As an Iraqi American, Saif Ataya is a product of the American dream and, also, of one of its broken promises. He came to San Francisco from a Saudi Arabian desert camp in the middle of nowhere 10 years ago without enough money to buy a razor to shave his scraggly beard.

After living through what he calls his own personal holocaust - including the deaths of his mother and other family members - Ataya was happy to be in the United States. But then again, he was a refugee in large part due to U.S. policy gone awry.

It was the first President George Bush who had encouraged him - and hundreds of thousands of other oppressed Shiite Muslims in the south of Iraq - to rise up against Saddam Hussein immediately after the first Persian Gulf War.

U.S. support for a final coup de grace against Hussein seemed a given. Though some of the poorly-armed rebels briefly reached the gates of Baghdad, within 20 days the uprising was brutally suppressed. Thousands died. Many more fled the country.

Having won their war in Kuwait, the Americans - who had encouraged the uprising - sat idly by while Hussein used Scuds and chemical weapons and combat helicopters - which American officials allowed Iraq to operate under the Gulf War cease-fire agreement - against the ragtag rebels.

"I have seen it with my own eyes," says Ataya vehemently in his not quite perfect English. "I see two pictures actually. One is the Iraqi helicopters shooting us and then, above that, I see the F-16s all the way up, very small, the Americans watching all this atrocity that has been done."

Like many new immigrants in this country, Ataya worked hard immediately after landing on American soil - holding down two jobs and working 80-hour weeks, catching a little sleep on the bus which carried him from one job to the other. Ataya insists the money he got was a secondary benefit. He threw himself into endless toil mainly in order to forget.

The memories of the family he left back in his hometown haunt him the most. His mother died of a heart attack when the police came to the family home looking for Ataya after he deserted from the army. His brother was executed by the regime's secret service two decades ago for suggesting Hussein step down. Three of his sisters have also died since he left Iraq. No one has been able to tell him why.

Ataya has done well in America. He started out working in a grocery store. Now he owns one, which he runs during the week with his wife, Angelica. On weekends, he uses his real estate license and boyish charm to sell "dream homes."

But try as he might, Ataya cannot forget the past. It comes back to haunt him every time he turns on the TV and sees images of American troops massing in the gulf.

President George W. Bush is now poised to finish the work his father suddenly abandoned in the spring of 1991: overthrowing Hussein. In his State of the Union address, Bush included a special message for the "brave and oppressed people of Iraq," saying their leader - not the United States - was their enemy and when Hussein was gone the people would be liberated.

Indeed, many in the Bush administration are promising to bring democracy to a post-Hussein Iraq and liberation to its people. But it has proved far easier for us and our leaders than for Ataya to forget the way our government abandoned those same Iraqi people over a decade ago. At a time when U.S. troops are hoping to roll into Baghdad as welcomed liberators, to occupy and rebuild a country in our own image, we should all be reminded of this dark chapter in our mutual history.

Ataya recalls waking up one day in early March 1991 and finding the streets of his town littered with white flyers dropped by the Americans. "Rise up, oh brothers," the flyers read in Arabic. "This is your time. The American armed forces will help you. We need your help to change for democracy and freedom."

Ataya and the young men of al Hilla, a Shiite Muslim-dominated town 150 miles south of Baghdad, agreed. It was their time.

Since the days of the Ottoman Empire, the Shiite Arab majority in the region had been controlled, oppressed and deprived of their rights by an unsympathetic minority in Baghdad. The systematic discrimination accelerated when Hussein's Ba'ath Party came to power after a 1968 coup. Shiite clerics and leaders were routinely imprisoned or executed. Much of the wealth of the country came from enormous oil fields outside of Basra, but the Shiites of Basra seldom saw a single dinar flow back to the south.

Using what few weapons they had, the rebels stormed the town's Ba'ath Party headquarters. Many men in the regular army joined them. Within hours, al-Haila was in rebel hands, a scenario that was played out in town after town in the south of Iraq. Soon the Shiite rebels, joined by Kurds from the north, had reached the outskirts of Baghdad.

"We were 20 minutes away from the capital," Ataya says. "One more week and we would have been fine."

Najib al-Salhi, a general in the Iraqi army at the time of the uprising would agree, having seen things from the other side. The rebels were so close to toppling the regime "if the Americans or Arabs had helped them, Saddam would have been gone years ago," says al-Salhi, who subsequently fled Iraq and now lives in Washington, D.C.

In those few crucial weeks after the Iraqi armies were routed in Kuwait, however, U.S. policy seemed to undergo a sudden shift. The Bush administration apparently decided it was better to deal with a humbled dictator than with a group of rebels who could ultimately install a government in Baghdad even less to its liking. But there was a price. Thousands of Shiites and Kurds were killed (al-Salhi believes 300,000 died) once Hussein's elite corps of Republican Guard forces regrouped and attacked the rebel towns - and the Americans did nothing.

One U.S. Gulf War-era defense analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity said, "I consider the slaughter of 1991 to be one of the blackest marks on our record."

There were many divergent views within the first Bush administration as to what to do about Hussein, he said. Some wanted to keep moving into Baghdad, but the United States was limited in its U.N. mandate - and George H.W. Bush's war aims - which only called for the expulsion of Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait.

Some within the administration thought they should keep Hussein in power as a counterweight against Iran. But the CIA, according to the analyst, pushed the idea that the Iraqi regime was teetering on the brink of collapse and that "all we have to have is an uprising and then one of the generals will shoot Saddam."

That -didn't happen. Instead of turning against Hussein, the main Iraqi army, beaten badly by the Americans, rallied around the cause of suppressing the rebellion.

"It was the saddest day of my life," the analyst said, adding that he argued against the move. "I knew what was going to happen because we were presenting the Iraqi (army) with this lovely opportunity to get all their frustrations out on the helpless."

Ataya and other survivors had little choice but to flee or die. More than 800,000 people streamed out of Iraq within three days.

"It was at the time the largest, swiftest mass exodus recorded in history," says Jeff Chenoweth of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, who worked with the huge deluge of refugees. He noted that the record was only surpassed in Rwanda in the wake of the genocide three years later.

Ataya says he walked for 20 days through the Iraqi desert, using the night sky to guide him southeast, toward Saudi Arabia. His feet blistered and caked with blood, he kept himself alive with Kool-Aid powder he found in an abandoned U.S. army bag.

When he finally stumbled upon an American patrol in the border zone, he was 50 pounds lighter and nearly crazed by thirst. But he lived. "You know that show 'Survivor'?" he asks. "You put me on that show and I win - easy."

The Americans, who were preparing to pull out of southern Iraq and Saudi Arabia, suddenly had thousands of displaced people on their hands. As the Americans departed, they turned the group - 32,000 refugees in all - over to the Saudi government.

"In doing so, we completely violated international law," says Lavinia Limon,
director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, adding that the Saudis are not signatories to the Geneva Convention on refugees or prisoners of war. "If I had another life to live after retirement, I would sue everyone on the winning side of the war in international court for this."

Ataya and the other refugees were deposited in makeshift camps in the Saudi desert, where they stayed for more than a year before anyone noticed them.

"We were getting desperate," Ataya says. "We'd been there for one year and four months with nothing to do. We -didn't even have a newspaper. Just giving me food, that's punishment to me. I'm not an animal."

In August 1992, the refugees staged a hunger strike, which led to deadly riots. Whether due to the protests or not, the United Nations set up an office in the camps within a month and began processing applications for resettlement.

Ataya was one of the first to be resettled to the United States.

More than 12,000 Iraqis came to these shores before the resettlement program was shut down in 1997, with more than 5,000 Atayas still languishing in Rafha, the Saudi camp.

The Saudis have provided the Iraqis with many creature comforts, but they are still stuck in a wasteland six miles from the Iraqi border, which may soon become the front line in a new war on Iraq.

"We feel we did the major share of the work in Rafha," said Theresa Rusche, director of admissions in the Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, adding that many of the refugees in the camp initially -didn't show up for interviews and seemed ambivalent about resettling in the United States. "So they had their shot."

Moreover, following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was focusing on populations in other regions, such as Africa. "Of course, that might change again in three months, who knows?" Rusche said.

But some refugee agency workers say the story of the Rafha refugees is crucial to the debate about another conflict in Iraq.

"Here we have the U.S. about to launch a war against Saddam Hussein because he's such a brutal dictator," says Limon, who was a part of the now defunct resettlement program. "The Bush administration is talking about democracy, but as long as Rafha is sitting out there, who can believe the U.S. gives a damn about the people of Iraq?"

Given the American track record, Ataya -doesn't trust the Bush administration to create a democratic Iraq. What he fears, in the wake of a successful war unseating Hussein, is a continuation of suppression and terror - just in another name.

"One and a half million people in Iraq have died already," he says. "How much more can they give? If there is a war, then more will die, and who will come after that? It will be the same struggle."

Brandon Sprague wrote this story for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he is a student.