necessitated the long-term occupation of large cities, exposing the occupiers to the
dangers that the US Marines had faced in Beirut in 1982. If Bush were determined to
wipe out the government of Iraq, then he would have to provide an occupation
government, or else let the country collapse into civil war and partition. One of the big
winners in any partition would surely be Iran; the mullah regime would use its Shiite
organizations in southern Iraq to carve off a large piece of Iraqi territory, placing Iran in
an excellent position to threaten both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait early in the postwar
period. This would have caused much dismay in the Saudi royal family. Arab public
opinion was inflamed to such a degree that most Arab governments would not have been
able to participate in the destruction of the Iraqi Baath Party, since this was an objective
that was clearly not covered by the UN resolutions. Based on these and other
considerations, Bush appears to have made a characteristic snap decision to end the war.
Bush ended the war with a claim that the US casualty list for the entire operation stood at
223 killed; but, in keeping with the mind war censorship that had cloaked all the
proceedings, no casualty list was ever published. The true number of those killed is
therefore not known, and is likely to be much higher than that claimed by Bush.
A part of southern Iraq was occupied by the US and other coalition forces. On March 14,
Bush met with Mitterrand on the French island of Martinique and there was some falling
out on questions of the future new world order "architecture" in the Middle East. On
March 16, Bush met with British Prime Minister Major on Bermuda. Bush's public line
was that there could be no normalization of relations with Iraq as long as Saddam
Hussein remained in power. Since the days of the Treaty of Sevres at the end of World
War I, London had been toying with the idea of an independent Kurdish state in eastern
Anatolia. The British were also anxious to use the aftermath of the war in order to
establish precedents in international law to undermine the sovereignty of independent
nations, and to create ethnic enclaves short of a complete partition of Iraq. British, Israeli,
and US assets had combined to provoke a large-scale Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq,
and this produced a civil war in the country. But the Republican Guard, which had
allegedly been destroyed by the coalition, and the Iraqi army, were still capable of
defending the Baath Party government against these challenges, a factor which doubtless
also cooled Bush's enthusiasm for further intervention.
During the latter half of March, calls were made for the creation of a Kurdish enclave in
northern Iraq under the protection of the coalition. On April 2, the State Department
restated the Bush administration line of non-intervention and "hands off" Iraqi internal
affairs, and Bush himself repeated this line on April 3. But British pressure was about to
create an extraordinary reversal, which showed the world that even after the departure of
Thatcher, and while he was allegedly at the height of his glory, Bush was still taking
orders from London. On April 5, Bush yielded partially to the clamor to intervene in
favor of the Kurds, who had now been militarily defeated by the Iraqi army and were
seeking refuge in Iran and in the Turkish mountains of southeast Anatolia. On April 7,
US planes began air drops of supplies into these Turkish and Iraqi areas. Then, on April
8, Major repeated his demand for "safe zone" enclaves for the Kurds to be created and
guaranteed by the coalition in territory carved out of northern Iraq. It was a clear
interference in Iraqi internal affairs, and a clear violation of international law, but the