The Course of Conscience

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"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. determination not to aid the anti-Saddam rebels, 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.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame and Christopher Ogden/Washington and William Mader/London