Mission Of Mercy

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The Kurds were dying. Starvation, exposure and disease were killing as many as 1,000 a day. And that brute fact overcame the nervousness about being sucked into an endless political and perhaps military quagmire. Prodded by distressed allies, by outraged U.S. and European public opinion, and not least by his own conscience, George Bush last week finally did what he should have done long before: set in motion an unprecedented and bold operation that might at last bring effective succor to the Kurds -- at least to the 850,000 or so squatting along the Iraq-Turkey border and possibly to the 1.5 million who are seeking asylum in Iran.

To that end, American, British and French troops over the weekend began moving into northern Iraq, an area the allies had largely left alone throughout the gulf war. Over the next two weeks or so, these soldiers will build on relatively flat land as many as seven tent cities, each housing up to 100,000 Kurds. The idea is to bring the refugees down from the barren, freezing and almost inaccessible mountain slopes where they are perched and relocate them where they can be given adequate food, water, shelter, sanitation and medical care. And, of paramount importance, safety: the camps will be protected by as many as 10,000 soldiers from the U.S., 5,000 from Britain, 1,300 from France and 1,000 each from the Netherlands and Italy. from any attempt by Saddam Hussein to exact bloody vengeance for the Kurds' failed revolt.

But for how long? And what follows the supposedly temporary relocation? Nobody can say, but at minimum it seems that Bush will have to bid farewell to his hopes for a quick and clean American military withdrawal from the Middle East. The risks of the new effort, dubbed Operation Haven, may not have justified the President's long dithering in providing effective relief. But those risks are real, not chimerical.

Immediately, there is a danger that U.S. and other allied troops involved in Operation Haven will become enmeshed in a long-running battle between Baghdad and the Kurds. Few think Saddam would be so mad as to order a deliberate attack on the camps and their allied protectors. That would expose what remains of his army to more of the allied bombing that proved so devastating during the gulf war. But the allied soldiers could easily get into unplanned and escalating shooting incidents with the 30,000 or more Iraqi troops in the area.

U.S. Army Lieut. General John Shalikashvili, commander of the relief effort, met with Iraqi officers near the border town of Zakhu to warn them to keep their troops away from the camps; at further meetings Americans and Iraqis will try to work out some ground rules to keep the two forces apart. But it is by no means certain that they can succeed, especially if allied soldiers decide to seize Iraqi military airstrips to land construction materials and relief supplies for the camps. The Operation Haven troops could also get caught in cross fire between Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas using the camps as bases from which to stage raids. The allies say they will not allow guerrilla activity in the tent cities, but are not at all clear about how they intend to stop it.

It is also difficult to see when and how the allies can wind up Operation Haven. The U.S. and its friends insist they do not intend to let the tent cities become a second Gaza Strip, home to generations of embittered, stateless and disruptive exiles. Washington and London hope to turn over protection of the refugee settlements to a United Nations peacekeeping force in one to three months, and eventually to resettle the Kurds in their old homes under the eye of U.N. observers.

But that may be wishful thinking. U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar insists that a new Security Council resolution would be required to empower the organization to take part in Operation Haven. Any such resolution might well be vetoed by the Soviet Union or China. They would be afraid of setting a precedent for intervention that one day could be applied to the Baltic republics or Tibet.

Even getting the Kurds to come down from the mountains in the first place may not be easy. Some Kurds fear precisely what the allied governments hope -- that the U.S., British and French soldiers will leave in a month or so. If so, many Kurds believe, Saddam's forces will massacre them all, U.N. observers or no. Enticing the Kurds to return to Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah or the other cities from which they fled looks impossible as long as Saddam is in power. Already Administration officials assume that the U.S. and allied forces will have to stay until the dictator goes. But since Washington has no strategy for forcing Saddam out, that could mean maintaining garrisons for years in a country perpetually on the brink of explosion. "Going in is easy," sums up a high-ranking officer attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Getting out may be the problem."

It was exactly this fear of an open-ended commitment that for weeks kept Bush from organizing any effective relief effort. As late as Saturday, April 13 -- only three days before he finally ordered Operation Haven -- the President declared in a speech at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama: "I do not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that's been going on for ages." But while Bush was still in Alabama, where he had gone to fish for largemouth bass, Secretary of State James Baker phoned to report growing pressure from Congress and allies to save the Kurds. British Prime Minister John Major had already publicly proposed several versions of a plan to establish "safe havens" for the Kurds inside Iraq, and France had sent senior diplomats to the State Department to plead for U.S. participation in some such effort.

The Turkish government, Baker reported, was especially agitated. Turkish President Turgut Ozal confirmed as much in a phone call to Bush on Monday morning. Turkey could not take in the refugees, said Ozal, and American efforts to get aid to them in the mountains by airdrop or helicopter were insufficient; more were dying every day.

Bush reported this to his top national-security advisers at their regular Monday morning meeting, and the group assigned Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates to devise a plan. Gates convened a "deputies committee" of the second-ranking officials at State, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the CIA. By Monday afternoon they sought their chiefs' approval for Operation Haven, which Bush announced Tuesday afternoon after telephoning Major, French President Francois Mitterrand and Turkey's Ozal.

Some advisers were unenthusiastic to the end. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell "were not crazy about this idea" of sending troops into Iraq, says one high official. (A Pentagon source puts it more forcefully: "Colin got steamrollered.") National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft had argued since long before the gulf war that the U.S. should set two limited objectives -- drive Iraq out of Kuwait and break Saddam Hussein's offensive military power -- and once they were accomplished, get out quickly. But Bush, says a senior official, decided that "we simply could not allow 500,000 to a million people to die up there in the mountains. And that's precisely what might have happened."

The Administration has also decided to come to the aid of the Kurds who are stranded near the Iran-Iraq border. Initially, Bush suggested that the strain in American relations with Iran would limit U.S. assistance for the refugees. But late last week Iran made a formal plea for U.S. help through Swiss intermediaries. The Administration replied that it was prepared to send relief supplies once the Iranians detailed exactly what they needed. Said an Administration official: "We are comfortable doing it for humanitarian reasons."

The relief operations for the Kurds, however, do nothing for 50,000 Shi'ites who have taken refuge in the occupation zone of southern Iraq, from which coalition troops are rapidly withdrawing. The allies plan to place these refugees in camps within a nine-mile-wide demilitarized zone along the Iraq- Kuwait border that will be patrolled by a U.N. force.

Seen in this light, Operation Haven looks less like a bold venture and more like a minimum effort that is long overdue. Certainly the U.S. could, and should, organize a major relief effort for the Kurds fleeing toward Iran and try to ensure the safety of the southern Shi'ites. And it has bargaining levers to use with Saddam. Following the requirements of the cease-fire that ended the gulf war, Baghdad last week meekly asked the U.N. Security Council for permission to sell almost $1 billion worth of oil and use the money to buy badly needed food, medicine and other necessities for the populace still under Saddam's control. The U.S. and its allies, which have veto power in the council, are in a position to trade consent for some satisfactory arrangement bringing relief to the refugees.

Even then, the long-term stationing of military forces inside Iraq entails very genuine risks. Bush's worries about a Vietnam-style "quagmire" are not at all unrealistic. But the risks will just have to be borne. The alternative would be to abandon the Kurds to their fate, and no humane nation can do that.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame and Bruce van Voorst/Washington and William Mader/London