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

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 stability of the region that [Iraq] maintain its territorial integrity" -- a statement that precluded support for independence-minded Kurds and Shi'ites. Within a week, the anti-Saddam rebellion incited by Washington had been crushed.

In his book Eclipse, intelligence analyst Mark Perry observes: "The exact details of White House discussions about the uprisings are not known, but circumstantial evidence indicates that the [Bush] Administration purposely decided to allow Hussein to slaughter his opponents in the south. The murderous response to the Shi'ite uprisings was fine-tuned: the White House allowed Hussein free rein in southern Iraq, drawing the line at his use of chemical weapons and fixed-wing aircraft. What protests there were in the United States against this policy were muted by the celebration of the overwhelming American victory."

The Bush administration has reacted to discovery of the mass graves "with pious expressions of outrage and shock ... [as] blatant evidence of the bestial nature of Saddam's regime, and why it had to be removed by force," notes Toronto Star foreign correspondent Olivia Ward. However, for Iraq's Shi'ites the mass graves testify that Washington betrayed them "in a way that will come back to haunt Iraq's new American rulers long into the future."

"Our betrayal by the United States will never be forgotten," declared an Iraqi physicist imprisoned and tortured by Saddam's regime. "People remember how they were urged to rise up against Saddam, and how the Americans then turned their backs. They even helped Saddam massacre the Shiia."