Saturday, March 04, 2006

Sweaty palms in Baghdad these days.


Y'all remember this uplifting demonstration of right-wing courage and loyalty, don't you?

It was only after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that Washington's concern for Kurdish rights suddenly reappeared in the build up to the last Gulf War. George Bush Sr. proclaimed Saddam Hussein the new Hitler and said the U.S. was fighting to free the Iraqi population. At the end of the war when Shiite Muslims in the south and the Kurds in the north rebelled against Hussein's regime, the U.S. abandoned them, permitting the Iraqi military to use helicopter gunships to crush the insurrections.

If you're an Iraqi with even a moderately good memory who's been supporting the U.S. all this time, well, all this talk about a quicktime American withdrawal might be making you a wee bit nervous, no?

BY THE WAY, make sure you follow the links far enough to appreciate 101st Fighting Keyboarder James Lileks, from the safety of his cubicle, telling an Iraqi blogger to be a grown-up. It's near the bottom.

No, no, don't thank me. Your admiration and a small bag of unmarked bills are all the appreciation I need.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe it was Shiite who rose up when George Bush sr. called for a revolution in Iraq after "Desert Storm."

Maybe it was both the Shiites and the Kurds, but I think most of the people in the mass graves were Shiites.

It was Kissinger who truly abandoned the Kurds, and Reagan and Rumsfeld who later obfuscated Saddam's oppression of them during the Iran-Iraq War.

CC said...

There was, in fact, more than one betrayal, as you can see in that article, involving either Shiites, Kurds or a combination of the two at one time or another.

Certainly, the Kurds these days are not about to go out on a limb for American interests any time soon.