COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : Stop Saddam From Killing More Kurds : An expiring U.S.-Turkey pact facilitating overflights of Iraq is a Bush time bomb for Clinton.

Meeting at the White House for the first time since the election, George Bush and Bill Clinton are said to have talked mainly about foreign affairs. The President-elect, with his mind on the domestic economy, might prefer not to think too much about the outside world. But he will not escape it, given the large number of ticking time-bombs that are Bush’s parting gift to him.

The most lethal of these may be the matter of the Iraqi Kurds. By comparison, even the war in Bosnia seems relatively simple. The crux of the problem is Operation Provide Comfort, established after Iraq crushed the Kurdish uprising in the spring of 1991. Provide Comfort rests on an agreement between the United States and Turkey, renewable at six-month intervals, that allows U.S. aircraft access to Turkish bases to patrol the skies of Iraq north of the 36th Parallel. The current phase of the agreement expires on Dec. 31, and there is a serious danger that it will not be renewed.

In the past half-year, Turkey and its Middle Eastern neighbors have wearied of the Iraqi Kurds. Turkey, Syria and Iran all have troublesome Kurdish minorities of their own, and when foreign ministers from the three countries met on Nov. 14, the mood could not have been more ominous. With only minor variations of wording, all three declared that the current security zone in Iraqi Kurdistan must not be allowed to lead to the fragmentation of Iraq. Implicit is their concern that an autonomous Kurdistan (which the Great Powers promised in the aftermath of World War I, but then reneged on) will press ethnic Kurds’ claims to territory in their states.

Turkey’s is the only voice that really counts. Not only do Turkish bases make the overflights possible; Turkey is also the transit route for the majority of supplies that allow the Iraqi Kurds to survive a government blockade. But insiders say that the Turkish Parliament is poised to reject renewal of Provide Comfort.

The Kurds feel certain that if this happens, they will be immediately overrun. U.S. military officers in the region confirm privately that the main population centers of Kurdistan could be retaken within hours by Iraqi troops stationed along the edge of the no-fly zone. The Kurds’ plea to the outside world can be summed up in the most familiar and painful cry of the the 20th Century: Never again!

Comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Hitler at the time of the Gulf War were too often made for specious and opportunistic reasons by those who had long bankrolled and otherwise indulged the Iraqi leader. But the atrocities his regime inflicted on the Kurds, as recounted by survivors, make the parallel accurate.

In the worst episode, a 1988 military campaign called Anfal, the entire machinery of the state was deployed for what can only be described as murder on a Nazi industrial scale: widespread use of poison gas; the sorting facilities where detainees were separated by age and sex; the convoys of sealed, windowless buses headed for unknown destinations in the dead of night; the mass firing squads in the desert. The Kurds estimate that 180,000 died.

Under the umbrella of Provide Comfort, the Iraqi Kurds have shown the world what they can do if they are left to live in peace. They have held free and clean elections and they have built a functioning government of their own. On Oct. 4, their new Parliament voted in favor of a federalized system for a future, democratic Iraq.

It is this prospect of permanent Kurdish statehood that so alarms Iraq’s neighbors. The Turkish government now speaks of learning to live with Saddam Hussein. Worse, it has begun to adopt more and more of his terror methods to deal with its own Kurdish resistance.

In their search for survival, the Iraqi Kurds have long experience of making devil’s bargains. The latest of these is perhaps the most humiliating of all--an alliance with the army in its drive to destroy the Kurdish Workers’ Party, made in the pathetic hope that Turkey will show its gratitude by allowing Operation Provide Comfort to continue. Kurds are forced to kill Kurds--for the sake of saving Kurds. Such are the tragedies that afflict the weak and the powerless.

Bill Clinton has given few hints of how he might react to a renewed emergency in Iraq. But he cannot be held accountable for the wretchedness of the situation he will inherit, or the poverty of the options available to him. While the crisis in Kurdistan deepened, like those in Bosnia and Russia, the State Department was on furlough for politics. George Bush, in the final hapless months of his term, has done nothing to make his successor’s job any easier.