“…during the closing days of Operation Desert Storm, the Shiites of southern Iraq took a cue from the first President [George H.W.] Bush and rose up against Saddam’s rule. ‘By March 7 [1991], a little over a week after the rebellion had exploded,’ [author] Sandra Mackey recounts in The Reckoning, ‘Basra, Najaf, and Karbala as well as other Shia towns in the south were prime to become killing fields.’ As the American military stood on the sidelines, Saddam dispatched his special forces to crush the revolt. …While the Iraqi media branded the Shiites part of ‘a dirty, foreign conspiracy,’ the Iraqi army pillaged, raped and murdered its way through town after town, killing thousands in the space of a few months.”
– Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq, Page 11