Video: 'Idealist' tried to halt Saddam's Kurdish slaughter

Video: 'Idealist' tried to halt Saddam's Kurdish slaughter  »  Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attacks in 1988   (CNN) - Years before the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was slaughtering Iraq's Kurds with bombs, bullets and gas. The Reagan White House saw it as a ruthless attempt to put down a rebellion by a minority ethnic group fighting for independence and allied with Iraq's enemy, Iran. But Peter Galbraith thought it was something worse. "A light went off in my head, and I said, 'Saddam Hussein is committing genocide,'" said Galbraith, who was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time. Galbraith was one of the first Westerners to witness the effects of the slaughter. During a fact-finding trip for the Senate in 1987, he saw something troubling. "When we crossed from the Arab part of Iraq into the Kurdish part of Iraq, the villages and towns that showed on our maps just weren't there," he said. Bulldozing Kurdish villages was just the first phase of Hussein's war against the Kurds. In 1988, it escalated with chemical weapons. Watch CNN video   http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2008/12/01/sbm.iraq.kurds.cnn.cnn