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

To: carranza2 who wrote (139417)	7/8/2004 4:03:43 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

> It was crazy to think that Saddam would invade Kuwait ... Absolutely not so! If you read the excerpts of Glaspie's meeting, you'll see that she implies US thinks Iraq is planning to invade Kuwait and then some (references to troops on the boarder and statements coming from Saddam's office). Saddam himself makes it clear that he believes he is under economic attack from Kuwait and that he sees no difference between this economic attack and a military one. Any reasonable person would not find it "crazy" that Saddam may invade Kuwait and an ambassador who has lived in Arab world for many years and knows Saddam (and presumably has been briefed on his psych profile), would have found it likely that this is what Iraq planned. Incidentally, the issue of Kuwait's economic warfare against Iraq is often over-simplified as a matter of slanted drilling. In fact there was more substance to Saddam's claim on this than drilling disputes. So long as Iraq was fighting Iran, US and its satellites in the Persian Gulf provided massive support to Iraq. From US this took the shape of intel and arms sales. From Arab counties it was monetary support. The Iraqis saw themselves as the front line of defense for America and the rest of Persian Gulf against Iran. Certainly the support they got from these parties fortified this belief for them that they were all in it together. After the war they expected the support to continue towards rebuilding their country. Not only did they not get any help, but the OPEC refused to lower its production to help with the falling oil prices. Worse, Kuwait (and if I recall correctly UAE) increased their production beyond their OPEC quota and they certainly did not need the money at the time. The combination meant that Iraq had a hard time meeting the interest payments on what it had barrowed during the war. When this happened, Kuwaitis pushed even harder by selling their Iraqi notes cheaply on the open market and bringing down Iraq's credit rating. Now Iraq does have some legitimate claims over the northern region of Kuwait where the Kuwaitis allegedly ran slanted drilling. So from the Iraqi perspective, not only were the Kuwaitis going over their OPEC quota and waging economic war against them, they were doing it by stealing Iraqi oil using the fields that should not have been belonged to Iraq in the first place. Put all this together with the stress of 8 year war with Iran and Saddam's personality, and you will see it was not crazy at all to see Saddam was positioning its troops along the Kuwaiti boarder to invade. ST