly after the liberation of Kuwait and the slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops--the end of our war, if not theirs--Bush promised the Kurds and Shiites that he would use American air power to ground Iraqi helicopters. He lied. Having told two peoples to rise up against their oppressor when it suited one set of his purposes, Bush left them to die when it suited another.

We are not there to intervene, Bush tells reporters on a golf course. If the worry is about the niceties of international law, then the United States has already violated them by occupying 15 percent of Iraq.

We don't want to get involved in Iraq's internal affairs. Never mind that the United States has supported scores of "internal" rebellions across the Third World. The point is that we have also supported one in Iraq. Formally and practically, the United States has "intervened" in the "internal affairs" of Iraq.

By destroying much of the Iraqi military and telling prospective rebels that we would help them, the United States caused a revolt. By leaving just enough of Iraq's military intact and abandoning the rebels, the United States caused the revolt to fail. Add these deaths to the continually escalating body count from the Gulf War.

We want to avoid the Lebanonization of Iraq. Many experts feared the fragmentation of Iraq into three warring states, causing instability and further war in the region. But nobody gave the opposition a chance.

On March 23, Professor Roy Mottahedeh, no raving radical, wrote that democracy "seems nearer realization than ever because a genuine alliance between the Shiites and Kurds (and 15 other groups) that has been forming for a year or so has begun to find sympathy among alienated elements in the ruling Baath party."

Sunni Muslims, for example in Basra, were joining in the rebellions against Hussein. As Arabs with historic enmity to Persians, the Iraqi Shiites would not have embraced Iran's theocracy. In any case, they deserve the same chance to escape slaughter which the American liberation gave many Kuwaitis. Their lack of oil, an embassy in Washington, and Saudi support does not make their deaths more palatable.

AT LEAST not for them. The Bush Administration did not know or care what Henry Kissinger's "surgical and progressive destruction of Iraq's military assets" would really mean for the Iraqi people. With reports from the U.N. and refugee camps, Bush now knows. He still does not care.

If we extend the Nazi analogy which Bush so exulted in: America has freed Czechoslovakia only to leave Hitler to exterminate the German Jews. We no longer hear about the Nasser-Hitler-Nebuchadnezzar who kills his own people; recently the U.S. "refused to confirm" reports that Hussein was slaughtering Kurds. Apparently, he's not so bad after all.

The future is grim. The United States will sell more than $20 billion in weapons to countries in the Middle East this year. One should not be surprised if some end up in Saddam Hussein's hands. The Kissingerian logic which has guided Bush's policy prescribes "striving for an equilibrium between Iraq, Iran, Syria and other regional powers." With reports that Syria has already spent more than one billion coalition dollars on guns, the Iraqi side of the equation may need some shoring up. This Realpolitik would approach farce--if there were not dead bodies everywhere.

Many of the harshest critics of Bush's current policy supported the war. Supporting Bush in January and criticizing him now are not mutually exclusive. But they do not sit well together, either. Having recognized this blatant Administration lie, how many more might we find? Having seen how much American public opinion matters to President Bush, how little foreign lives, what are we to think of this wonderful war as a whole?

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists claims that Iraq was nowhere near completion of a nuclear weapon, and that only the Administration's hyperbole sold the idea. Professor Charles Maier reasonably wonders whether the tens of thousands of soldiers on the Basra road could not have been given more of a chance to leave their vehicles before being slaughtered. Was the slaughter necessary at all?

These questions, like so many others about the war, will never be answered by the Bush Administration. So busy are we waving flags and celebrating ourselves, nobody is asking them. Instead, Bush will likely coast to victory in 1992, and Democrats who opposed the war will have to act as though it didn't happen.

Watching the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites sink into oblivion, oppressed people everywhere now know that they had better keep quiet, whatever the American President says. That brutal silence--that is the new world order.