Score one for the power of the media, especially television, as a policy-making force. Coverage of the massacre and exodus of the Kurds generated public pressures that were instrumental in slowing the hasty American military withdrawal from Iraq and forcing a return to help guard and care for the victims of Saddam Hussein's vengeance.

The Kurdish tragedy was only one in a season of worldwide disasters -- the typhoon in Bangladesh, earthquakes in Soviet Georgia and Costa Rica, famine in Africa. Scenes of suffering flitted past American television audiences, a succession of miseries almost too rapid and stark to be absorbed.

But the suffering of the Kurds stood out from the others. This was not a natural catastrophe, but a man-made disaster, and one that had a special claim on the American conscience. It was America, after all, that had invaded Iraq and shaken loose the underpinnings of authority. It was America's president, George Bush, who, on February 15, called on the "Iraqi military and the Iraqi people" to rise up and "force Saddam Hussein . . . to step aside." It was President Bush who, on February 27, had ordered an abrupt cessation of hostilities, leaving the Iraqi dictator with enough armor and aircraft to put down Shiite and Kurdish uprisings. And, finally, it was the Bush administration that, after first warning the Iraqi regime not to use helicopter gunships against its own people, then stood by while they were used to strafe Kurds fleeing to the mountains in the north.

Americans became dimly aware, in the month after the war stopped and the rebellions had started, that their government, having burst the floodgates in Iraq, was trying to run away from the flood. There was even a whisper of tacit collusion with the dictator whom Bush had called "worse than Hitler." The New York Times reported on March 27 that the administration had "decided to let President Saddam Hussein put down rebellions in his country without American intervention." This in the name of avoiding being dragged into what the president called "a Vietnam-style quagmire," and in response to Saudi Arabian and Turkish concerns about the possible disintegration of Iraq.

The administration had every reason, at first, to believe that the public supported a policy of getting the troops home quickly and avoiding involvement in ethnic strife. There was some criticism, but it was mainly confined to the editorial pages of newspapers. The Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, seems to work on the premise that print does not move people; only television, with its visceral impact, does.

The Kurds had been let down by America before. As disclosed in the report of the House Intelligence Committee in 1976 (of which I obtained a draft before the House voted to suppress it), President Nixon had the CIA sponsor a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein, starting in 1972, as a favor to the Shah of Iran. When the Shah and Saddam settled their differences, support for the insurrection was withdrawn and the Kurds were abandoned to an Iraqi attack. ("Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone," Mustafa Barzani, father of the current Kurdish leader, wrote to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on March 10, 1975. "We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country's policy.") Thousands were killed and 200,000 fled to Iran, of whom 40,000 were forcibly returned to Iraq.

I reported this on CBS in 1976, but it was a "tell story" without the pictures needed to let the audience experience the dimensions of American betrayal. And it made little impression. So now, in March 1991, the Bush administration was not overly concerned with "tell stories" and commentaries about how America was turning its back on the Kurds.

Jim Hoagland wrote in The Washington Post of "an American bug-out from the Persian Gulf," and William Safire wrote in The New York Times that the president had experienced "a failure of nerve." But "a senior presidential aide" told Time magazine, "The only pressure for the U.S. to intervene is coming from columnists and commentators." And a "top White House aide" (probably Chief of Staff John Sununu in both cases) told Newsweek, "A hundred Safire columns will not change the public's mind. There is no political downside to our policy."

Famous last words, politically speaking. What the White House did not seem to realize was that, by the end of March, the issue, as perceived by the public, was changing from military intervention in support of a revolution to compassionate intercession for the victims of Saddam Hussein's genocidal methods. By then, while hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites were being driven into Iran, where they could not be easily seen by the world, hundreds of thousands more Kurds were being driven into the rugged mountains bordering Turkey, where they could be vividly witnessed by television.

The vast panorama of suffering, and perhaps even more the individual portraits of agony, seemed overwhelming. Not easily forgotten were scenes like that of the little girl, her bare feet sinking into the freezing mud, or of the little boy, his face burned, possibly by napalm. The anguished face of a child peered up from the cover of Newsweek, with the caption, addressed to Mr. Bush, "Why won't he help us?" In a BBC report on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, a woman asked, "Why did George Bush do nothing?"

The quagmire-shunning Bush administration was slow to react, concentrating on a formal cease-fire to speed the return of American troops and continuing to emphasize its refusal to be involved in "an internal conflict."

April 2: On a golf course in Florida, in strange juxtaposition with evening news scenes of shivering and starving refugees, the president brushed off questions about the continued Iraqi use of helicopter gunships against the Kurds, saying, "I feel no reason to answer to anybody. We're relaxing here."

A senior official told The Washington Post that the reticence was deliberate: "Engaging on this issue gains us nothing. All you do is risk raising public concerns that are not there now. . . ."

April 3: By now the administration was becoming aware of American and European "concerns," and had begun scrambling for a policy of compassion without intervention. On the Florida golf course, Mr. Bush said, "I feel frustrated any time innocent civilians are being slaughtered. But the United States and these other countries with us in this coalition did not go there to settle all the internal affairs of Iraq."

Later that day came a written statement in the president's name, departing from the administration's passive role: "I call upon Iraq's leaders to halt these attacks immediately and to allow international organizations to work inside Iraq to alleviate the suffering. . . . The United States is prepared to extend economic help to Turkey through multilateral channels."

April 4: Appearing with Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu in Newport Beach, California, Mr. Bush said, "We will do what we can to help the Kurdish refugees." But he also stuck with the position that no American parent "wants to see United States forces pushed into this situation, brutal, tough, and deplorable as it is."

By this time, the Kurdish insurrection all but crushed, television was showing a mass exodus into the mountains. A widely distributed Associated Press photo showed a ten-year-old girl being comforted by her mother. The child had lost a hand and an eye in an Iraqi helicopter attack.

April 5: In Newport Beach, a dogged President Bush declared, "We will do what we can to help there without being bogged down into a ground-force action in Iraq." Again, the press office, hours later, came up with a written new policy -- the Air Force would start dropping food, blankets, and clothing to Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq.

As a public-relations answer, the air drops did not go over very well. The supplies landed in random places; television showed where some Kurds had been killed by falling bales.

April 8: Europe was looking at television, too, seeing reporting -- particularly in Britain -- that was often more vivid and comprehensive than American television was showing. At a European Community meeting in Luxembourg, British Prime Minister John Major proposed the creation of a protected "enclave" for the Kurds in northern Iraq. Secretary of State James Baker, visiting Luxembourg, saw on television what Europeans were seeing. Then, at the bidding of President Bush, worried about an impression of American insensitivity to the refugees' plight, Baker proceeded to the Turkish border. The seven-minute visit turned into a photo opportunity of a special sort. It focused on scenes of desperate Kurds, one saying, in English, "Please, Mr. Baker I want to talk to you. You've got to do something to help us."

April 11: A Reuters dispatch from Washington noted, "Searing pictures of suffering Iraqi refugees have clouded America's gulf war triumph and given President Bush a devilish political problem." Part of his problem was that his vacillation on the Kurdish issue had helped to bring down his approval rating from 92 to 80 percent in a Newsweek poll (78 percent in a Gallup poll).

April 12: The administration announced that American troops would be going back into Iraq as part of a relief operation called "Provide Comfort." Military encampments would be set up, guarded by coalition forces, eventually to be turned over to the United Nations. The announcement came so suddenly as to catch off base Defense Secretary Richard Cheney who, an hour before, had told a news conference that there had been no decision to "actually put forces on the ground in Iraq."

Within a two-week period, the president had been forced, under the impact of what Americans and Europeans were seeing on television, to reconsider his hasty withdrawal of troops from Iraq. As though to acknowledge this, Mr. Bush told a news conference on April 16, "No one can see the pictures or hear the accounts of this human suffering -- men, women, and, most painfully of all, innocent children -- and not be deeply moved."

Military victory over Iraq was threatening to turn into political and moral defeat. The polls that had shown Americans overwhelmingly wanting troops home in a hurry were now showing that Americans did not want to abandon the Kurds, even if that meant using American forces to protect them.

It is rare in American history that television, which is most often manipulated to support a policy, creates an unofficial plebiscite that forces a change in policy.

In a column on May 5, New York Times television critic Walter Goodman underscored what the medium had wrought when "it compelled the White House to act despite its initial reluctance." But he also raised the question, "Should American policy be driven by scenes that happen to be accessible to cameras and that make the most impact on the screen?"

The question is a reasonable one. But, in the case of the Kurds, it was not the pictures alone that forced the change. These were not random pictures of random suffering, but pictures that dramatized the suffering of a people for whom Americans felt some responsibility. It was that combination that overwhelmed governmental passivity.

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