And I'd suggest Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation.

The US never promised or even suggested that it would aid such a rebellion, as it was against the UN resolution. The propagation of such myths is part of the reason why many Americans felt a special responsibility for liberating the country.

In any event, we were a little busy assessing the scale of the Iraqi Arab atrocities committed against other Arabs in Kuwait.

Here's a tougher question. Where were the Iraqis? Saddam didn't jump in a helicopter himself and quell those uprisings.

The Coalition had just obliterated a good portion of the Iraqi military and they still couldn't topple the regime? Why? The sad truth is that the uprisings were pathetically small and Saddam still enjoyed a significant level popular support throughout most of the country. Sound familiar?
Then don't instigate a rebellion. Whether or not it was intended, the Shi'ites in the south-east of the country and the Kurds up north were under the impression that the United States would offer military assistance when they'd rise up in rebellion.

Interesting to note is that UNSCR 687 was adopted the 3rd of April. Radio Voice for Free Iraq called for a revolution against the Ba'ath party on the evening of February the 24th. Whether or not they had promised military assistance, it had been expected by the revolutionaries. This was not a fight they could win on their own. This was the message coming from Al-Ali of Radio Voice Free Iraq:

"...you have no option in order to survive and to defend the homeland but to put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang"

Apparently, it was either liberty or death. No middle ground. Perhaps we should've been more fair to the Iraqis who suffered daily under the Ba'athist oppression.

Why was it our job to lay siege to Baghdad? We acted in defense of the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and crippled the Iraqi military - couldn't the Iraqis have carried a little bit of the weight themselves?

And we all saw what happened when they were belatedly delivered a chance for freedom and democracy on a silver platter - a rare chance peoples in dozens of third world crapholes would love to get. You'll note that the initial toppling of the regime was remarkably bloodless for the average Iraqi and the nation's infrastructure. America was ready and enthusiastic to help the Iraqis create a democratic state and rebuild their nation after years of rot under Saddam. Unlike the Japanese who faced a similar situation decades before, the Iraqis chose the path of the petulant child, and their temper tantrum led to untold levels of death and destruction. Fun stuff.
It may not have been the job of the West to free Iraq and lay siege to Baghdad, but that was the idea everyone listening to the clandestine CIA-operated radio expected. The Iraqi rebels were first told to rise up, but when the moment was at its most critical, we decided to pull back. Basically we told them "go and get 'em, we'll be right behind you". Only we really weren't.

No valid reasons, yes. If you're trying to create the impression that Iraqi insurgents fought due to bitterness over sanctions, then they were fighting the wrong people. When the effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi people became clear, the UN, specifically prodded by the US and British, took steps to address the situation. There wasn't much that could be done to help the Iraqis under regime control except...
Yeah, but did you know to what lengths the West went to deny what was happening in Iraq. When the aforementioned Robert Fisk first reported on the detrimental effects of depleted uranium to the public health, especially in the cases of child cancer, Lord Gilbert from the ministry of Defence wrote: "coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk, this would be regarded as a wilful perversion of reality". Nice.

In 1991, Paddy Bartholomew of the UK Atomic Energy Agency wrote: "[Depleted Uranium] can become a long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a risk to both the military and civilian population[...] if the tank category of DU was inhaled, the latest Internatioanl Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor . . . calculates 500,000 potential deaths.". Of course, the AEA made a deal with the Kuwaiti government (and rightly so) to clean up the mess of DU in Kuwait, but not in Iraq, where many, many people were dying. Infant mortality rate went up from [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions#Infant_and_child_death_rates]47 per 1,000 pre-invasion to 108 per 1,000 post-invasion]. Child mortality rate was even worse.

I will have to be fair here, though, the UN did not ban medicine imports, that was one of Saddam's own doings.

As for UN support, let's get serious here. The British newspaper The Independent launched an appeal, raising $250,000 to buy cancer drugs and medical equipment. The British government was quite lethargic in its handling of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. It called for eh "peer-reviewed epidemiological research data" to confirm the abysmal state of living in Iraq, which of course, never happened.

9/11 had everything to do with the First Gulf War and nothing to do with Saddam. It seems if you act in defense of some Arabs, you get blown up by other Arabs.
Okay, maybe Bin Laden was bitter over the fact that the Saudi government didn't want him to fight in Iraq. But now you're sweeping over a whole different discussion and suggest that the primary reason for 9/11 was the Gulf War. That's plain denial.

Iraq invaded and ruthlessly pillaged an Arab neighbor and was bombed accordingly. The deaths of teh childrenz sucks, but they lie at the feet of Saddam and the ordinary Iraqis who gleefully raped and killed the people of Kuwait.
Ah yes, the gleeful rape of Kuwaitis by vile ordinary Iraqis. Those same vile ordinary Iraqis who were dumped in mass graves by American soldiers whose general couldn't be bothered to hold on the Geneva Conventions that were oh-so-very-important to count the exact amount of bodies. American deaths were tragedies. Iraqi deaths were statistics. Intriguing issue.

Thos same vile Iraqis who were threatened with execution if they tried to desert. Those ordinary Iraqis? Those who suffered perhaps even more under Saddam than the Kuwaitis? Just to make sure we're on the same line here, those Iraqis whose children were shot to death if they were supposedly working against Saddam?

Not to justify that what the Iraqis did in Kuwait was okay, of course it wasn't. But now you're pretending that there was some sort of general pro-Ba'athist consensus of the Iraqi people, so much that any mistreatment of the Kuwaitis was jusitified. That's scornful. And if the Iraqis think that all Americans think like you do, maybe, just maybe they've got some reason to dislike Americans.

A little more than a decade later, America took the extraordinary step of removing the regime and instead of thinking "wow, I'm grateful the Americans finally removed this horrible person who has caused us so much grief and want to help us establish a free state", the average Iraqi thought to himself "let's blow some up!"
Again, those were the same Iraqis whose families were raped to death in the subterranean prisons of the Ba'ath party. Those Iraqis whose suffering was ignored by the West, probably even extended by (indirect) western support for Saddam's government. Only when it started to get inconvenient for us that we decided to stop Saddam, with some pathetic excuse about weapons of mass destruction or something like that.

I've become more and more convinced that the Arab Street just isn't ready for democracy. They may want a change in leadership, but their culture is structured in such a way that they are not capable of establishing a modern civil society.
Okay, good for you. But lets leave this to the Arabs okay? Because when Iran, a non-Arab country, was ready for democracy, we decided to interrupt. Your argument of culture reeks of 19th century colonialist filth. Don't forget that we kept Bouteflika, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad and Saleh in power. So don't give me this "not ready for democracy" nonsense. We never wanted them to be ready for democracy.

Oh but they did. There were constant calls by Iraqis to liberate the country. It was, after all, our duty after mercilessly betraying them in 1991 and imposing a child-killing humantarian crisis on them thereafter. Freeing Iraq became our responsibility, and a moral imperative that could not be ignored any longer.
When you don't have anything to eat, when your 13-year old daughters have to prostitute themselves to truckers, you try rebelling against the government. There was one thing that Saddam understood about staying in power that Mubarak didn't; either you have to give your people the illusion of freedom, or you have to take so much freedom away that anyone trying to rebel is immediately eliminated, and anyone seeing him is immediately eliminated as well. See what happened to the Marsh Arabs, for example.

Speaking about betrayal.