Did Not Mislead Rebels, U.S. Says : Iraq: Baker insists that the Administration wanted to avoid ‘being sucked into a civil war.’ The President says there was no secret assurance of aid.

ANKARA, Turkey —  Secretary of State James A. Baker III, seeking to quell growing public dismay over the Bush Administration’s failure to aid Kurdish and Shiite Muslim rebels in Iraq, said Sunday that the United States kept its distance from the rebellions to avoid “being sucked into a civil war.”

Baker joined President Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in counterattacks against critics who have charged that Bush exhorted the dissidents to rebellion and then deserted them, insisting that the United States had never sought the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

For his part, Bush said that he had given the Iraqi rebel groups no overt or secret assurance that they would be supported militarily by the United States in their efforts to overthrow Hussein.

“They were not misled by the United States of America,” the President said at a press conference in Houston, where he met with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. “I went back and reviewed every statement I made about this, every single one, and there was never any implication that the United States would use force to go beyond the objectives which we so beautifully have achieved. None.”

Cheney said that involving U.S. troops in the Iraqi unrest would inevitably lead to a “quagmire” and substantial loss of American life.

“If you don’t have a clear-cut military objective, if you’re not prepared to use overwhelming force to achieve it, then we don’t have any business committing U.S. military forces into that civil war,” Cheney said in a television interview.

Besides the deaths of thousands of insurgents, the uprisings in Iraq have caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to flee north to Turkey, east to Iran and south into U.S.-occupied territory. The Administration last week authorized airdrops of food, clothing and medical supplies to Kurdish refugees in the north, and the drops began Sunday.

Baker told reporters aboard his airplane en route to Turkey that “the removal of Saddam Hussein was neither a military nor a political objective” of the United States. “We did say that we would shed no tears (if Hussein were overthrown) but that it was up to the Iraqi people to determine who and what their leadership would be,” he said.

Baker made his statements as he launched a ticklish mission: a one-day visit to Kurdish refugees to demonstrate U.S. concern for a people whose leaders have accused the United States of betraying them.

Anti-American passion is running so high among the hundreds of thousands of Kurds fleeing Iraq that Baker, for safety’s sake, may not actually venture into their camps; instead, officials said, the Kurds may be brought to him at a Turkish military base.

Baker, in a brief statement on his arrival, compared Iraq’s massacre of the Kurds to last year’s invasion of Kuwait--but then went on to say that, as an internal Iraqi problem, it will not draw any U.S. military response.

“We are not prepared to go down the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil war,” he said. “We cannot police what goes on inside Iraq, and we cannot be the arbiters of who shall govern Iraq. As President Bush has repeatedly made clear, our objective was the liberation of Kuwait. It never extended to the remaking of Iraq. We repeatedly said that that could only be done by the Iraqi people.

“However, we cannot be indifferent to atrocities and human suffering in Iraq, and we haven’t been,” he said. “We will make certain that humanitarian assistance, in both northern and southern Iraq, gets to those who most need it.”

In a direct warning to Hussein, he added: “We will not tolerate any interference with this humanitarian relief effort.”

Baker’s contention that the United States had never sought the overthrow of Hussein was difficult to square with the statements of Administration officials during the war, when Hussein’s downfall appeared more likely.

During the war, Administration officials said frequently--and often fervently--that they hoped the conflict would unseat the Iraqi leader. They carefully never stated that goal as a formal “war aim,” in part because the other members of the anti-Iraq coalition would not have agreed. But they left no doubt that it was one of their major desires.

In the short run, however, the Kurdish rebellion--and a similar short-lived insurgency mounted by Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq--appears to have strengthened Hussein’s grip on Iraq’s army and the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party, a senior State Department official said. “There was a kind of rallying-round effect,” he said. “How long that will last, given the enormity of Iraq’s problems and Saddam’s inability to solve them, is another question.”

In Washington, officials said the United States will explore the possibility of establishing a U.N.-supervised buffer zone along the Turkish border where Kurdish refugees could seek sanctuary from government forces, as suggested by Turkish President Turgut Ozal.

Ozal said in a television interview from Ankara that 300,000 Iraqi Kurds already have crossed into Turkey and that a total of 1 million Iraqi refugees may be headed for his country’s borders.

“The whole (of) northern Iraq is on the move, and it looks like cities are being emptied and . . . all of them are coming to our borders,” Ozal said on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

The Turkish leader said the border area is very mountainous, and the only solution to the refugee problem is to create a U.N.-sponsored place of refuge within Iraq.

In addition to the Kurdish problem in the north, tens of thousands of Iraqis have fled the Shiite rebellion in the south, seeking sanctuary in the U.S.-occupied zone.

Brent Scowcroft, the White House national security adviser, said the estimated 40,000 Iraqis now living under U.S. control will not be left to Iraqi government reprisals when U.S. forces withdraw over the next several days.

“We will not abandon those people,” Scowcroft said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said they may be moved to an established demilitarized zone along the Iraq-Kuwait border, where they would come under the control of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Scowcroft, too, reiterated the Administration’s position that, while it regrets the bloodshed in Iraq, it is not responsible.

“Well, it’s a real tragedy. There’s no question about it. And it’s horrible to see the pictures of innocent people being savaged or even killed,” Scowcroft said. “But the policy has to be clear, and for us to get involved in a civil war in Iraq means occupying it, means replacing the government, means setting up a new government, which undoubtedly would be overthrown as soon as the coalition troops left. That’s a horrible morass into which to get, and from a policy standpoint it’s just unacceptable.”

Despite the U.S. protestations, Iraqi insurgents insisted Sunday that they had been led to believe that U.S. and allied forces would come to their aid if they rose up against Hussein.

“Without that (help), I am sure the Iraqi people, as a whole, would not have risen, to be left alone and to be abandoned and to be butchered and massacred by Saddam’s forces,” said Barham Salih, a Kurdistan Front spokesman in London.

Salih said the Kurds felt a bitter sense of betrayal, having taken Bush’s encouragement of an internal Iraqi revolt literally.

“I don’t know of any other interpretation,” he said. “There was a clear statement that Saddam Hussein ought to be removed and the Iraqi people will be supported.”

Baker met here Sunday evening with Turkish President Ozal to discuss the refugee crisis and other issues growing from the aftermath of the war in which Turkey was a key U.S. ally.

Baker said he will visit Turkey’s border with Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of Kurds are camped on frigid mountain slopes, “to get a better feel and fix for the situation.”

Officials said he will tour the area by helicopter today but will stay well inside Turkish airspace.

Baker’s 20-hour stay in Turkey is the first leg of a Middle East tour that is also intended to inject some momentum into the Administration’s search for a new Arab-Israeli peace process--an initiative announced with some fanfare last month but that has turned up no concrete results as yet.

Baker said he is still trying to “match up confidence-building measures” that Israel and the Arab countries can take simultaneously to lessen hostility in the area.

One issue he will discuss in Israel, Baker said, is the recent report that Israel’s Housing Ministry has begun building new homes on the occupied West Bank for Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union.

McManus reported from Ankara and Broder reported from Washington. Staff writer David Lauter in Houston contributed to this report.