| http://www.fpa.org/topics_info2414/...m?doc_id=100339
Could you tell us a little bit about your experiences in Northern Iraq, working with the opposition to Saddam Hussein and the kinds of problems you had in gaining support here at home?
BB: I was in Iraq when a coup was proposed in 1995. A general, a major general, came to me and said that he had an inside group that wanted to overthrow the government. Frankly, there was no interest in Washington. I don't know why, it is not my story why there was no interest. I met somebody recently from inside the White House who said it was completely compromised, but I realized at that point that he wasn't aware of the coup, only of the diversion of the coup. There was an uprising in 1995, which was going to be a Kurdish uprising, and the hope was that once everybody started moving troops in the north, that this military group, an armored unit, would be able to surround Saddam and force him to give up. Would it have worked? I don't know. Should it have been postponed and tried later? I don't know. What happened was, although I reported this in detail on paper, I never got an answer. For some reason, people were distracted at home. Nonetheless, at that point I was left on my own. I gave them a message, from the White House, on the fourth of March, which said, “You are on your own.” I said, “Read it literally,” to them. “The President of the United States says you are on your own.”
And what was their reaction?
BB: It took the wind out of their sails, but they had already committed, and the message arrived 36 hours before the coup was supposed to go down. They couldn't pull back. One Kurdish group attacked the Iraqi army and overtook three divisions. But by the ninth or tenth of March they were out of ammunition and had to retreat. I can't say if we could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein or not, because we just never investigated. It was negligence. | |
