Hi Maurice Winn; Re: "Carl, the advice to Saddam, pre-Kuwait invasion, wasn't just a little mistake. It was a biggie, equivalent to Australia saying to the USA "What do you think of us taking over NZ by invasion and conquest?""
I agree that your wording would imply that we HAD given permission to Saddam, but it's evident that your memory of the conversation between Gillespie and Saddam is defective. If you read what was actually said, and take into account the fact that the translation of subtle intentions between Arabic and English is fraught with difficulty, you will see that it was well within the scope of human error to "green light" Saddam to invade Iraq:
Shortly before the invasion, Saddam called a meeting with then US ambassador April Gillespie, who told Saddam: "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." She went on to say: "James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction."
socialistalternative.org
A lack of opinion on a "border disagreement" is something that two people can reasonably be expected to mean two different things. What James Baker meant was that the US wouldn't intervene in the diplomatic border disagreement going on between Iraq and Kuwait, not that we would not intervene in a takeover of Kuwait by Iraq.
Re: "I think it was a booby-trap and Saddam walked in and his oil was taken off the market while the search for BigFoot got underway."
Our country is led by fools and imbeciles and pretty much always has been. There is no way that they could organize such a trap. They just aren't that deep thinkers. Instead, what they did was try to keep the US as buddies of both Iraq AND Kuwait, but that may have inadvertently convinced Saddam that he had a green light.
By the way, I couldn't find a full transcript of the interview between Gillespie and Saddam. If I recall, when you place the above Gillespie comments in perspective, it makes it even more clear that the conversation could have a dual interpretation.
-- Carl |
