THE GENERAL had a point. Although the Kurds had no role in the coup, at least in the beginning, they definitely had the potential to spoil it. By mid-February, their civil war had spread all over the north. Iran and Turkey were about to intervene, and the temptation for Saddam to stick his snout under the Kurdish tent was quickly becoming irresistible.
The origins of the Kurdish conflict go deep into time, history, and character. By late February 1995, though, the ancient rifts had come down to two main factions: the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP; and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. They had fought each other to a near standoff, but rather than just call a truce as any group in its right mind might do, they continued to battle on. Worse, as their desperation grew, both were separately considering inviting Saddam and his despised army to intervene in the north—the same Saddam who had gassed the Kurds in 1988, killing thousands of civilians.
Any appeal to Saddam would be a disaster for the coup plotters. Committed troops couldn’t refuse orders to go into in Kurdistan: Saddam would immediately and ruthlessly crush even the hint of a mutiny. The general made it clear to me from the beginning that the committee needed the status quo to hold up until the last minute, but it was more than just the committee’s coup at stake. The Iraqi army back in the north, even for a day, would be an irreversible symbolic victory for Saddam. Steeped in conspiracy theory, Iraqis would immediately assume that the United States had secretly given Saddam the green light to go in and that they had been right all along in believing that the Americans wanted to keep Saddam in power.
Forget the truth of the matter, or even the logic that undergirded the assumptions. If Saddam was ever going to be thrown out, the Iraqis were going to have to do the job and not us. It was their perceptions that counted, not ours. If they were convinced the U.S. secretly kept Saddam in place, they would conclude that it was futile to act against him.
THE KURDS weren’t the only desperate ones. Ahmad Chalabi understood as well as anyone just how fragile the situation was.
Chalabi was head of the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi opposition umbrella group based in Salah al-Din. When I first met him in Washington one muggy August afternoon in 1994, it was difficult to imagine someone less likely to unseat Saddam. Marching across the lobby of the Key Bridge Marriott in his Saville Row suit, $150 Italian silk tie, and hand-stitched calfskin oxfords, he looked more like the successful Levantine banker he once had been than like someone who was going to ride into Baghdad on the top of a tank. Short and overweight, his body showed the side effects of too many long business lunches at first-class European restaurants. When he shook my hand, I picked up the faint smell of scented soap.
As incongruous as Chalabi’s appearance was, his résumé offered even less promise that he might one day lead a successful Iraqi opposition. First, he was a member of Iraq’s lowest caste—the Shi’a Muslims, who had never ruled Iraq and weren’t about to anytime soon. Second, Chalabi’s family had been forced to flee Iraq for Lebanon in 1958 when the Hashemite monarchy fell. Thirteen years old at the time, Chalabi had grown up abroad, exchanging his Iraqi accent for a Lebanese one. Chalabi was further tainted when he attended graduate school in the U.S. While picking up a master’s degree at MIT and a Ph. D. in numbers theory at the University of Chicago, he had learned to speak American idiomatic English. No matter what Chalabi said about his Iraqi nationalist credentials, Iraqis looked at him as a stateless exile. Finally, a bank that Chalabi had owned in Jordan, the Petra Bank, collapsed in 1989, losing hundreds of millions of depositors’ dollars. Although no one was sure who ended up with the money, Chalabi was blamed, and a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement.
Outside Iraq, Chalabi was a felon; inside, he remained almost completely unknown. But what he lacked by way of credentials, he made up for in brains, energy, and a practiced political touch, all qualities that were tested daily by the Iraqi National Congress. The capos of the opposition who made up the congress were a sack of fighting alley cats. Shi’a clerics, Bedouin chiefs, royals, communist apparatchiks, ex–military officers, ex–Ba’th Party officials, Kurdish chieftains—they hated one another as much as they hated Saddam. What’s more, each one of them thought he was more qualified to head the group than Chalabi.
Chalabi had been elected president of the INC at a 1992 meeting in Vienna, and for two years he had managed more or less to hold it together. By the time I met him in mid-1994, though, his authority had come under serious challenge. The main Shi’a Muslim groups had dropped their anchor in Tehran, where Chalabi was seen as a tail-wagging CIA dog. A more serious threat came from the Iraqi National Accord. One of the important constituent groups of the congress, it was threatening to bolt from the organization even as it was trying sub-rosa to unseat Chalabi. By early 1995 Chalabi was running what was in effect a rump INC—the Kurds. If Saddam invaded the north, Chalabi would lose even the Kurds, not to mention his base of operations. Most likely, he would be forced into exile again, and Chalabi knew better than anyone that Saddam wasn’t going to be overthrown from a European café.
For a guy with virtually no internal support in Iraq, Chalabi knew how to get things done and especially how to nudge people where he wanted them to go. He had produced a lengthy position paper entitled “End Game,” on how to jump-start the March 1991 uprisings, when the Shi’as and Kurds had taken advantage of the end of the Gulf War to try to wrest power from Saddam and his Sunni supporters. The paper had been well shopped around Washington by the time Chalabi presented me with a copy—at a sushi restaurant in Georgetown, two days after our first meeting—but if the thinking wasn’t particularly new, “End Game” did help him stand out in the crowd. Besides, it wasn’t like we were being overwhelmed with other plans to get rid of Saddam.
Chalabi would call me occasionally on a secure telephone from Salah al-Din, where he spent about half the year, to entreat me to set up a CIA base in the north. The Kurdish fighting was getting out of hand, he would say; only an official American presence there could stop it. Since the State Department still refused to establish its own mission in northern Iraq, the CIA was the next best thing. I thought Chalabi had a good point, but it wasn’t until the general defected from Saddam’s army and crossed into the north that I was able to convince my bosses to let me put together the team and head to Kurdistan.
I HAD BEEN PLANNING to keep my team in Zakhu, along the Turkish border. The general who had defected would be returning there after his meeting with Turkish authorities, and at least for the moment, Zakhu was out of the way of the warring Kurds. Headquarters wasn’t anxious for us to venture to Salah al-Din in the middle of the fighting. Chalabi, though, would hear none of it. About an hour after the general finished telling me about the coup, Chalabi was on the telephone, urging us to move forward to Salah al-Din.
“You absolutely must be here for Litt’s visit,” Chalabi hollered over the static on the line one morning. “Don’t wait in Zakhu for the general. The Kurds won’t understand why you’re not in the Litt meetings.”
Litt was David Litt, the director of the State Department’s North Gulf Affairs and the de facto ambassador to Iraq. He traveled to the north once or twice a year, staying no more than a few hours each time. Unlike CIA personnel who had to drive to the north, he traveled in U.S. military Blackhawk helicopters, which cut the trip from days to hours.
I’d briefly met Litt in Washington and found him humorless. I had the further impression that he disliked the CIA. Still, after I started working in the Iraqi Operations Group, I called him and offered to drive down to State to brief him on what the CIA was doing about Iraq. He never returned my call. I tried a few more times before giving up, but I did learn before we left Washington that Litt intended to visit the Kurds about the time we were due to arrive, so I called up State and asked what was on his agenda. The State desk officer wouldn’t even tell me what day Litt was supposed to visit the north. Now I was being invited to the party, albeit from the other side.
Chalabi must have sensed my hesitation over the phone. “Don’t worry. The shelling has stopped. I’ve just talked to the Kurds. They’ve promised to be on their best behavior.”
WE ARRIVED IN SALAH AL-DIN a little after one and went straight to Chalabi’s house. The street was jammed with vehicles and guerrillas toting AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Chalabi’s aide told me that Litt had already met the Kurdish leaders and was just finishing up with Chalabi.
Litt was speechless when he saw me walk through the door. Without even a nod in my direction, he turned to a distinguished man in a charcoal-gray suit sitting next to him and whispered in his ear. They both stood up, shook Chalabi’s hand, and headed for the door. A few seconds later I heard their cars start up and leave in a blare of horns, and the shouting of the Kurdish fighters, known as pech merga. Not long after, the whirr of Blackhawk rotors passed above the house.
Chalabi walked back into the room, smiling.
“Who was the suit with Litt?” I asked.
“A Turk. He’s in charge of Iraqi affairs at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Chalabi was savoring the irony: The Turkish government was privy to what the State Department was doing in Iraq, but the CIA wasn’t.
“Well?” I said.
“Mr. Litt had a splendid pair of meetings, first with Talabani and then with Barzani.”
Jalal Talabani was head of the PUK; Masud Barzani the KDP.
“I suppose Litt demanded they knock off the fighting or we pull our air cover,” I said. In Salah al-Din, it almost passed for humor
Chalabi laughed. “Litt told them—you’re going to have to sit down for this—the U.S. intends to pay for a force to separate the Kurds. He promised two million dollars.”
“Whose money?” I asked, knowing State didn’t have it.
“Yours. The CIA’s.”
Chalabi was nearly beside himself with joy. There was nothing he liked more than watching the U.S. government trip over its own feet.
That night I got on the telephone to Washington. No one had heard about the $2 million. An hour later, headquarters called back. Not only had the CIA never agreed to fund an interposition force, doing so would be flat-out illegal. The damage, though, was already done. The Kurds didn’t distinguish between the State Department and the CIA. Litt had made the promise. I was the one who would pay the price.
WHEN IT FINALLY BECAME CLEAR in a few weeks that there would be no money for Litt’s army, the fighting picked up. Talabani’s PUK was down to the bottom of the barrel. It could either launch one final offensive against the KDP or spend its last nickel on a call to Saddam in Baghdad. Something had to be done.
“The clock is running out,” Chalabi said over dinner one night. “Litt has destroyed your credibility. The Kurds will never listen to you now. Only a preemptive strike can save the situation.”
Chalabi was right. I considered telling him about the general’s secret committee and its coup, but knowing about it would have frustrated Chalabi more.
“What will Washington do if I organize an uprising?” he asked. “It’s the only way to stop Talabani from attacking.”
I knew that no one in Washington would put credence in Chalabi’s uprising, just as no one really cared if the Kurds quietly shelled each other into smithereens. PUK and KDP were acronyms that the national security cognoscenti threw around to keep the uninitiated off-stride. Washington’s only real interest was to keep the Kurds out of the front pages of the leading newspapers. In the dank swamp that Iraq had long since become, no news was very good news. Still, I thought, why not let Chalabi propose his uprising? At the least, it might force Washington to deal with the secret committee’s coup.
“Schedule one and then ask,” I answered.
Chalabi did just that. The next day he asked me to inform Washington that he would lead an uprising on March 4, to begin exactly at ten P. M. Boiled down to its bones, it called for Talabani’s and Barzani’s combined guerrillas to launch small-scale, simultaneous attacks along Iraqi army lines in the north. A Kurdish fifth column would provoke disturbances in Kirkuk and Mawsil and sabotage government facilities all over Iraq. The Shi’a groups in the south would start attacking the Iraqi army at the same time. Within twenty-four hours, Chalabi predicted, the army would revolt and join the uprising. It was pretty much the same plan Chalabi had described in his “End Game.” Although neither Talabani nor Barzani had agreed to participate, Chalabi felt that once he threw down the gauntlet, they would—especially if the U.S. were to offer some sign of support.
I wrote a message to Washington about Chalabi’s plans, specifying the day and hour. Knowing Washington’s opinion about Chalabi and his shopworn “End Game,” I was fairly convinced that a message would come back with the return mail ordering him to call it off, or at least postpone it. Silly me.
WHEN IT CAME to convincing the Kurds to join the uprising, the hardest nut for Chalabi to crack was Masud Barzani.
Barzani was the son of the noted Kurdish rebel Mustafa Barzani, or the Red Mullah, as he was popularly known in the U.S. Mustafa had led a sporadic guerrilla war against Saddam in the early 1970s, but after the Shah of Iran and Henry Kissinger pulled the plug on him in 1974, Mustafa was forced to give up. He moved to the United States and died a broken man in his bed in McLean, Virginia. Not without reason, perhaps, Masud distrusted the U.S. government and, in particular, the CIA. Only grudgingly did he allow the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress to keep its headquarters in Salah al-Din, a town under Barzani’s control.
To make matters worse, Barzani was doing fine with the status quo. After spending most of his life in exile, he enjoyed having his own country, even if it was only a virtual one. Operation Provide Comfort, the air protection provided by American planes, came free of charge—the U.S. almost never attempted to interfere in his affairs—and by late 1994 Barzani had a nice little business in smuggled Iraqi oil.
In the months before the Gulf War, the United Nations had imposed a total oil embargo on Iraq, cutting off all exports, including oil. Almost immediately, though, the embargo had sprung leaks. First it was barges in the Gulf, running the blockade at night. Soon an overland route to Turkey opened up. Vegetable trucks transported the oil from Kirkuk in jerry-rigged tanks welded to their undercarriages. By 1995 some estimates put the quantity as high as a hundred thousand barrels a day crossing into Turkey. To get there, the oil had to pass through a large tract of Kurdistan controlled by the KDP, and Barzani took his cut from each truck. The smuggled oil was also a lifeline for Saddam, who used the money to fund his intelligence services and Special Republican Guards—the forces that kept him alive. Indeed, everyone seemed to profit from the smuggling except Talabani, who wasn’t getting a penny because no part of the smuggling route passed through his corner of Kurdistan. With Barzani accumulating money in his war chest, smuggled oil began to dangerously destabilize the north.
You only had to drive a few miles into the north to understand the dimensions of the smuggling operation. Trucks carrying oil were lined up bumper to bumper, often for as long as twenty miles, waiting to cross into Turkey. One Kurd told us that when there was a spike in Turkish oil demand, the trucks stretched all the way to the Iraqi lines beyond Dahuk, about seventy miles. Over the months upon months of smuggling, so much oil had leaked from the trucks that the road was dangerously slick to drive on.
Washington knew all about the smuggling but pretended it wasn’t happening. As far as I know, neither the State Department nor our embassy in Ankara ever challenged Turkey, which could have shut down the whole operation with a single telephone call. Part of the problem was that the Turks were already unhappy about the Gulf War’s aftermath. We’d promised Turkey a quick, decisive war but never mentioned the possibility of an open-ended embargo and the long-term damage it would have on Turkey’s economy. But there was also a bureaucratic roadblock to enforcing the embargo: Our embassy in Ankara fell under the State Department’s European Bureau. Smuggled oil, Saddam, Iraqi dissidents, the fractious Kurds—they were the Near East Bureau’s problem. All our Ankara embassy cared about was keeping the Turks happy, and if the Turks said they needed cheap oil for their refineries, well, that was good enough for Ankara.
What I couldn’t understand was why the White House didn’t intervene. All it had to do was ask Saudi Arabia to sell Turkey a hundred thousand barrels of discounted oil. Turkey certainly would have stopped the smuggling for the right price. It was almost as if the White House wanted Saddam to have a little walking-around money.
For Iraqis, of course, the arrangement made perfect sense. By turning a blind eye to the smuggled oil, the U.S. managed to turn the Kurdish opposition against itself even as it helped Saddam pay for his praetorian guard, just what you’d expect of a clever superpower that was secretly supporting the local despot.
MY OWN RELATIONS with Masud Barzani went sour from the start. Whenever I met with him at his Sar-i Rash office, a former government guest house about a five-minute drive from Salah al-Din, Barzani would begin to shift uneasily in his seat as soon as I raised the subject of the ongoing fighting between the Kurds. It wouldn’t be long before he would sit bolt upright, straighten himself to his full height (his feet still wouldn’t touch the floor), and start cursing Talabani. This would be my signal that the meeting was over. Once, when I told him the U.S. was fed up with the Kurds and would abandon the north one day, Barzani lost his temper. He walked over to where I was sitting, pointed his index finger at me, and hissed through clenched teeth: “Don’t threaten me.”
It didn’t seem possible, but as the fighting picked up, my stock with Barzani sank even lower. On February 17 I asked him about his relations with Iran. Angry as ever, he flatly denied that he even had a channel to Iran, let alone the ability to attack the PUK from Iranian soil. The next day, when I visited Talabani at Qolat Cholan, his camp near the Iranian border, he told me that he’d just learned Barzani had cut a deal with Iran that would allow him to transport artillery across Iranian soil so he could attack the PUK from the east. The axis of the assault would be Panjwin, a PUK-held town on the Iranian border.
A little before six A. M. the next morning, Talabani woke me to tell me that, just as he had predicted, Barzani’s forces were shelling Panjwin from the foothills on the Iranian side of the border. If true, it had the makings of a catastrophe for the U.S.: Iran had to be kept out of Iraq at all costs. When I called Barzani on the satellite telephone, he swore his troops were not in Iran and he wasn’t shelling Panjwin, from Iran or anywhere else. Someone was lying. I decided I had to take a look myself.
Talabani loaned me four Toyota Land Cruisers and a Toyota pickup with a .50-caliber machine gun bolted on its bed, and we drove about four hours through snow-patched mountains. Descending the valley into Panjwin, I saw no immediate sign of a bombardment. At the town’s edge, I was met by the local PUK commander and the mayor, who showed me around. On foot, you could see the smoking craters. I picked up the fragment of a 107mm base plate. It was warm. The mayor explained that the shelling had stopped once the rumor circulated that the “American ambassador” was on his way.
As we walked through the town, the villagers slowly started to come out of the ruins and follow us. One man was so furious that he picked up a boulder and threw it at an unexploded shell, cursing Barzani. I sped our little inspection tour on, right up to the Iranian border. By now I was close enough to clearly see that the gunners manning the 107mm rockets on the far side of the border were Barzani’s pech merga. Behind them stood khaki-clad soldiers from Iran’s Pasdaran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
As soon as I got back to Talabani’s camp, I called Barzani to tell him what I’d seen at Panjwin.
“You betrayed me” was his only response.
Granted, I had gone to see for myself what was happening, and I’d used Talabani’s equipment and men to get there, but only in the Middle East could you betray someone by refusing to accept the lie he had told you in the first place.
BARZANI’S KURDISH NEMESIS, Jalal Talabani, was not only genial and urbane; he was also a first-rate actor and a world-class politician. Built along the lines of a double-wide fireplug and with a smile as broad as the Euphrates, Talabani enjoyed the role of a likable rogue. When I would confront him after he’d made some unprovoked attack on one of Barzani’s positions, he’d laugh, hand me a cigar, and promise not to do it again. And the next day, of course, he’d start attacking all over again. Truth suffered with both men, but at least with Talabani, there were some good times in the bargain.
Talabani was an Iraqi nationalist. He believed that the Kurds should have a degree of autonomy, but he didn’t want to see Iraq partitioned among its ethnic groups. Unlike Barzani, Talabani seemed to genuinely want Saddam gone and was ready to make any sacrifice necessary to accomplish that aim. Talabani even had his own plan for getting rid of Saddam.
He first told Tom and me about it at a meeting in Kui Sinjaq, his native village, on March 2. Talabani ushered us into his bedroom, out of earshot of the political bureau and military commanders who waited in his cramped living room. Books and papers were everywhere—on the bed, under the bed, stacked against the walls. With the lights off and curtains drawn, the room smelled of sleep. The three of us sat on the edge of Talabani’s unmade bed.
“I am at a fork in the road,” Talabani said in his fluent but heavily accented English.
There were two choices staring him in the face, he said, neither of them safe. He could continue fighting Barzani, as he had for the last year, but it had become a war of attrition and he was unlikely to be able to inflict a decisive defeat. In the meantime, the dirty oil money was giving Barzani an insurmountable cash advantage. At the present level of conflict, Talabani wouldn’t have anything left to fight with in a week or two. Or, he said, he could launch an out-and-out offensive—a do-or-die effort against Barzani and his KDP before the PUK’s stocks of weapons and ammunition ran out completely. Apart from its finality, the latter plan ran the risk of sucking in an outside power, like Iran or Turkey, or encouraging Saddam to step in from the south.
“And that is what is worrying me now,” Talabani said.
He had received information from a spy inside the KDP camp that Barzani was panicking and ready to make common cause with Baghdad. Using the same channel he employed for his oil business, Barzani had promised Saddam that if Talabani were to launch an uprising, he wouldn’t participate in it. In return, Barzani expected Saddam’s help in expelling Talabani from Irbil, the administrative capital of Kurdistan, which the PUK had seized the year before.
“He’s a weak man,” Talabani said of his rival, “prey to a narrow tribal view of the world—someone who doesn’t give a damn about the opposition or Chalabi’s uprising or even overthrowing Saddam. He cares only about the Barzan clan and would make a pact with the devil to protect it.
“So I could do nothing, keep my fingers crossed, and hope Barzani and Saddam don’t make a deal. But I have another choice. Simply turn over the card table.”
Talabani spread out a map of Iraq on the bed, pushing a stack of books onto the floor.
“Look here. This is the V Corps line,” he said, running his finger along V Corps positions south of Irbil. V Corps was the main Iraqi force in the north facing PUK and KDP lines. “What do you see?”
“A reinforced Iraqi army corps,” I answered, refusing to believe he was about to propose attacking it.
“That’s what it says on your Pentagon’s maps, with all of those little flags standing for divisions and brigades. But what I see is a demoralized, vulnerable, beatable army.”
Talabani grabbed my hand to make sure he had my full attention.
“What I’m going to do is simply pull back my troops off the Irbil line—just abandon it—then march them south and hit V Corps here, here, and here,” he said, jabbing his thick finger at three V Corps divisions. “And you’ll see. Entire companies, even divisions, will surrender at the first shot.”
“And if Barzani attacks you from the rear?” I asked.
“If he does, everyone will know him for the traitor he is, and he will not survive a day. His own people will squash him like a bug.”
“And what happens if you defeat V Corps?”
“That’s where you come in. We’ll see how badly Mr. Clinton wants to get rid of Saddam.”
On the face of it, a band of Kurdish irregulars attacking an Iraqi army corps head-on was like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute: a thrill ride destined to end in a splat. V Corps wasn’t the finest fighting unit in the Iraqi army, but it had plenty of armor and artillery, and its forward positions along the Kurdish lines were dug in behind berms, razor wire, and concrete bunkers. In addition, it was backed up by a fully manned and equipped elite Republican Guards Division, and it was positioned well below the thirty-sixth parallel, where Saddam’s Mi-24 Hind gunships were allowed to fly. Harassing V Corps was one thing; engaging it in a battle, quite another.
As for his own forces, Talabani had no more than two thousand lightly armed pech merga to throw against V Corps. The few tanks he had captured from Saddam in 1991 had been sold to Iran. While he had some artillery, he was critically short of ammunition. Toyota Land Cruisers, his troops’ only transportation, gave him speed and mobility but nothing else. The Land Cruisers would be sitting ducks for Saddam’s gunships.
But Talabani was neither crazy nor reckless. He had fought Saddam’s army before, and he understood its vulnerabilities as well as anyone. If Talabani thought he could take on V Corps, there had to be something to it, at least to my thinking. The critical question, as I saw it, was just how bad off the Iraqi army was, and bits and pieces of evidence suggested it was in real trouble.
Handfuls of Iraqi defectors had been slipping into the north ever since the Gulf War. Now the trickle was turning into a river, and they carried tales of a defeated army: scarce rations, no ammunition, no fuel. The elite Republican Guards were only slightly better off, the defectors said. In late 1994 Saddam had ordered the ears of captured deserters cut off, another sign of rising discontent. Every night Iraqi television ran grotesque pictures of young men with missing ears, blood running down their necks.
In short, the stars seemed to be aligning against Saddam, even if no one could be certain his army was on the brink of collapse. The problem was that no one—not I or Chalabi or Talabani, certainly not anyone back in distant Washington—could tell what and whom the stars were aligning around. Talabani’s war plan threw a third ring into the circus, along with the general’s coup and Chalabi’s “End Game” attack. Could attacking V Corps work? Was Talabani serious about pulling the trigger, or was he just playing politics with me and, through me, with Barzani and all the others? I really didn’t know. The only beacon I had to go by was what I understood American policy to be: that we would support any serious movement to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Those were my orders as I understood them, the reason I had brought my team into northern Iraq. And I took my orders seriously.
“So, what should I do?” Talabani asked when he finished. “What choice do I make? Fight Barzani or Saddam?”
“Make a truce with Barzani.”
“It’s too late for that. Barzani is desperate. At any minute he will sign an agreement with Saddam, and when he does, we will all be finished—the Kurds, the opposition, and you.”
“What about his promise to join Chalabi’s insurrection on March 4?”
“Barzani is sitting up on his mountain just itching to betray it,” Talabani said. “If he really cared about the opposition and uniting the Kurds, he would have agreed long ago to share the money from the oil.”
I hesitated before speaking. I wanted to choose my words carefully. “Jalal, if the choice comes down to Saddam invading the north or you attacking V Corps—and those really are the only alternatives—you know which side I come down on.”
“I knew that was going to be your answer.” Talabani laughed, crushing my hand in his iron grip. “Let’s go tell the others.”
There were just enough chairs in Talabani’s dining room, the largest room in his house, for everyone to sit on. I looked at Talabani’s field commanders as they filed in and took their seats around the table. They were an odd lot. Half were unreconstructed Marxists who had spent most of their lives in Europe and came back to Iraq in March 1991 only to fight Saddam. The rest were hard-as-nails guerrilla fighters whose sole interest was slitting the throats of Saddam’s soldiers.
Standing at the end of the table, Talabani waited patiently for the room to go quiet. Even after it did, he stood silently for a good minute. Then, with “It’s time to turn our guns on Saddam,” the room exploded into clapping and shouting. Talabani went on for another fifteen minutes in Kurdish. By the end, his commanders would have run through the wall if he’d asked.
As soon as Talabani sat down, his pech merga swept into the room bearing enormous platters heaped with lamb, rice, and Persian nan, the waiters handsomely accented by bandoliers and sashes.
When it was time to go, Talabani walked Tom and me to our car. Just as I was about to climb in, he took me by the elbow and pulled me aside so no one could hear us.
“You know, I can’t do this alone. What is Washington going to do when I attack?”
“Washington wants Saddam out.” That wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but there was no point in telling him that Washington was simply ignoring him, me, and Iraq. It hadn’t even responded to the message I had sent in mid-February on the day and hour Chalabi’s uprising would begin.
No question, I was operating on the edge of my orders, out where the bright fires burn, but so far as I knew, I was telling Talabani the truth. 
. And I hadn’t yet seen Tony Lake’s cable. Even after I did, it would take some time for all its implications to sink in. I had no idea that while I was running around Kurdistan trying to find some way to help Saddam Hussein’s enemies drive him from authority, Washington had forgotten to care whether he stayed in power or not.
“Jalal,” I said again, by way of emphasis, “I assure you Washington wants Saddam gone.”