Exactly! In fact, I just got done posting this snip from an article Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1996 detailing this failure...and its implications on the problem we face today:
"...Perhaps most damaging was the pretense that nothing serious needed to be done to bring the feuding Kurdish factions together. In 1992 Secretary of State James Baker brought the Kurdish factions together as part of an Arab-Kurdish coalition, a coalition that was intact when its representatives met the following year with Vice President Al Gore and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who assured them that the U.S. would protect Iraq's Shiites and Kurds and would make no deals with Saddam.
Yet in 1995, when the Kurdish factions began to show serious divisions, the administration failed to lead. According to press reports, the administration even disowned promises of military support for a successful operation against Iraqi forces (this was further confirmed by the CIA). The most serious mistake was the failure to address the root of the conflict among the factions, their desperate need for resources. The administration never moved to provide an exception from the U.N. sanctions--which were supposed to be aimed at Saddam--for the liberated north of Iraq, which was being strangled far more seriously.
Desperate Kurdish factions began fighting over the limited resources available. And when the democratic Iraqi opposition negotiated a peace agreement between the two main Kurdish factions, the administration couldn't even come up with $4 million for a monitoring force to supervise the accord. Little wonder the Kurdish factions began to look elsewhere for support..."
What's important to note because of Clinton's lack of support, is that some of these Kurdish factions DID look for support from other sources. One of those sources just happened to be Zarqawi and AQ, who began funding a small group of fighters know as Jund al-Islam...who later turned into Ansar al-Islam. The objectives of this group quickly turned from one of supporting an independent Kurdish state to one of becoming an affiliate of Al Qaeda...as Afghan fighters soon began infiltrating the region.
Even Human Rights Watch noted that other Kurds were reporting the influx of foreign fighters, who were raping and razing villages, and assassinating political opponents.
While liberals have often tried to distance Saddam from the Kurds and problems in N. Iraq, he was smack-dab in the middle of it. As one Kurdish commander (Qada) reported, Ansar al-Islam has ties to agents of Saddam Hussein operating in northern Iraq. "We have picked up conversations on our radios between Iraqis and [Ansar] al-Islam."
While Saddam may not have wanted an independent Kurdish state within Iraq, these other Arabs and Kurds had different objectives that interested Saddam. Not only were they doing his bidding by fighting the real Kurdish seperatists, they were a perfect cover for him to continue his war against America. Just the fact that Saddam would've allowed Zarqawi to be treated in a Baghdad hospital...and than released unharmed, to return to Ansar, kind of puts this claim to rest.
Thanks for the information. Here's more from the London Telegraph...
Saddam's agents launch bloodbath against West's allies
By Wendell Steavenson in Halabja
(Filed: 23/12/2002)
Bitter fighting is raging in the mountains of northern Iraq between Islamic militants accused of links to al-Qa'eda and one of the West's key allies in a troubling diversion in the countdown to a possible war with Saddam Hussein.
For more than a year about 600 fighters of Ansar al-Islam have faced a Kurdish peshmerga force of 5,000, from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, lobbing mortar shells at their positions, mounting ambushes and sending terrorist cells into Kurdish cities.
In the past week the fighting has intensified with reports of 100 people on both sides being killed. Some accounts suggested dozens of peshmerga fighters were killed in one battle and that when they tried to take an Ansar al-Islam fighter prisoner he blew himself up.
According to the PUK, one of the two dominant Kurdish political parties, Ansar al-Islam is supplied with weapons and money by the Iraqi Mukhabarat, Saddam's intelligence service, to destabilise the region.
A Mukhabarat agent called Abu Wa-il is said to be among the group. This is confirmed by Abu Iman al-Baghdadi, an ex-Mukhabarat officer now in jail. If true, it means Ansar al-Islam could have a wider global aspect because al-Baghdadi says Saddam sent Abu Wa'il to Afghanistan in 1995 where he formed links with al-Qa'eda.
Al-Baghdadi said he knew this because he was in the bodyguard of Saddam's son-in law at the time and had been in a training camp with some of the agents they sent to Afghanistan.
"Saddam sent agents to Afghanistan to al-Qa'eda," said al Bahgdadi. "But they had their own agenda and orders from Baghdad."
The peshmerga commander of the area, Sheikh Jafar Mustapha, says Ansar al-Islam has killed 130 of his men and 20 local villagers have died in crossfire or by stepping on scattered land mines.
A year ago the peshmerga fighters tried to drive the group out of their mountain strongholds but the Islamists massacred 42 of them by slitting their throats. Mustapha said: "Usually they don't shoot people; they like to use swords and knives.
"When they capture one of our peshmergas they cut him into pieces." The original leader of Ansar al-Islam, Mullah Krekar, is in jail in Holland and the PUK said the group is now led by Abu Abdullah Ashafi, a low-born Kurd who joined the Iraqi army in the 1980s before turning to Islam and spending four years in Afghanistan.
Dug into caves in the mountains, as many as 40 of Ansar al-Islam's fighters are Arabs, Iraqis and others washed up from the Afghan melee.
According to the Kurdish newspaper Hawlati, Ansar al-Islam's leader, Abu Abdallah al-Shafei, was killed in the recent fighting with the PUK but there was no confirmation of the report.
The group's profile seems to be that of a band of itinerant guerillas, fighting their own ideological battles for Islam aided by other groups.
There are some suggestions that Ansar al-Islam, who operate right on the Iranian border, are supplied through Iran, with Iranian complicity.
But in general the Iranian relationship with the Kurdish parties remains cordial - the Iranian-Kurdish border is much more porous than borders with Turkey and Syria and in September they were instrumental in seeing Mullah Krekar caught in Holland.
The old enemies, Iraq and Iran, are on paper strange co-conspirators, but Iran, like Turkey and Syria, remains extremely wary of a strong Kurdish state bordering its own Kurdish populations. The KDP tends to play down PUK's claims that Ansar al-Islam has links to bin Laden.
One senior official of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan or KDP, said: "There are links with al-Qa'eda but I cannot say that Ansar receives orders from al-Qa'eda."
They suspect the connection has been manufactured to encourage American help and involvement. The Americans have conspicuously stayed away.
He said: "I think if the Americans were more convinced of an al-Qa'eda link they would attack them. Possibly the al-Qa'eda link is exaggerated."
A Mukhabarat captain arrested by the KDP for overseeing a sabotage campaign in Erbil that saw several bombs aimed at civilian and UN targets as well as assassination attempts, said the Mukhabarat supplied Ansar al-Islam.
"They co-operated now and then but secretly," he said. "But Ansar does not always carry out the operations the Muk asks them to. Sometimes they take the money and do not deliver."