HALABJA, Iraq – If crimes against humanity were sufficient reason to oust Saddam, you could find all the necessary evidence in this shabby town.

Set in a beautiful valley, with fields of wheat ringed by craggy, snow-topped mountains, Halabja has a history of horror. It is symbolized by a memorial statue in the middle of the town, much of which still lies in ruins. The statue portrays a dying father lying on the ground as he tries in vain to protect his child from an attack by chemical weapons.

This is the town where Saddam Hussein murdered 5,000 Kurdish civilians in a matter of hours on March 16, 1988, when his military sprayed and shelled them with VX, sarin and mustard gas.

The population cowered in their homes, or ran out into the streets, or crowded into government air-raid shelters built for the Iran-Iraq war. I peer into the remnants of one belowground shelter, now a fetid pit filled with garbage, where 120 men, women and children perished.

This was a revenge killing by Saddam. Some Iraqi Kurdish leaders had helped the Iranians. Such aid was not surprising: Saddam’s troops had slaughtered more than 100,000 Iraqi Kurds and razed 4,500 Kurdish villages in the 1980s.

Even though the Iran-Iraq war was ending, the Iraqi leader wanted to punish the Kurds further.

The survivors of Halabja, and scores of other small villages that were also gassed, suffer from increased rates of cancer, scars, blindness, continuous itching, and severe breathing problems. Women miscarry, and their babies suffer abnormal numbers of birth defects.

Saddam has no regrets: He keeps the man who organized the attacks, nicknamed Ali Chemical, as a trusted adviser.

But are these crimes sufficient reason to launch a U.S. war against Baghdad? My heart says yes, but my head says that America would be fighting endless wars if it tried to oust every despot who crushed his own people.

The bigger question is whether – as U.S. officials claim – Saddam would cooperate with terrorists who could use chemical or biological weapons against us.

My trip to Halabja made me reconsider this critical question. I traveled in a convoy, with a truck full of armed Kurdish “peshmerga fighters behind me, and a guard with a machine gun riding up front.

Why the guards? Halabja is located near some mountain villages where a small number of al-Qaida terrorists are ensconced along with a few hundred radical Kurdish Islamists who want to establish an Islamic state in Kurdistan. I could see those villages from a peshmerga fortress in the valley that exchanges regular mortar fire with the terrorists.

The Bush administration claims that Saddam has trained members of this al-Qaida nest in making chemical weapons. I have always doubted that Saddam would help al-Qaida – whose leader, Osama bin Laden, just labeled him an infidel – to attack the United States. I thought Saddam would find this too risky, because if the link were discovered it would provide justification for “regime change.”

But Kurdish intelligence officers tell me that Iraq is helping this small al-Qaida cell for a more local reason – because these terrorists are attacking secular Kurdish leaders. In other words, Saddam is willing to make common cause with his al-Qaida enemy to keep himself in power, and al-Qaida will use his help for its own goals.

It is this ferocious determination to keep power, for which he will use any means, that makes Saddam more dangerous than the usual despot. My Halabja trip convinced me that the U.N. Security Council has only two options: commit to maintaining intense weapons inspections of Iraq as long as Saddam rules Iraq, or pass a second resolution to disarm him by force.

The consequences of war, while they would improve life for Iraqis, could trap the United States in a Mideast quagmire. But I believe there is no choice. The man who used chemical weapons against Halabja will never willingly let go of them.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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