Schwarzkopf not surprisingly opposed the liberation of Iraq, along with Bush 1's former NSA, Brent Scowcroft. But the reasons for this may be more than a mere matter of opinion. As Ken Pollack wrote in The Threatening Storm (p. 48):
... at the cease-fire talks after Desert-Storm was halted, the Iraqis asked for permission to fly their helicopters to move personnel and supplies around, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the U.S. forces — acting without any instructions but trying to show magnanimity — permitted Iraq to use all of its helicopters, including armed gunships. As should have been expected, the Iraqis began using their gunships to attack the rebels, and the United States could have prohibited the Iraqis from doing so.Before transcripts of these negotiations were made public, Schwarzkopf claimed the Iraqis had deceived him but the following exchange came to light in 1992 when the transcripts were at last made public. The WaPo's Laurie Mylroie frames the discussion between Schwarzkopf and an Iraqi delegation led by Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmed this way:
The crucial exchange began when Ahmad told Schwarzkopf, "Helicopter flights sometimes are needed to carry some of the officials, government officials or any members.... needed to be transported from one place to another because the roads and bridges are out."In his new preface to the 1998 printing of Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya called (p. xxi) the helicopter gunships "that ultimate terror weapon." And whenever you hear others lament that the Iraqis themselves weren't the ones to depose Saddam, remind them of what those helicopter gunships were used to do in early 1991.
Schwarzkopf then told Ahmad how to mark helicopters to avoid being shot at.
Ahmad: This has nothing to do with the front line. This is inside Iraq.
Schwarzkopf: As long as it is not over the part we are in, that is absolutely no problem. So we will let the helicopters, and that is a very important point, and I want to make sure that's recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq. Not fighters, not bombers.
Ahmad: So you mean even the helicopters. . . armed in the Iraqi skies can fly. But not the fighters? Because the helicopters are the same. they transfer somebody....
Schwarzkopf: Yeah. I will instruct our Air Force not to shoot at any helicopters that are flying over the territory of Iraq where we are not located. If they must fly over the area we are located in, I prefer that they not be gunships, armed helos, and I would prefer that they have an orange tag on the side--as an extra safety measure.
Ahmad: Not to have any confusion, these will not come to this territory.
Schwarzkopf: Good
The first act of rebellion came from an Iraqi tank driver on February 28, 1991. A column of Iraqi tanks had fled Kuwait after being expelled by coalition forces and rolled into Sa'ad square in Basra. A tank commander stood atop his tank which he'd stopped in front of a giant mural of Saddam in the middle of the square. He said:
What has befallen us of defeat, shame and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations, and your irresponsible actions! [Makiya, xix]The commander aimed the cannon of his tank at the mural and shot away Saddam's face.
This instantly inspired rebellion among the demoralized soldiers present. Within days, it had spread to Diwaniya, Nasiriyah, Hilla, Samawah, Kerbala, Najaf and Amarah. Iran jumped at the occasion to destabilize its old enemy and sent the Tawwabin Division (Iraqi POWs who'd stayed in Iran following the '80-'88 war) and the now-famous Badr Corps. Still reeling form the Anfal genocide Kurdistan soon joined the insurrection — they informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that had been planning to revolt from the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait — and by March 19, they had regained control of most of Kurdistan.
At the height of the Intifada, 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces had wrenched themselves from Baghdad's control. More than even the most dire moments with the war with Iran, it would be the most serious threat to Saddam's reign until March of 2003.
Indeed, as a way of destabilizing Baghdad, the US had encouraged this rebellion. On February 15, 1991 president Bush urged the Iraqi people and military "take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside." A leaflet dropped by the coalition read "O you soldier and civilian, young man and old, O you women and men, let's fill the streets and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides."
Needless to say, cynical Western powers hadn't actually expected it to work. Had Saddam fallen to a coup, the Sunni minority rule could have continued and Iraq would have remained a counterweight to Iran. Had the Shia/Kurdish rebellion succeeded, some feared Iraq would break apart and the sphere of Shia political influence would stretch from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon, transforming Hizballah into an altogether more powerful organization.
On June 26 of 1997, ABC news ran a special report entitled "Unfinished Business In Iraq: the CIA and Saddam Hussein." In it, Scowcroft tells Peter Jennings that he "frankly wished the rebellion hadn't happened" and that "we clearly would have preferred a coup."
When Saddam responded to the uprising, Western public opinion eventually forced the coalition to come to the aid of the Kurds. Yet even this came second to cold-hearted geopolitical considerations. WaPo's senior foreign correspondent Jonathan Randall wrote in his book After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? – my encounters with Kurdistan (p. 102-3) that an anonymous Bush administration official explained that "Frankly, we wanted to wait for the civil war to be over so that our involvement would not be seen as a decision to help the rebels, but as a decision to provide humanitarian aid."
The helicopters Schwarzkopf allowed to crisscross Iraq immediately went to work, murderously suppressing the rebellion while coalition forces sat idly by, just a few cable's lengths away in the Gulf. Soon it came time not just for the intifada's repression but for its punishment. Five elite divisions of the Republican Guard remained intact and they were sicked on the defenseless. The Hammurabi armored and al-Faw infantry divisions set out for Basra, where the rebellion had begun. In charge was Saddam's cousin, 'Ali-Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali"), famous for orchestration of the Anfal genocide only three years earlier. Iraqi forces carried flags that bore the inscription, "No more Shia after today." Pollack describes (p. 50) what ensued:
The Republican Guards were ordered to act with a savagery that many observers claimed was more appalling than even the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. The Guards maimed and slaughtered thousands of people, and 'Ali Hassan insisted that the piles of bodies and severed limbs be left unburied throughout al-Basrah and its surrounding villages. On one occasion, 'Ali-Hassan demanded that residents of the city turn out in Sa'd Square to show their support for the regime, but when he arrived he pulled out an AK-47 and he and his bodyguards began firing into the crowd, mowing down scores of innocent men, women and children. He executed some captured rebels by running over them with tanks, while others were drawn and quartered by trucks.Meanwhile Hussein Kamel, who would later become the famous, stroke-addled defector who returned to Iraq only to be executed by Chemical Ali, led the al-Nida Armored the Army's Fourth Infantry Divisions as well as parts of the Special Republican Guard to crush the revolt in Kerbala and Najaf, slaughtering hundreds, perhaps thousands, in the tombs of the martyrs Adnan, 'Ali and Hussein and shooting holes into the mosques themselves.
With al-Basrah brutally subdued, the Hammurabi spearheaded a drive north along the Shatt al-Arab to clear the key roads up into central Iraq. As they moved north, the Hammurabi not only killed large numbers of rebels but razed any village that offered any resistance, massacring the inhabitants and burning their crops for good measure. On March 15, the Hammurabi captured the key town of al-Qurnah, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers unite to form the Shatt. There the regime's forces split, with the Hammurabi and several other units pushing north along the Tigris, clearing pockets of rebellion and retaking the city of al-Amarah, while the Guard's al-Faw Infantry Division and other units branched off along the Euphrates to join up with other loyal formations that had been reasserting the regime's control over central Iraq.
Also during this time, the Hammurabi continued to Kurdistan, taking Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah. All told, this assault killed an estimated 20,000 Kurds, many of whom were civilians. In the south, estimates for the number of Shia killed range from 30,000 to 50,000.
During this time, readers will recall that there was a lot of self-congratulatory talk of having liberated Kuwait. A ticker-tape parade took place on Manhattan's 5th avenue in honor of US armed forces. While unspeakable cruelty unfoled north of the border, Schwarzkopf himself posed for TV cameras as he collected sand from a Kuwaiti beach as a souvenir from the liberated country.
Clearly, Schwarzkopf's helicopters weren't the only instruments of Saddam's bloody repression of the Intifada. However, they did kill a great many people and the fact that Schwarzkopf (who, remember, was acting entirely of his own accord) granted Saddam the freedom to use them signaled a very real US willingness to look the other way as the predictable and horrific occurred. For that reason, I view Schwarzkopf's opposition to ending Saddam's rule (and the sage advice he offers below) in a somewhat jaded light.
It is because the policy of regime change in Iraq represented such a clear-cut departure from the cold-war and its misuse of the third-world that left-wing persons such as myself were able to support it. As the delightful Hak Mao wrote back in July, "I would be perfectly happy to see any number of former heads of state, ministers, and functionaries in the dock. Do not assume that those socialists who supported the deposition of the Hussein crime family are swaying giddily in the glare of GWB's goofy grin."
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