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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (134572)	5/27/2004 7:42:55 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, I only needed to click on the link and there they were: <May 20, 1991: President George Bush: "At this juncture, my view is we don't want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power." James Baker, Secretary of State: "We are not interested in seeing a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power." > Your memory is defective [welcome to the club] <But my memory is that these quotes are in the context of the mid-1990s or later - that is, after Saddam had engaged in sufficient cheat and retreat to make it clear that relations could never be normalized. If he had cooperated in 1991 a la Gaddafi is now, it would have been a different matter. Not certainly, but with high chances. > Right back at the very beginning, meaning while Saddam's soldiers were still in Kuwait, I was puzzled by his question as to whether the sanctions would be lifted if he withdrew from Kuwait. I thought of course they would. Silly me. Saddam had been around a lot longer than I had and knew the nefarious ways of the Machiavellian Americans. Sure enough, Saddam was right and I was wrong and the Americans had no intention of letting the oil supplies of a competitor get onto the market any time soon or to let Saddam move an inch. The profits for 13 years have been huge. BP's share price and profits have been splendid [not all of them due to my good works in the 1980s, I modestly have to admit]. So have Exxon's. The Bush and Clinton regimes were out to get him, or at the very least, keep his oil supplies very limited and meanwhile, preparing for an attack on him. While the USA and UN were messing around with Saddam, Pakistan was proceeding with their selling of actual noocular bomb weapons of mass destruction technology [not just the intention of developing proposals for developing programmes for some weapons of mass destruction] and Osama was planning the aerial demise of the Twin Towers and a lot more besides. Blinded by money and oil lust, the USA over-looked the real threat. Anyway, you were wrong and my PM correspondent right. You may kneel and apologize for misleading parliament: <Nonetheless, he could have got free of the sanctions by abiding by the terms > Mqurice