Mass graves, Washington's perfidy. (Insider Report).(Iraq)

Some apologists for the Bush administration's needless, illegal, and counterproductive invasion of Iraq have ghoulishly delighted in the discovery of mass graves containing the remains of an estimated 15,000 Iraqis. Little attention has been paid to the fact that Saddam slaughtered most of the victims after the U.S. urged them to rise up against the vile dictator following the 1991 Gulf War. America essentially abandoned the vulnerable rebels.

In a February 15, 1991 speech, given while the air campaign in the Gulf War was still raging, the first President Bush urged "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step down." This invitation, translated into Arabic and beamed into Iraq, prompted Shi'ite separatists in southern Iraq and Kurdish rebels in the north to take up arms: By March 1991, 14 of 18 Iraqi provinces were in open revolt -- and winning. In a 1996 interview with ABC News, General Wafik Samarii, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, said that "the uprising almost succeeded.... At the very end, we had only two days of Kalashnikov bullets left over in the warehouses of the Iraqi army."

But for reasons never explained, the Gulf War cease-fire allowed Saddam to keep a fleet of helicopter gunships. This gave his military a decisive advantage when the Iraqi government's counteroffensive against the rebels began on March 28th. Two days before Saddam rallied his forces to put down the revolt, U.S. presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater pointedly declared that "it is good for the ...