When I interviewed Gonzalez again after the Duelfer report was issued, he maintained that, contrary to what the report said about mustard gas, many of the refugees who fled to U.S. lines were indeed victims of that chemical. "Their tongues were swollen," he said, "and they had severe burns on the mucous tissue, on the inside of their mouths and nasal passages. Our chemical officer also said it looked like mustard gas."

Gonzalez suggested that local Iraqi military and Baathist officials, desperate to put down the uprising, may have used mustard gas without permission from on high. Gonzalez said he heard from refugees that nerve gas was also being used. He observed Iraqi helicopters making repeated bomb runs over an-Najaf. One of the helicopters, he said, was outfitted as a crop sprayer.

What did Gonzalez's unit do with that intelligence? "A lot of that was kept quiet," he said, "because we didn't want to panic the troops. We stepped up our training with gas masks, because we were naturally concerned. We were downwind from where Saddam was using the weapons." Despite such caution, however, "there were reports generated at our level," Gonzalez said. "I mean the people themselves said they were being gassed. So we filed the reports. Whether they went above our division, I have no idea." Gonzalez's former commander turned down my request for an interview.

At the time, few subjects were more militarily and politically sensitive than Saddam's use of WMD. It's difficult to believe that reports from Gonzalez's unit weren't flashed immediately up the chain of command in the Gulf and Washington.

And there were other American witnesses to what happened. U.S. helicopters and planes flew overhead at the time, constantly observing as Saddam's helicopters decimated the rebels. Some of those aircraft, according to Gonzalez, provided real-time video of the occurrences below. A reliable U.S. intelligence source confirmed that such evidence does indeed exist.

Why was there no statement of outrage or threat of retaliation from the administration of the elder Bush? There can be only one explanation: Denouncing Saddam for using chemical weapons would have greatly increased pressure on the U.S. president to come to the aid of the Shiites. And that was the last thing Bush I wanted to do.

In February 1991, still battling Saddam, President Bush twice called for Iraqis to rise up. "There's another way for the bloodshed to stop," he declared, "and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and to force Saddam Hussein to step aside." The president's message was repeatedly broadcast across Iraq by clandestine CIA-backed stations and by millions of leaflets dropped by U.S. airplanes over southern Iraq. Meanwhile, the Kurds in the north were also rising up. Many in the military joined in the revolt.

But when it looked as if the revolt might actually succeed, Bush abruptly turned his back. He and his coalition partners wanted a neat military coup to replace Saddam, not an uncontrolled revolt that could lead to chaos and the collapse of Iraq as a state, extending the influence of Iran. In an Iraqi vacuum, Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, wrote in "A World Transformed" in 1998, the United States "could conceivably" be drawn into becoming "an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." They wanted a regime change, nothing more: a malleable general to take the place of the mercurial Saddam.

The idea had been that a popular uprising would be another way of weakening Saddam's grip on power and allowing the Iraqi military to take over. Commenting on the U.S. tactic in an interview for the documentary, Thomas Pickering, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said, "All of the efforts to debilitate Saddam and to create problems for him in order to remove him from Kuwait were justified." I asked: "Even though the U.S. couldn't follow up afterwards to help the people who rose up?" He replied: "In war and love, all's fair."

So the United States stood by while Saddam's tanks and helicopters put down the Shiite revolt and then headed north to deal with the Kurds. When the peace treaty was signed at the end of Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf gave Saddam's generals permission to keep flying their helicopters. When they turned them against the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings with devastating effect, the Bush administration asserted that, unfortunately, its hands were tied by the peace agreement -- and made it very clear that the United States didn't want to become involved militarily in any way. On April 3, 1991, President Bush said: "I do not want to push American forces beyond our mandate. Of course I feel a frustration and a sense of grief for the innocents that are being killed brutally, but we are not there to intervene."

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