Behind the heartrending headlines and reports of the mass repression, slaughter, forced migration and misery inflicted on Iraq's Kurdish population, and beneath the crocodile tears in Downing Street, two key facts stand out.
First, despite all the propaganda pumped out by the British and US governments that compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and despite their earlier calls for the Iragi people to oust Saddam, George Bush and John Major now support his regime against those fighting to overthrow it.
Second, the current situation has been created by the imperialist military intervention in the Gulf, and would be worsened, not resolved by any further US or external military action.
The USA and Britain want Saddam removed only if this is carried out by a military coup that would install a new strongman at the helm of the Baath regime. They will oppose the revolutionary overthrow of Baathist rule by any popular forces, whether these be Kurds, Shias, or a coalition of the various Iragi opposition forces.
As one angry US Senate official told Newsweek magazine in the closing stages of the Gulf War: "The position of the US administration is precisely that we want to get rid of Saddam, but not his regime. It's like getting rid of Hitler but leaving the Nazis in power."
This underlines the point that the fight for the withdrawal of US and coalition troops - which are aiding Saddam by giving his forces free reign to crush Kurdish and other opposition fighters - must not be relaxed but stepped up.
Few socialists will be surprised by the latest twist in the two- faced position of the imperialist coalition on Saddam's regime. While the Butcher of Baghdad was being courted in the 1970s by Moscow and the West, then feted in Washington in the 1980s as the supposed scourge of Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalist Iran, and even lauded by some as an 'antiimperialist' opponent of Israel, it was only socialists who exposed the true character of the Baathist regime, which has been consistent only in its ruthless and cynical repression of any form of internal opposition.
After Saddam's reactionary invasion of Kuwait, the imperialist propaganda machine was cranked into action, 'discovering' a long list of crimes including his poison gas attacks and repression of the Kurds: the media began to draw the (completely spurious) parallel with Hitler.
But in one respect the parallel is appropriate: Churchill and other leaders of world imperialism were at first quite content to do deals with Hitler and turn a blind eye to his repression of the labour movement and onslaught on the Jews: they saw him as an ally Stalin's USSR.
Today's imperialists would rather do deals with Saddam than risk his overthrow by popular forces that could lead towards the liberation of the oppressed and fragmented Kurdish people - destabilising not only Iraq, but also their NATO allies in Turkey, which has an 9-million-strong Kurdish minority. They prefer this 'Hitler' figure who is totally committed to preserving the integrity of Iraq, to the threat of revolution or even possible fragmentation of the existing states in this strategically and economically vital region.
There can be no doubt that the uprisings in the South and North of Iraq were triggered by the Gulf War, urged on by the repeated public calls from Washington and London for the Iraqis to oust Saddam. This gave rise to the tragically deluded belief among the Kurds and others that the huge US forces still occupying 15% of Irag and controlling its entire airspace would give at list limited and tacit support to
Socialist Outlook April 9th 1991 Page 2 Spain's Thatcherite 'socialist' Felipe Gonzalez; Kinnock anxiously watches his back, as the vultures begin to gather