By Peter W. Galbraith

Sunday, August 11, 2002; Page B07

In making his case to remove Saddam Hussein, President Bush has no more appreciative audience than Iraq's Kurds. Having been on the receiving end of his chemical arsenal, the Kurds want Hussein gone as much as the American president does. Yet, as U.S. officials meet with Kurdish leaders this weekend, they encounter a potent ally whose cooperation cannot be taken for granted.

Nearly 4 million Kurds live in an enclave in the north and east of Iraq. Comprising nearly one-fifth of Iraq's territory and population, the Kurdish enclave has been free from Saddam's control since 1991, thanks in part to regular patrols by U.S. and British aircraft. Since the 1994 breakdown of a common Kurdish government, the enclave has been divided between a region in the north administered by Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and one of comparable size in the east administered by Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. After intense fighting in the mid-1990s, the two Kurdish parties have made peace and are working together -- cooperation that seems to be increasing as the prospects for eliminating Saddam Hussein grows.

The Kurds possess considerable military resources. Their territory includes Iraqi-built airfields and other facilities that could enable U.S. forces to launch an assault on Baghdad from Iraqi soil. The combined military of the two Kurdish factions now numbers more than 100,000. Constantly training, disciplined and well equipped with light arms, they have recently proved more than a match for the demoralized Iraqi army forces on the front lines opposite them.

The Iraqi Kurds have good reason to want Saddam Hussein gone. Since the 1970s, the Kurds have been particular targets of Hussein and his Ba'ath Party, whose ideology stresses the primacy of the Arabs at the expense of non-Arab minorities such as the Kurds. Hussein has long been vicious toward his foes. In 1983 his forces rounded up hundreds of Barzani's male relatives, who have not been seen since. Barzani believes they may have been used as human guinea pigs to test the lethality of Iraq's chemical weapons.

Nothing, however, rivaled the scale of the campaign that Hussein initiated in 1987 against the Kurds. In three years the Iraqi regime systematically destroyed every village in Kurdistan, more than 4,000 altogether. Hundreds of Kurdish villages and towns were attacked with mustard gas and nerve agents, including the eastern Iraqi city of Halabja. No one knows the total death toll, but I heard firsthand accounts of hundreds of deaths from survivors of 40 villages that were gassed in just three days from Aug. 25 to Aug. 28, 1988. Altogether upward of 100,000 Kurds, and possibly as many as 180,000, died from gas, forced deportation and mass execution between 1987 and 1990.

Precisely because of the brutality of Hussein's vengeance, neither Talabani nor Barzani wants to jeopardize the de facto armistice that exists between the Kurdish enclave and the rest of Iraq unless there are assurances of U.S. seriousness and protection.

So far, both men like what they have heard from the Bush administration. Nonetheless, President Bush's strong words cannot erase Kurdish suspicions of American resolve, which date back to a Henry Kissinger double-cross of a 1974 Kurdish rebellion but are felt most acutely with regard to the first President Bush. As every Kurd remembers, the elder Bush called for the Iraqi people to overthrow Hussein and then ignored their pleas for help as Iraqi forces swept north at the end of March 1991 to crush the rebellion.

This weekend, visiting Kurdish leaders are looking for public guarantees that the United States will protect the territory and people of the Kurdish enclave from an Iraqi ground assault. So far, the most any U.S. administration has said is that it will answer an attack on the Kurds in "a manner and time of its choosing."

The Kurds will also be seeking assistance with civil defense. With nothing to lose, Hussein has no reason not to use his chemical and biological weapons. While America may be his most desirable target, the Kurds are the closest. Kurdish leaders will ask Pentagon officials for antibiotics and chemical weapons protection gear.

Finally, the Kurdish leaders will be seeking American endorsement of their vision of a post-war Iraq. In the past 11 years, the Iraqi identity has largely disappeared from the north of Iraq. Kurdish television, media and universities have replaced earlier Iraqi counterparts. In schools, Arabic has been demoted from the language of instruction to a foreign language (one considered by young people far less useful than English). Kurds take pride in what they have accomplished on their own -- from rebuilding destroyed villages, to tripling the number of schools, to establishing one of the Middle East's most extensive and accessible Internet networks.

In a post-Hussein Iraq, the Kurds will insist on maintaining the independence they now enjoy. Barzani and Talabani have proposed that a future Iraq be a federal state with Kurdish and Arab entities. In the coming months, they will be moving unilaterally to create a legal structure for a self-governing Kurdistan that will have its own assembly, president, tax and spending powers and police. Believing that written promises in an Iraqi constitution provide scant protection, the Kurdish leaders insist on retaining a Kurdistan self-defense force.

Iraq's neighbors fear federalism as a prelude to the breakup of the country. In fact, it may be the only way to save Iraq. The Kurds know that the Bush administration will have little choice but to block any effort to force them back under Baghdad's control. But Kurds and Arabs do have practical reasons to cooperate, not least of which is their shared interest in Iraq's vast reserves of oil. A voluntary association of two equal peoples is far more likely to produce stability in Iraq than the failed 20th-century strategies of repression and dictatorship.

The writer, a former American ambassador, is a professor at the National War College. He has just returned from northern Iraq.