Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 6, 1991                   TAG: 9104090476
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NON-INTERVENTION: TRAGIC, BUT CORRECT

The stories told by Iraqis streaming to the borders are horrifying. One refugee reports that his son was beheaded. Another says families have been lured from their houses and slaughtered with artillery. Such accounts have led some Americans to wonder why U.S. forces should not have intervened on behalf of the rebels.

The question is probably moot now anyway. The insurrection seems to have been put down; the refugee problem has supplanted it. An end to the violence and the start of rebuilding will come sooner with the cessation than with a prolongation of civil conflict.

In any case, the decision to avoid U.S. intervention was, if anguishing, nonetheless correct.

Notwithstanding the cries of betrayal coming from some quarters, shooting down a few helicopters would not have done the trick. Saddam apparently saved his best forces and weapons for after the war over Kuwait. In all likelihood, U.S. troops could not have spared Kurdish and Shiite rebels from defeat or Iraqi civilians from bloody revenge except with full and endless intervention and occupation, including the capture and indefinite holding of Baghdad. Such a scenario holds little prospect for a good outcome.

So, too, the division of Iraq into Kurdish and Shiite states, and the invitation to Iraq's neighbors to carve up zones of influence and hegemony. There is no indication that any governments arising from civil war would be democratic, pro-Western or stable.

Moreover, United Nations resolutions do not extend to involvement in civil war and imposition of a friendly government in Iraq. The United States, having ousted Saddam from Kuwait, does not have legal authority or allied support for intervening further in Iraq. That nation's fate, violent though it may be, is ultimately Iraqis' to decide.

This is not, of course, to excuse the position in which the administration has found itself. Today's chaos is a predictable consequence of misguided and zigzagging past policies.

When the Reagan administration supported Saddam's regime after it invaded Iran, little concern was shown for the sufferings of Iraqis under Saddam's rule. When congressional Democrats tried to impose sanctions against his human-rights abuses, the Reagan and Bush administrations and their allies in Congress blocked the effort.

When Bush, in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, abandoned the sanctions policy he had put in place and resorted to war last January, he ordered the bombing of Iraq's civilian infrastructure as part of the Desert Storm operation. The effect was to leave the country, according to a recent U.N. report, in a "pre-industrial state."

When Bush called for Iraqis to rise up from this war-induced turmoil and overthrow Saddam, he did not make sufficiently clear that the United States would offer no help. On the contrary, he approved CIA plans for aid to the rebels, then declined to implement them. He said no gunships would be allowed in the air against the rebels, then reversed his decision.

And when insurrection arose, but the Bush administration rediscovered the virtues of non-intervention, the inevitable result was to give up Kurds and Shiites to Saddam's butchery.

The common denominator underlying all the policy shifts has been suffering for the Iraqi people.

Of course, it must be emphasized that Bush has not caused that suffering; Saddam has. It also should be emphasized that, having fulfilled relevant U.N. resolutions and pried Iraq from Kuwait, the administration was right to sidestep the civil war.

Still, the United States has incurred a moral obligation for the fate of the refugees. We must lead the humanitarian effort to ease their plight. And we must keep the oil and arms embargo in place - and stringently enforce cease-fire terms - until the genocidal Saddam is gone.

The administration says non-intervention offers the quickest way to bring home America's troops. It is, says an official, "the yellow-ribbon road." Alas, for Iraqis, the road is blood-red.