I finally finished transcribing this interview. Here are some quotes from the second half:
"[Terry Gross:] You were one of two people who smuggled out Iraqi documents documenting human rights violations and atrocities committed against the Kurds. What were the documents, how did you get them? [Peter Galbraith:] In March of 1991 there was an uprising in northern Iraq, and the Kurds took over all the Kurdish-majority cities and towns. And when they did that, they captured the buildings and the records of the Iraqi secret services, as well as of the Bath party. They took these records to the mountains so that when the Iraqis retook the Kurdish area at the end of March, they didn’t get the records back...when I went back in September of 1991...I talked to Jalal Talabani who is one of the two main Kurdish leaders, and he told me indeed that most of the documents had been rescued and moved to the mountains. So I said to him, "Well if they stay here, there’s a good chance that they will fall into Iraqi hands, and anyhow, they won’t be useful." And so he said, "Well, I agree, I think they should go out of Iraq, but I’m not going to give them to the Bush administration, I just don’t trust the American administration." He was very angry at the Americans for having called for the uprising and then failed to support it. So he said, "I’ll give it to you personally." Well that was a bit of a dilemma because I didn’t know what I would do with what turned out to be fourteen tons of documents. But in the end, we were able to get them out, actually on US military aircraft, [with] cooperation of the Pentagon. And then I deposited them in the files of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which meant they went into the US national archives, a special room was built for them below ground, out in Sutland, Maryland. And then Human Rights Watch, the human rights organization, began to do research on them. And they turned out to be extraordinary documents. They were ledgers of executions. They included the orders for the destruction of the villages, what was known as the Anfal Campaign. They included orders for the use of special weapons, which meant for chemical weapons. They included the tapes of meetings of the northern bureau. One of these tapes, for example, is Ali Hassan Majeed -- who is Saddam’s cousin who had been put in charge of the north -- in which he talks about using chemical weapons. He says, "We will use chemical weapons on the Kurds; who will object? The international community?" And here, I paraphrase the language: "To hell with them." So it is an extraordinary record, from the point of view of the Iraqi regime, of their activities."
"Looking at what the Iraqi regime has done, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a fascist regime that bears close resemblance to the fascist regimes in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe. It has an official ideology that glorifies one group, the Arabs, over the others. It has engaged in escalating atrocities against the minority that ultimately -- in my view but also in the view of Human Rights Watch -- rose to the level of genocide. And I think that it is appropriate for the United States to take action -- preferably with others in the international community, preferably, but not necessarily, pursuant to security council authorization -- against regimes that commit genocide. Genocide is an internationally recognized crime, and there is a convention, to which the US is a party, that obliges states to do something to stop and to punish the crime of genocide."
"In February of 1991, the first president Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein...By the middle of March of 1991, most of Iraq was in the hands of rebels. Saddam was about to topple. At that time, president Bush took the decision to let the rebellion fail. Not just to let it fail, but actually to facilitate its failure. So American troops who were on the Euphrates valley in southern Iraq, permitted Iraqi Republican Guard units to pass by their lines, and in some cases through American lines, to put down the rebellion in the southern city of Basra and Nasiriyah and in some other places. In the north, general Schwarzkopf allowed the Iraqis to use helicopters against the Kurds. And one has to understand the role of helicopters in the Kurdish psyche. Helicopters had often been used to deliver chemical weapons, so for the population in the city, when they saw those helicopters flying, they panicked, they fled. The helicopters also gave the Iraqis intelligence that they could use to target Kurdish militia units. The final thing that happened is that those people in Baghdad and in the Iraqi military who were wavering -- who were trying to figure out if they should overthrow Saddam or not -- looked at what the Bush administration was doing, got the clear message that the Bush administration did not want the rebellion to succeed, and decided to back Saddam. And as a consequence, Saddam stayed in power. We are dealing today with the failure of the first Bush administration to support the rebellion."
"The first Bush administration never talked to anybody in the opposition. There was a ban on talking to the Iraqi Kurds that continued until the beginning of April of 1991. So they had no idea of what the Iraqi Kurds were thinking....The current Bush administration is not repeating those mistakes. Paul Wolfowitz, who is the deputy secretary of defense, has known the Iraqi opposition leaders for many years. There are very regular contacts with the Kurdish leaders, there are developing contacts with the Shiite leaders, so I think that they have taken that lesson on board."
