WASHINGTON: Military Leaders Fear History Repeating Itself- Iraq War Scenario Again

“What happens if we leave?” the normally reticent Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who until March was the commander of U.S. Central Command overseeing the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, wrote in an op-ed article in The Atlantic on Tuesday, two days after the White House announced it was leaving the Kurds. In the piece, Votel spoke fondly of the top Kurdish general, Mazloum Abdi, whom he called “impressive and thoughtful.”

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Votel, now retired, wrote that Turkish attacks on the Kurdish fighters, “coupled with a hasty U.S. departure, now threaten to rapidly destabilize an already fragile security situation in Syria’s northeast, where ISIS’ physical caliphate was only recently defeated.”

Paul D. Eaton, a retired major general and veteran of the Iraq War, was more blunt. “It takes time to build trust,” he said. “And any time you erode trust, like this, it’s that much harder to bring it back.”

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Pentagon officials fear that Turkey’s incursion could lead to the release of tens of thousands of Islamic State fighters and their families who are being held in detention facilities under Kurdish control, and a return, quickly, of the self-proclaimed caliphate that the United States and its partners have spent the last five years destroying.

But even more, they fear that the next time the United States is looking for help from fighters on the ground in the region, the Americans will not be able to find it.

This has happened before. In February 1991, as the Desert Storm campaign was unfolding in Iraq, President George H.W. Bush, during a rally in Andover, Massachusetts, suggested that the Iraqi people “take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”

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Two weeks later, Bush made another call to arms, saying that putting Hussein “aside” would “facilitate the resolution of all these problems that exist and certainly would facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations.”

Iraq’s feared Republican Guard did not heed Bush. But the Shiites and the Kurds did. On March 1, the day after Bush halted the Desert Storm war effort, Iraqi Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north began a rebellion against Hussein.

At first, things went swiftly and well for the Shiites and the Kurds, as a succession of Iraqi cities and towns — although not Baghdad — came under their control.

But the United States never stepped in to assist, and Hussein’s military soon regrouped and began a counteroffensive. In fact, the cease-fire negotiated by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf to end Desert Storm helped Hussein quell the uprising. The deal prohibited the Iraqi military from using fixed-wing aircraft over the country but allowed helicopters, which Hussein then deployed to bombard the Shiites, who had few surface-to-air missiles or heavy weapons. They were largely defenseless against the helicopters strafing the ground.

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In the north, Iraqi divisions crushed the Kurdish rebellion.

Shiite and Kurdish leaders turned to the Americans, begging for help. It did not come. U.S. warplanes in the south did not engage as the Republican Guard wiped out the rebellious Shiites by the thousands.

Human Rights Watch reported that “in their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas” and “executing young people on the streets, in homes and in hospitals.” The Iraqi military, Human Rights Watch said, was shooting people “en masse.”

Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the undersecretary of defense for policy, was “dismayed,” he would say later, by the president’s unwillingness to support the Shiite uprising, and particularly by the order that American pilots not shoot down Iraqi military helicopters that were strafing the rebels.

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More than a decade later, President George W. Bush was surrounded by many of the same national security advisers his father had. One in particular, Wolfowitz, was forcefully making the case that it was time for the United States to do what it did not in 1991: Go after Hussein.

When the United States finally did enter Iraq in 2003, the Shiites, while welcoming the toppling of Hussein, did not greet the Americans as liberators.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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