Moyers Special Report: After the War

GEORGE BUSH SR: [February 27, 1991] After consulting with Secretary of Defense Cheney, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Powell, and our coalition partners, I am pleased to announce that at midnight tonight, Eastern Standard Time, exactly 100 hours since ground operations commenced and six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm, all United States and coalition forces will suspend offensive combat operations.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] America's troops are coming home from the liberation of Kuwait, coming home to the praise of their nation.

GEORGE BUSH SR: And when you freed Kuwait, you uplifted the American spirit.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, our guest of honor, the commander-in-chief, United States Central Command, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf'!

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Unlike the Vietnam War, this one was ending with a party.

RANDY TRAVIS: [singing] All it takes is a point of light / A ray of hope in the darkest night-

ANNOUNCER: From Bob Hope's home in Palm Springs, we bring you "Bob Hope's Yellow Ribbon Party."

ED McMAHON: These are the areas we'll be discussing today. Now, you probably noticed right off we've divided Kuwait into two sections: smoking and non-smoking.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The war has become a prime-time spectacular. Its heroes have joined the winners' circle.

ANNOUNCER: [television commercial] The people of Delta would like to recognize the sacrifice made by our armed forces and their families.

ACTRESS: [as reservations clerk] We do have a special military fare, sir.

ANNOUNCER: Now, with our ''Welcome Home" fares, active duty-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Its warriors are impersonated for the bottom line.

JONATHAN WINTERS: [television commercial] [as Gen. Schwarzkopf] This significant victory for our nation's business travelers was won by America West Airlines, who have reduced full-coach fares up to 40 percent with no-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Even the military produced its own rock video about the war.

BOB HOPE: I wish all the guys from Vietnam and Korea and World War II were here today. These yellow ribbons are for all of America's veterans, believe me.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] This victory left America feeling good about itself. As Newsweek magazine put it - quote - "The march on Kuwait turned into something akin to a Roman triumph, complete with beaming general"-

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: This is sand from the liberated beaches of Kuwait.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] -"rolling engines of war and lines of bedraggled prisoners. America," the magazine said, "was seen as a giant again, its military might beyond compare, its diplomacy sure handed, its self-confidence restored." Perhaps, but now that the Gulf war is over, we are not of one mind. The euphoria is fading. There are second thoughts.

Sergeant MIKE ANGE, North Carolina National Guard: I think it's- it's possible that maybe the support for the troops is being mistaken for support for the campaign.

1st SOLDIER: I wish we could have took care of Saddam before we, you know, came back. I really do. I wish we could have taken care of him.

2nd SOLDIER: I wish we wouldn't have left him.

1st SOLDIER: I hate that we left him still in power.

Sir BRIAN URQUHART, former United Nations Undersecretary General: A very important point of principle has been made, that one country cannot swallow up another, which is after all the principle on which the whole world is supposedly based in any reasonable conditions. So I think that was very important, but I think that the great tragedies that have come with the war and so on will not be justified unless a great deal of pains is taken to look at this whole experience and try to move on to doing everything better in the future.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] It is only now that official censorship has been lifted and eyewitness reports are coming in that we can look at the whole experience. Now we can learn the truth and see the consequences of the war.

LIONEL A. ROSENBLATT, Refugees International: You came up over that mountain ridge to where the refugees were and you saw what at first glance looked to be lots of trash blown up against these steep mountain slopes. And you looked closer and you realized it wasn't trash. These were people huddled, holding their blankets and strips of tents and plastic.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] During the war, the Pentagon had muzzled the press and controlled what reporters could show us.

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: This is the main supply route-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] What we saw on TV was not the war, but the official reports on the war.

U.S. OFFICER: This is my counterpart's headquarters in Baghdad. This is the headquarters of the air force. And keep your eye on all sides of the building as the airplane overflies the building and drops the bomb down through the center of the building.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The generals told us this was a clean win. They showed us carefully selected videotapes of how accurate the smart bombs were.

GEORGE BUSH SR: [February 6th, 1991] This has been fantastically accurate and that's because a lot of money went into high technology weaponry, these laser-guided bombs and a lot of other things, stealth technology, many of these technologies ridiculed in the past now coming into their own and saving lives, not only American lives, coalition lives, but the lives of Iraqis.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Others saw what most Americans didn't.

FADIA FAQIR, Jordanian Writer: It is like watching pornography. You feel guilty for watching it, but you can't help but watch it. It was terrible watching that violence. And also it was presented with a lot of euphoria and merry-go-round, that "We are the clever guys. We are the producers of Patriots. We created all these high-tech weapons," and some journalists said "state of the art." "And we can destroy the natives, the invisible natives, easily."

IRAQI BUSINESSMAN: The three small hotels [crosstalk] You can't see it from there.

ROBERT NEUMANN, former U.S. Ambassador: Did we worry during World War II about the destruction of Dresden, Leipzig? No. Afterwards one is always so clever, you- this idea of a very surgical strike- no, there is no surgical strike.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Former ambassador Robert Neumann represented the United States in Afghanistan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. He now directs the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

ROBERT NEUMANN: You don't fight war to save the enemy. You are more concerned about your own casualties than about the casualties of the other side. George Patton was a great advocate of that. It was right to bomb the bridges, to destroy the infrastructure. If we had not, then the command and control of the Iraqi forces would be more effective and it would cost us our lives and our lives are the principal concerns, have to be, should be, of our leaders. The lives of the enemy- well, as humane as possible, but war is rough business.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] This one was rougher than we realized. Not until the fighting ended did the Air Force chief of staff reveal just how rough. Eighty-eight thousand five hundred tons of bombs were dropped, but only 7 percent were precision-guided smart bombs. Seventy percent of all bombs missed their targets - 70 percent. Not even the Patriot missile turned out to work all the miracles claimed for it. During the war, the audience thrilled to its triumphs over incoming Scud missiles, vividly showered into living rooms by a wide-eyed media. When the war ended, we learned that the Patriots, at $600,000 a shot, often failed to detonate the warheads of the Scuds they hit. And the Patriots' own debris sometimes resulted in additional damage in populated areas. We didn't see American pilots conducting a turkey shoot against retreating Iraqi troops or the bodies of thousands of Iraqis hastily buried in sandy graves by allied forces. Officials told us about the slaughter, but wouldn't let us see for ourselves.

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: There was a very, very large number of dead in these units, a very, very large number of dead.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] How many dead? The general wasn't saying. The government wasn't saying. Three months after the war, there was still no official U.S. estimate of Iraqi military and civilian deaths.

MINISTER: [speaking at funeral] We are held together even when our world is falling apart.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Even the 378 Americans who died in the Persian Gulf were kept invisible.

DEMONSTRATORS: [chanting] How many bodies did you hide today?

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] When their bodies were flown back to Dover, Delaware, reporters were denied access to the base. They could cover the protests about the war, but not the casualties of the war.

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: I'm now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq on this particular day. Keep your eye on the crosshairs.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The American public saw only what its government wanted it to see.

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: Right through the crosshairs. And now, in his rear-view mirror-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Death was out of sight. It might spoil the show. Others were not so lucky.

U.S. GUNMAN: [military footage] "Say hello to Allah." [footage shows tanks destroyed.]

BILL MOYERS: This Department of Defense video, obtained by the newspaper Newsday, shows how U.S. forces of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division destroyed an Iraqi division just west of Basra. Nearly half of the 7,000 troops in this Iraqi division were captured. The number killed is still unknown. Mike Ange's National Guard unit was in the area.

MIKE ANGE: We rode into Basra, Iraq, behind the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and there was a lot of death and destruction along the roadway. There were vehicles- I actually went up close and examined two vehicles that basically looked like refugees maybe trying to get out of the area. You know, you had, like, a little Toyota pick-up truck that was loaded down with, you know, the furniture and the suitcases and, you know, rugs and, you know, the pet cat and, you know, that type of thing hanging all over the back of this truck and those trucks were taken out just like, you know, the military vehicles.

NARRATOR: ["The Information War"] Because of the news blackout, coverage was muddled. Rather than the one battle of which the media spoke, there were many separate slaughters. Neither the scale of Iraqi casualties nor the horror was made evident.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] American network television reported nothing like the scenes in this documentary, The Information War, shown on Britain's Channel 4.

NARRATOR: ["The Information War''] From Richard Dowden at Ur of the Chaldees, in southern Iraq: "It is, they say, where Western civilization began, one of mankind's first towns and identified in the Bible as the home of Abraham. Standing on top of the ziggurat, the scene looked more like the place where civilization ended. To reach it, we had come through apocalyptic scenes of destruction reminiscent of the song in 1916, 'Oh, Hiroshima.' And although the war is officially over and the allies are going home, the dying may not be done.

KATE ADIE: Television cameras have only started to nibble at going to war. People die quickly. They die horribly. And they don't die in front of television cameras. We do not actually deliver on a screen what war does.

[on news broadcast] It's evidence of the horrible confusion and downright panic as the Iraqis tried to leave Kuwait. And those who fought and died for Iraq here turned out to be from the north of the country, from minority communities.

NARRATOR: Television cameras did not depict the consequences of battle. Images like these were censored, first in the field, then in newsrooms. Somewhere on the road to Basra, the reality of war was lost.

KATE ADIE: It's inevitable, the rather sloppy reporting of war, the muddle of war, of everybody just sort of saying, "the Basra road." It's a great, long road. People were killed all along its length.

RICHARD DOWDEN, ''The Independent": The lorries further down the line would have tried to crash off the motorway and just get away, just get off the road, and they would have chased them and you saw them in the desert. And then you would see the bodies going from those lorries. So they'd actually hunted down people who were just- who were just running away.

MIKE ANGE: I talked to one guy that was a medical doctor in the Iraqi- he was an infantryman in the Iraqi army, but he was trained and licensed as an M.D. and he was educated here in the United States. And he said that basically, you know, they were all conscripts and they were told that if they did not stay and if they did not put up a fight, that their families would be tortured and killed. And so, you know, did those people want to be there? I don't think so.

GEORGE BUSH SR: [November 30, 1990] Let me repeat. We have no argument with the people of Iraq and, indeed, we have only friendship for the people there. [February 5, 1991] And we are not trying to systematically destroy the functions of daily living in Iraq. That's not what we're trying to do, or are we doing it.

HELEN THOMAS, UPI: No water, no electricity, no fuel-

GEORGE BUSH SR: Well, I would say that- that our- our effort our- our main goal is to get this man to comply with the resolutions, but we are not trying to systematically destroy the infrastructure or to destroy Iraq.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me, what happened to your father?

IRAQI WOMAN: His leg break- broken and his hand and all face-

INTERVIEWER: Was burned?

IRAQI WOMAN: No face, no.

INTERVIEWER: His face was burned off?

IRAQI WOMAN: Lips and nose, everything, yes.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Despite his denials, the President's strategy made the suffering of civilians inevitable. The massive air power was aimed at destroying Iraq's electric power, communications and transportation facilities, laying waste to the country's infrastructure. When the war ended, a United Nations team went to Iraq to survey the damage. It found the country paralyzed, bombed back to a preindustrial age. Without electricity, the report said, there was no way to preserve food and medicine, irrigate crops, purify the water or clean up the sewage.

RICHARD REID, UNICEF: You can go into places like Amara and Basra and walk for blocks and blocks almost knee-deep in liquid sewage and it's in people's homes, obviously. It's everywhere. In some towns, even the sewage treatment plants are half a meter under water, so to speak, or under the liquid sewage level, which is what makes it very likely that there will be big epidemics. That's one of the worst aspects of the whole Iraq picture.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Richard Reid, based in Amman, Jordan, is regional director of UNICEF. He brought 54 tons of medical supplies into Iraq during the war as co-leader of a joint evaluation team for UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

RICHARD REID: Kids are not growing, have not been growing for the last two to three months, young kids in Iraq. And we're seeing also in Iraq now a couple of manifestations of hunger that you had seen only before in Africa, never in our region, never in the Middle East or North Africa, and that's marasmus, the condition that makes kids under two suddenly look like wizened old men - the bony face, the skull - and kwashiorkor, the malnutrition condition that turns a child's hair a rusty red and gives him a pot belly. That's unimaginable in Iraq and yet you see it all over the place now, even in Baghdad.

INTERVIEWER: And is that typical of a number of children, that they're becoming malnourished?

IRAQ HEALTH WORKER: Yes, many cases. In many cases, yes.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] In May, a Harvard University team of public health experts visited hospitals in Iraq and predicted that tens of thousands of children will die in the next year from epidemic levels of cholera, typhoid and gastroenteritis.

RICHARD REID: The country was really pasted and then the country did a job on itself internally with these uprisings, which went door to door, house to house and wiped out everything. Everything.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The uprisings inside Iraq were also part of President Bush's strategy. He called on the population to rise up and overthrow Sad dam Hussein.

GEORGE BUSH SR: [February 15, 1991] And there's another way for the bloodshed to stop and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside-

HAZIR TEMOURIAN, "The Times of London": It wasn't only George Bush, either, who asked the people to rise. There was an American-financed radio broadcast into Iraq from Jedda in Saudi Arabia. It was a very smooth operation. The Saudi Arabians could not have announced it- organized it themselves. This lady was saying in Kurdish and Arabic to people, "Rise! This is your moment. This time the allies will not let you down."

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] But the allies did let them down.

AMERICAN SOLDIER: [on the radio] Roger. We've got a whole bunch of guys throwing AK-47's up in the air down here. Does that mean anything?

BILL MOYERS: [on camera] As the Iraqi army retreated from Kuwait in chaos, there was a rebellion inside Iraq. Several thousand Shiite Muslims in the south took up arms against Saddam Hussein and looked to America for help, but President Bush ordered the allied army to stop fighting, allowing at least 20,000 of Hussein's crack troops, the Republican Guard, to escape.

[voice-over] Hussein joined them with his reserves in Iraq and began a slaughter of the rebels.

AHMAD CHALABI, Iraqi Democratic Opposition:Those people are- they're sort of forgotten almost now. They are now the main recipients of Saddam's terror. Basra is a city which was in excess of a million people. He leveled it. Karbala, he did the same. Najaf, he did the same. He just went and knocked out everything that was not knocked out by the allied bombing in the Shiite cities.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Ahmad Chalabi, an American-educated mathematician, lives in London where he is a member of the exiled Iraqi Democratic Opposition. When he came to Washington to lobby for support, the Bush administration turned a deaf ear.

AHMAD CHALABI: Whenever we talked about democracy, we were laughed at. After the war started- after the war started by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait August 2nd - if you like, you could call it the "phony war" between August 2nd and January 17th - there was very, very limited contact between the U.S. and the Iraqi opposition, extremely limited. But the Saudis had extensive contacts and the whole idea was that really don't say that we want democracy at this stage. Just let's get rid of Saddam and talk about that later. The idea is that the United States did not encourage and did not come out with a statement supporting democracy in Iraq.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] It wasn't just Washington's indifference toward democracy that angered the Iraqi opposition. It was also the President's decision to let Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard escape.

AHMAD CHALABI: General Powell gave an interview in which he said, ''We plan to stay in Iraq many months to put pressure on Saddam." And to, in effect, the article said that he was saying that "By our presence- we are helping the rebels." Then four days later, there was a sudden switch.

LIONEL A. ROSENBLATT: Once you get the other guy to retreat, you go and surround him and disarm him. I don't understand why we didn't do that on the ground. Schwarzkopf has said that there was a steel trap that closed and all that remained, apparently, was to just go in and say, "OK, instead of retreating intact to Baghdad, we're going to disarm you and demobilize you." That didn't happen.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] General Schwarzkopf later told David Frost what a few more days of fighting would have meant.

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: [" ... Talking With David Frost," PBS] Frankly, my recommendation had been, you know, continue to march. I mean, we had them in a rout and we could have continued to, you know, wreak great destruction upon them. We could have completely closed the door and made it, in fact, a battle of annihilation. And the President, you know, made the decision that, you know, that we should stop at a given time, at a given place. That did leave some escape routes open for them to get back out and I think it was a very humane decision and a very courageous decision on his part also.

AHMAD CHALABI: I felt that there was some- perhaps some analogy with the situation that happened in Warsaw in 1944. The Red Army arrived in Warsaw- the Polish Resistance were encouraged to revolt against the Nazis. The Nazi armies and SS put down the rebellions brutally and killed a great many people and destroyed the very forces that would have been effective in Poland. And only after they did that, did the Red Army march in. So it is- that's the analogy that I was talking about. Let Saddam kill the rebels. Let Saddam get rid of the rebellion and then we'll deal with the situation later.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The terms of the truce between Iraq and the U.S. called for the grounding of Saddam Hussein's airplanes, but not his helicopters. At first, President Bush had warned Hussein about using the helicopters for combat, but when Saddam turned the gunships on the rebels, the Americans did not shoot them down.

General NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: ... Talking With David Frost," PBS] When they said to me, you know, "We would like to fly helicopters," I said, "Not over our forces." "Oh, oh, no. Definitely not over your forces. Just over Iraq because- for the transportation of government officials." That seemed like a reasonable request and within my charter, I felt that that was something that it was perfectly all right to grant. I think I was suckered because I think they intended right then when they asked that question to use those helicopters against the insurrections that were going on.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] In the north of Iraq, the Kurds, like the Shiites in the south, rose up against Hussein. He crushed them, too, with troops spared by the ceasefire. Nearly two million Kurds fled to makeshift border camps in Iran and here in Turkey. Some 100,000 Kurds found themselves at Isikveren, where producers Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes took these pictures. Here, a few hundred yards from the Iraqi border, American and other foreign aid eventually arrived, but not before the refugees had endured hunger, disease and death. This eight-year-old boy was caught in one of Saddam's napalm attacks.

RELIEF WORKER: He was on the streets when they dropped the bomb and it just happened that his face caught fire.

ERIC WIEGER, CARE Volunteer: Everyone should have known there would have been a civil war and it would have been- started with the Kurds. I feel embarrassed that Mr. Bush did not keep his word to keep the helicopters and airplanes of Saddam on the ground. I know he was under political pressure. I feel embarrassed about that political pressure. And so when I talk to these people, I don't talk to them as a representative of America. I just apologize for the mistake. It was a simple political mistake with vast, vast consequences and it should have been better thought out.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Relief workers try to organize the refugees into groups in order to distribute food and water. Salih Khalid, an irrigation engineer, represents 25 families. His wife and two-year-old child were in another city when he was forced to flee. He's had no contact with them.

SALIH KHALID, KURDISH REFUGEE: My father and my mother and my other brothers, all of them is in Mosul.

INTERVIEWER: Do you worry about them now?

SALIH KHALID: Yes, I've very worried about them.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Ashmair is Salih's sister.

ASHMAIR KHALID, KURDISH REFUGEE: [through interpreter] We had everything in our house. We had a telephone, a VCR. We had a color TV. We had a nice bedroom. We had a living room. We had a car. We had our own paint store. Our life used to be very nice, not the way you see us in these tents. Kurds are sophisticated people. They're educated. We build our lives. We build our homes. Then Saddam comes and bombs us and we flee to live in tents. We've run for our lives.

CARE WORKER: This is a diverse group. These people- there are rural people and there are urban people. Among the urban population, you've got professional people, you've got medical doctors, you've got engineers, you've got university teachers. And when they came down here, it was a shock to many of them, a real shock.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Salih, Ashmair and her husband and three children have been here 27 days, surviving on meager amounts of flour, rice, olives and condensed milk.

SALIH KHALID: The children, more of them is sick because when you come here about a week, the rain is every day raining and the snow every day is snowing here. More of them is very sick and more of them is dead. Their future is no future because they don't learn anything. Only you see mountains and they play in this air. They be very sick in this air.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Ashmair's children are weak and have stopped sleeping through the night. Here, at a hospital tent run by the international organization Doctors Without Borders, they are 60th in line this morning. They'll have to wait five hours in the heat before they can see a physician.

JILLES VAN DELFT, M.D., Holland: The problems with malnutrition are starting so the first weeks, it was a problem of dehydration of the children and then you put some water in them and they were all right. But now, after some weeks, the problem of malnutrition is getting worse each day. Here you see, for example, a child- it looks normal. It looks a bit ill, but he is getting the first signs of malnutrition here, the swollen legs. So you have to look very good and then you can pick out a lot of children who are starting to get problems of protein deficiency.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] While malnutrition continues in the camp, relief agencies tackle the enormous problem of food distribution.

RELIEF WORKER: We're looking for-

SALIH KHALID: Judge Mohammed?

RELIEF WORKER: No, not Judge Mohammed.

SALIH KHALID:

RELIEF WORKER: You're with Hussein Abdul Kareem, right?

SALIH KHALID: No, I am not with this group.

RELIEF WORKER: You're with Judge Mohammed?

SALIH KHALID: Yes, I am with group- Judge Mohammed.

RELIEF WORKER: Judge Mohammed is tomorrow.

SALIH KHALID: Tomorrow?

RELIEF WORKER: Uh-huh.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] There's been a mix-up. Now it's up to Salih to tell over 200 people they will receive no food ration today. The aid shipped to the Kurds in Turkey has been estimated to cost a billion dollars, much of it from America. Many of the refugees are grateful for American aid, but at the same time they fault the U.S. for pulling back its forces while Saddam Hussein was still strong enough to take his revenge.

KURDISH REFUGEE: [through interpreter] If we had stayed home in Iraq, 700 or 800 men and women and children would not have died over the last 20 days. If we had been at home, my daughter wouldn't have died. We have medicines. We have doctors there. We came here in the cold and the snow and we starved to death. When the Gulf war broke out, we thought it would cost Saddam Hussein his head. We said that George Bush would chop his head off and then we could relax. Well, we didn't relax. It has gotten worse.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] For the Kurds, the bitterest irony is that they responded to George Bush's call for an uprising, believing America would support them to victory. In fact, by mid-March they controlled over half of Kurdish Iraq and thought their freedom was at hand.

REBEL OFFICER: [subtitled] I am pleased and honored to be in the liberated town of Koi. The Kurdish fighters captured the army bases as easily as going on a picnic.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Journalist Frank Smyth was there with a camera.

FRANK SMYTH: In the sense of popular support, it was a very moving experience to be there and certainly the Kurds had suffered for decades and we were there at a time when they were really at their peak and for the first time, the entire population, civilian and rebel, were really tasting the spirit of liberation and really feeling quite triumphant. People would dance in the streets. At one point in front of a hospital in Dohuk, a group of rebels joined with a group of nurses and began a folk dance in the street.

[interviewing] Hello? Where are you going?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: To war!

FRANK SMYTH: To war? Against whom?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: Against the enemy.

FRANK SMYTH: Saddam Hussein, is he the enemy?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: Yah.

FRANK SMYTH: Yes?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: Uh-huh.

FRANK SMYTH: And are you going to win?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: Yeah, we are going to win.

FRANK SMYTH: Yeah?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: And to smile.

FRANK SMYTH: And to smile?

1st REBEL FIGHTER: Yeah.

FRANK SMYTH: They were using mortars in the beginning, something which is really effective if you're attacking a fixed army base, but it's really not effective if you're attacking mobile army units. And they really hadn't thought through what to do when the tanks come, what to do when the helicopters come and what their line of defense would be other than to rise up and say, "Long live Kurdistan" and go out and charge an Iraqi tank armed with merely an AK-47. [interviewing] And with that, you're going to defeat Saddam Hussein?

2nd REBEL FIGHTER: Yes.

FRANK SMYTH: People were speculating on how much time Saddam had left and the spectrum ran from two months to as short as two days.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] People were wrong. What happened next proved disastrous. While the U.S held its fire, Saddam Hussein turned his surviving army on the Kurds. Terrified, they fled any way they could. Hussein's helicopters pursued and strafed them.

GEORGE BUSH SR: [April 13, 1991] We will not interfere in Iraq's civil war. The Iraqi people must decide their own political future.

1st KURDISH REFUGEE: I hate Bush. I hate everybody because they make us to suffering this.

2nd KURDISH REFUGEE: George Bush and Saddam Hussein- [clasps his hands together]

BILL MOYERS: [on camera] George Bush repeatedly said he didn't want to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, but he has ignored that principle when it suited his purposes. He intervened in Panama to oust Manuel Noriega, in Nicaragua to arm the contras. Why not in Iraq? Well, the President's defenders said that the U.S. couldn't impose democracy, but we did precisely that in Germany and Japan after defeating them in World War II. No, what guided the White House this time was not concern for democracy, but for stability and for access to oil. The argument was that if the rebellion in Iraq succeeded, the country might split apart. Iran, Turkey and Syria might fight over the pieces. The Shiites' and Kurds' struggle for autonomy might incite revolt in neighboring countries. The thinking went, "Better we let the rebels lose than risk upheaval in Baghdad." It was not the first time that the Kurds were betrayed to power politics by an American government. [voice-over] In the early 1970's, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger armed the Kurdish guerrillas in their struggle for autonomy in Iraq. Oil was one of the reasons. America's oil-producing ally in the Gulf, the Shah of Iran, was threatened by neighboring Iraq. The American government hoped a civil war would distract Iraq from its larger ambitions in the region. An American Congressional committee, the Pike Commission, later found that Washington had never intended that the Kurds should win. The Commission said - quote - [onscreen] "Documents in the Committee's possession clearly show that the President, Dr. Kissinger and the [Shah] hoped that our clients [the Kurds] would not prevail. This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting." Iran and Iraq agreed to a temporary truce in 1975 and the U.S. need for supporting a rebellion disappeared. The Kurds were abandoned. Saddam Hussein, then internal security chief, began a bloodbath. Thousands of people were killed. Thousands of villages were reduced to rubble, their inhabitants made homeless. Many of them were resettled in camps run by the Iraqi police. British journalist Gwynne Roberts, who made this film, has covered the Kurdish Resistance since 1974.

GWYNNE ROBERTS: Within the space of a few weeks, aid was withdrawn from the Kurds and it was withdrawn so cynically and so abruptly that these people, who thought that they were fighting for their futures, for their children, for some semblance of independence or autonomy within Iraq, were left totally bereft. People were executed. They declared amnesty, but they disregarded it in many cases. Families really suffered.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Hussein's suppression of the Kurds and other opponents continued for the next 15 years.

GWYNNE ROBERTS: They had all forms of torture. They'd nail people to the wall by their ears.

REPORTER: ["Kurdistan: A Dream Betrayed''] What are those on the wall?

IRAQI: That's an ear nailed to the wall. You can see the skin.

GWYNNE ROBERTS: They'd manacle them to long bars in the pitch black. They crucified them, driving nails into their hands. There were shots of children who had been executed at the stake. We saw various pictures like that. One little boy came up to me and told me that he'd found a roll of negative on the floor of EI Amin HQ and had it processed at a local chemist's. And he was just showing them to me and these were actual pictures of one individual who'd been tortured to death and then shot from various angles so that it would go in the file and be sent off to Baghdad as proof that the case was now concluded.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Hussein's violence against his people was well known and documented, yet the U.S. and others kept supplying him with bank credits, technology and weapons: Mirage aircraft from France, tanks and Scud missiles from the Soviet Union and the raw materials for chemical weapons from companies in Germany, Great Britain and the United States. The U.S. tilted toward Iraq in its eight year war with Iran and continued to support Hussein even after what happened in 1988 at Halabja. There Hussein put down a Kurdish rebellion with poison gas.

GWYNNE ROBERTS: ["Winds of Death''] At the time, they said 5,000 people were dead. It's possible, because the remains of people are still being found in the cellars in Halabja, that maybe 10,000 or even more thousands were actually killed in that one attack.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Despite a U.S. ban on military exports to Iraq, the Reagan and Bush administrations continued to license the export of materials to Hussein's government that could be used in conventional chemical and biological warfare. As late as last year, before the invasion of Kuwait, President Bush resisted efforts in Congress to impose sanctions against Iraq and to condemn Hussein for gross violations of human rights. American policy was helping to turn Saddam Hussein into a Frankenstein's monster. It was just a matter of time before he would turn on his benefactors.

Dr. SHAFFIQ QAZZAZ, Kurdish Representative to the United States 1965-73: Saddam Hussein's record as a head of government, or previously, when he was prime minister, or even before that when he was just a simple gangster wielding a gun, should have been known to the West and to the United States because this is a man who had made deals with them commercially, militarily, technology-wise. He is the man who have been given every kind of aid, economic, military, security, weapon-wise. You name it and he had gotten it from the West.

BILL MOYERS: [on camera] As director of the CIA, vice president for eight years and president for two, there was no way George Bush could not have known what kind of man Saddam Hussein was or what he was doing to his own people. Yet it was only after the dictator invaded Kuwait that Bush made Hussein a moral issue.

GEORGE BUSH SR: [October 23rd, 1990] We're dealing with Hitler revisited, a totalitarianism and a brutality that is naked and unprecedented in modern times and that must not stand! [October 15th, 1990] But remember, when Hitler's war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] But there have been no war crimes trials this time. Saddam Hussein survives. It's as if, at the end of World War II, the Allies had stopped at the Rhine, leaving Hitler in power with the Gestapo intact and the death camps running.

GWYNNE ROBERTS: Do you think that Saddam Hussein will forget what has happened? One of the things about him is that he really bears grudges. Now, he's also prepared to pull back and comply. But if you think, for example, that chemical and biological weapons will simply be destroyed- they've been hidden all over Iraq. If you think that he would give up, you know, wanting to be the leader of an Arab world, you would be terribly mistaken.

CHILDREN'S CHORUS: [singing] This land is your land / This land is my land / From California to the New York islands / From the redwood forests to the Gulf stream waters / This land was made for you and me-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] So with Hussein still in power, what are we celebrating? The bravery of the troops, to be sure, and their general's leadership. They did liberate Kuwait.

GEORGE BUSH SR: [March 6, 1991] We went halfway around the world to do what is moral and just and right and we fought hard and, with others, we won the war.

RALLY ANNOUNCER: Please welcome our coalition partners: Argentina, Australia, Bahrain-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] If the celebrations seem forced, it's because the fruits of victory have not all been "moral, just and right." The "new world order" looks very much like the same old thing. In Kuwait, while the country lay devastated under the pall of black smoke rising from burning oil wells, the U.S. Corps of Engineers rushed to restore the Emir's palace. The royal family returned from exile still delaying hopes for democracy in Kuwait. The government is a monarchy and wants to stay one.

LIONEL A. ROSENBLATT: Our view on Kuwait is that having fought to regain Kuwait that we ought to have a much more humane policy towards refuge and asylum and protection of human rights there. Clearly there's a problem and clearly the Kurdish situation has tended to divert attention from that, but I hope that we get back to looking at basic, minimal human rights decencies being practiced by a government that all of the coalition forces struggled so hard to liberate. It would be an ironic ending to end up with a repressive Kuwait at the end of the road here.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Saudi Arabia remains an oligarchy of royal princes. Women are not even permitted to drive. There is no free press and religious police enforce strict fundamentalist law. The "new world order" includes America's embrace of an old dictator, Hafez Assad of Syria, a country officially condemned by the U.S. as a terrorist state.

Secretary of State JAMES A. BAKER III: We're only going to solve it provided there is a genuine desire on the part of all parties to the conflict for true reconciliation.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The Arabs and Israel continue to frustrate Secretary of State James Baker's search for peace, yet soon after President Bush called for new controls on the Middle East arms race, his administration announced that it is stockpiling substantial weapons in Israel, sending Jerusalem more fighter planes and selling attack helicopters to the Gulf states. And in the most perverse return to the status quo, the remnants of Saddam Hussein's army are back as a power in the region. So for the arms makers and arms dealers, the "new world order" means business as usual.

ROBERT NEUMANN: After what they've seen on television about the Gulf war, the marvelous way the weapons worked, everybody wants some. It's like any other form of advertisement. You are shown a product which works, whiz-bang, and you say "Oh, this is good. I want it."

BRIAN URQUHART: I was brought up in the 1920s on the idea of the merchants of death who were supposed to have caused World War I. These were arms manufacturers. Well, these people- this was kid stuff by comparison with what goes on now. And I wonder. I think it's the biggest single question.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Sir Brian Urquhart has spent much of his life as a troubleshooter for the United Nations. He's retired now as undersecretary general. I talked to him about some of these issues, including where Saddam Hussein got the weapons he used against Kuwait.

BRIAN URQUHART: Well, he got it certainly from the Soviet Union and France, in terms of actual weapons. He got a great deal of help from the British and the United States in terms of technology and a lot of other countries as well, not to mention China.

BILL MOYERS: [interviewing] What does that tell us, that several members of the Security Council, which voted finally to repel him from Kuwait, had actually helped him get there in the first place?

BRIAN URQUHART: It tells us that money talks, don't you think? President Harry S. Truman: In one unshakable unity of determination to find a way to end war.

BRIAN URQUHART: Forty-six years ago when I joined the United Nations at the end of World War II, it was commonly believed that governments, if they cooperated, could control the forces that are shaping the future. I'm not sure it was true in 1945 and it sure as hell isn't true now. The forces that are shaping the future are way out of control of most governments, even the most powerful ones. I mean, the agenda we ought to be considering is what we're doing to the life support system of the planet itself, which is horrendous, what we are doing to the natural resources of the planet. We're spending them as if there was no tomorrow. And what on earth are the succeeding generations going to live on?

BILL MOYERS: [interviewing] What you're doing is asking for a new definition of security.

BRIAN URQUHART: Well, I think this is absolutely correct. I mean, security traditionally means an absence of conflict. But now it means the capacity to survive.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] It is what we do now, after the war, that concerns people seeking a new and larger agenda. Our energy policy is of particular concern to Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

ROBERT BOROSAGE, Institute for Policy Studies: Well, the President made a decision, you know, on his energy policy coming out of the war that we were going to remain reliant on imported oil. We pay a lot for imported oil. The Japanese probably pay $21 a barrel these days, something like that. We pay $21 a barrel plus $60 billion a year in military forces to enforce order in the Middle East. And if we had an energy program that said we're going to be serious about conservation, we're going to attempt to find alternative fuels and develop different energy arrangements, this country could easily be energy independent. And with energy independence, then all of the turmoil in the Middle East becomes something that we're concerned about, that we want to be part of a collective response to, but that we are not economically threatened by. What upsets me is the lack of political leadership either from the White House or from the opposition willing to tell the people the truth and to talk about the real problems facing the country.

BILL MOYERS: [interviewing] And the truth is?

ROBERT BOROSAGE: The truth is we need to change our course dramatically. We need to get our own house in order. We need to change our priorities and invest at home.

BILL MOYERS: [interviewing] What do you make of the bumper stickers that say, ''We're number one and don't you forget it"?

ROBERT BOROSAGE: Well, I think the bumper stickers reflect the insecurity of the country. This is a country that is in increasing trouble internally, increasing inequality, increasing national debt, cities that are collapsing, schools that don't work. And so that assertion, ''We're number one, don't forget it," is in part an attempt to look past the day to- day troubles and grab onto something that's positive.

RANDY TRAVIS: [singing] There's a point when you cannot walk away / When you have to stand up straight and tall and mean the words you say / There's a point you must decide-

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Americans rejoice that their troops are coming home. To these returning soldiers and their loved ones, this war has a happy ending. But for the victims of Saddam's cruelty and American policy, the suffering continues. The camp in Isikveren is closed now. The refugees have been moved inside Iraq, protected for the moment by American soldiers. Once those soldiers are pulled out, these people will again be at Saddam Hussein's mercy. If he respects their rights, it would be the first promise he has kept. For us, the war is over. For millions, it isn't. Only by remembering them can our celebration be tempered by the truth. No war is clean. Every victory is someone's horror. The least we owe them is our grief. I'm Bill Moyers.