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On Feb. 15, 1991, as coalition bombs fell on Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush addressed the Iraqi people. \u201cThere is another way for the bloodshed to stop,\u201d he declared<\/a>, \u201cand that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.\u201d Coalition aircraft dropped leaflets calling<\/a> on Iraqis to \u201cfill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.\u201d<\/p>\n A few weeks later, Shiite rebels in southern Iraq and Kurdish fighters in the north rose up. At the peak of the uprising, 14 of Iraq\u2019s 18 provinces had slipped from government control. And then\u2014nothing. The Bush administration provided no support, actively blocked the transfer of captured Iraqi weapons to rebels, and allowed Saddam to use helicopter gunships to crush the uprising. While Iraq was prohibited from flying fixed-wing aircraft, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf permitted the use of helicopters. Between 30,000 and 60,000 Shiites and some 20,000 Kurds were killed<\/a>. Over 1.5 million Kurds were displaced, and thousands died from exposure, disease, and land mines.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n On Feb. 15, 1991, as coalition bombs fell on Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush addressed the Iraqi people. \u201cThere is another way for the bloodshed to stop,\u201d he declared<\/a>, \u201cand that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.\u201d Coalition aircraft dropped leaflets calling<\/a> on Iraqis to \u201cfill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.\u201d<\/p>\n A few weeks later, Shiite rebels in southern Iraq and Kurdish fighters in the north rose up. At the peak of the uprising, 14 of Iraq\u2019s 18 provinces had slipped from government control. And then\u2014nothing. The Bush administration provided no support, actively blocked the transfer of captured Iraqi weapons to rebels, and allowed Saddam to use helicopter gunships to crush the uprising. While Iraq was prohibited from flying fixed-wing aircraft, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf permitted the use of helicopters. Between 30,000 and 60,000 Shiites and some 20,000 Kurds were killed<\/a>. Over 1.5 million Kurds were displaced, and thousands died from exposure, disease, and land mines.<\/p>\n Bush\u2019s defense was remarkable in its brazenness. \u201cDo I think that the United States should bear guilt because of suggesting that the Iraqi people take matters into their own hands, with the implication being given by some that the United States would be there to support them militarily?\u201d he asked<\/a> a few weeks later. \u201cThat was not true. We never implied that.\u201d<\/p>\n This was a lie by any reasonable reading. But as U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s behavior so far seems to suggest, it was also part of a long pattern.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s template for<\/span> betrayal was established decades earlier. In October 1956, Hungarians took to the streets of Budapest to demand an end to Soviet domination. What followed was an inspiring several weeks of resistance, but also a catastrophic miscalculation about American intentions.<\/p>\n Radio Free Europe (RFE) had been broadcasting into Hungary for years. While scholars still debate<\/a> whether RFE explicitly promised Western military support, the emotional tone of its broadcasts during the uprising left little ambiguity. A survey of Hungarian refugees afterward found that nearly 40 percent<\/a> believed Western broadcasts had given the impression that the United States would fight to save Hungary. RFE even broadcast<\/a> instructions for making Molotov cocktails. As a Wilson Center study concluded<\/a>, \u201cWestern broadcasts evidently encouraged Hungarians to think that the United States would not let the Revolution be crushed.\u201d<\/p>\n The Soviet Union let the rebels believe they had won, then sent in the tanks. When the dust settled, 2,500 Hungarians were dead<\/a>, 700 Soviet soldiers had been killed, and 200,000 Hungarians had fled the country. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, preoccupied with the Suez crisis and unwilling to risk a nuclear confrontation, did nothing. As he later<\/a> put it, \u201cThe United States doesn\u2019t now and never has advocated open rebellion by an undefended populace against force over which they could not possibly prevail.\u201d<\/p>\n Less than two decades later, Henry Kissinger was the architect of another betrayal. In 1972, at the Shah of Iran\u2019s request, Kissinger and President Richard Nixon organized a covert operation to arm and encourage Iraq\u2019s Kurdish population in their rebellion against the Baathist regime. Over the next three years, the United States channeled $16 million in military aid. This was enough to sustain the insurgency but, crucially, not enough to win. As the Pike Committee later discovered<\/a>, \u201cThe president, Dr. Kissinger, and the foreign head of state hoped that our clients would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally\u2019s neighboring country.\u201d<\/p>\n The Kurds did not know about Kissinger\u2019s cynical calculation. Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani trusted the Americans implicitly; he sent Kissinger three rugs and then a gold necklace as a wedding gift. When the Shah abruptly cut off support in 1975 after reaching his own deal with Baghdad, the Kurds were blindsided. Barzani wrote<\/a> to Kissinger: \u201cWe feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people.\u201d There was no reply. Thousands of Kurds died, and 200,000 became refugees.<\/p>\n When pressed by the House Intelligence Committee about the betrayal, Kissinger offered<\/a> what has become the definitive statement of American realpolitik toward those it encourages to fight: \u201cCovert action should not be confused with missionary work.\u201d The congressional investigators were appalled. \u201cEven in the context of covert action,\u201d the Pike Committee concluded, \u201cours was a cynical enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n The pattern has continued with numbing regularity. In Syria, President Barack Obama provided just enough support to the opposition to keep the civil war grinding on without resolution, before famously backing down<\/a> from his chemical weapons red line when it was crossed in 2013. In October 2019, Trump abruptly withdrew<\/a> American forces from northeastern Syria after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, effectively green lighting a Turkish assault on the very Kurdish forces that had served as America\u2019s main ground ally against the Islamic State. The Kurds, who had lost over 11,000 fighters in the campaign against the Islamic State, were left to face Turkish bombs and artillery. As American convoys drove away, Kurdish civilians pelted them with rotten vegetables. \u201cTrump betrayed us,\u201d read one sign<\/a> held along the road.<\/p>\n What explains this<\/span> recurring pattern? The charitable interpretation is that these are a series of individual miscalculations: tactical errors by different presidents, compounded by the fog of crisis. But the consistency of the pattern across decades and administrations suggests something structural.<\/p>\n American foreign policy operates on two tracks that rarely connect. The rhetorical track, which focuses on freedom, self-determination, and solidarity with those who resist tyranny, serves domestic political purposes and reflects genuine ideological commitments embedded in American national identity. The strategic track, however, operates on political interests, risk calculations, and the hard limits of power. Presidents speak on the first track and act on the second. The people who take American rhetoric seriously\u2014sometimes more seriously than Americans themselves\u2014end up falling into the gap.<\/p>\n Encouraging dissent in adversarial states is cheap: It costs little money and no American blood and creates problems for rivals while allowing U.S. politicians to feel morally righteous. But the cost of actually supporting those movements is high. The result is a perverse set of incentives where leaders talk big and act small. When the moment comes, they suddenly discover pressing reasons why this particular uprising cannot be supported after all.<\/p>\n There is also a more cynical possibility contained in Kissinger\u2019s remarks, one that doesn\u2019t even require hypocrisy. Uprisings that get crushed still serve American interests by bleeding adversaries, delegitimizing rival regimes, and creating martyrs. By this logic, the failure of American promises is not an unfortunate downside but part of the strategy itself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Which brings us to Iran. As protests spread across the country in recent weeks, Trump adopted characteristically aggressive rhetoric. \u201cIf Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,\u201d he posted<\/a> on Truth Social. \u201cWe are locked and loaded and ready to go.\u201d Days later, as the death toll climbed into the thousands, he urged Iranians to \u201cKEEP PROTESTING \u2013 TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!\u201d and declared<\/a> that \u201cHELP IS ON ITS WAY.\u201d<\/p>\n Obama famously held back during Iran\u2019s 2009 Green Movement, reasoning that American support would only give the regime a pretext for crackdown. He later called<\/a> this decision \u201ca mistake.\u201d Trump has no such hesitations, but his approach raises its own questions.<\/p>\n In one sense, Trump represents a collapse of the two-track system described above: His rhetoric bleeds into strategy, or at least, there\u2019s no clear gap between them. He says what he thinks, consequences or national interests be damned. But this doesn\u2019t necessarily make him more reliable. It may simply mean that the old pattern of encouragement followed by abandonment will play out faster and more chaotically. Already, analysts note that any U.S. military action is more likely to target Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities or military infrastructure than to actually aid protesters on the ground. As one Iran expert put it<\/a>, striking nuclear sites would be \u201chelping the United States, maybe in terms of its strategic aims or friends like Israel. It\u2019s not helping the protest movements.\u201d<\/p>\n There is something else here that sets Trump apart. The calculated betrayals of Eisenhower, Kissinger, and Bush were born from a surplus of caution. They knew exactly where the line was and refused to cross it for fear of nuclear war or regional instability. The danger with Trump\u2019s current treatment of Iran is not just that the rhetorical and strategic tracks are merging, but that the strategic track might not exist at all. Trump\u2019s betrayal, if it comes, won\u2019t happen because of a cold, Kissingerian calculation but because of a whim, a distraction, or a transactional shift. To the victims, the result is the same. But for observers of American policy, the mechanism of failure is different. One is ruthless competence; the other is chaotic incompetence.<\/p>\n This does not<\/span> mean the United States should abstain from encouraging those fighting authoritarian regimes. But it does suggest that American policymakers should be honest about the gap between rhetoric and action. And those who hear American promises should be deeply skeptical about what exactly is being offered. The Kurds have learned this lesson too many times over the past century.<\/p>\n As for the victims of 1991, they eventually got their answer. When Colin Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, published his memoirs in 1996, he admitted<\/a> that Bush\u2019s rhetoric \u201cmay have given encouragement to the rebels.\u201d But he also revealed what American strategic thinkers actually believed at the time: The real purpose, he said, was \u201cto leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile toward the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n As Powell\u2019s stark admission shows, the freedoms of those who took Bush at his word were never the point. The American encouragement of those freedoms was part of a cynical strategy. And the lesson is not just for the Kurds or Iranians to be skeptical, but for the American public to stop being duped by their own presidential moralizing.<\/p>\n The Iranian people listening to Trump today have heard American promises before. Whether Trump represents a genuine break from this pattern or simply its latest and most volatile iteration remains to be seen.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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