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To: tsigprofit who wrote (17492)	6/6/2005 7:23:57 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 20773

My facts are correct: answers.com When these purported transcripts were made public, Glaspie was accused of having given approval for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which took place on August 2, 1990. The transcript, however, does not show any explicit statement of approval of, acceptance of, or foreknowledge of the invasion. Indeed Glaspie's opening question ("Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait's borders?") would suggest that Glaspie (and presumably therefore also the State Department) did not know the purpose of the troop concentrations and was concerned about them. The transcript also shows clearly that when Glaspie expressed the hope that the Iraq-Kuwait dispute would be "solved quickly," she meant "solved by diplomatic means." The references to solving this problem "using any suitable methods via Klibi or via Mubarak" make this clear. Nothing Glaspie says in the published versions of the transcript can be fairly interpreted as implying U.S. approval of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It is possible to ague, however (and many have done so), that Glaspie's statements that "We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts" and that "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America" were interpreted by Saddam as giving tacit approval of his annexation of Kuwait. Since it is not now possible to know what was in Saddam's mind, this matter cannot be resolved. Saddam was a dictator who had never visited a western country, and who lived a in a world where disputes were routinely resolved by force. It is therefore quite possible that he wrongly interpreted Glaspie's remarks. Given that the Iraqi regime sought to arouse international sympathy in order to weaken support for the economic sanctions that had been imposed by the United Nations after the invasion of Kuwait, it is somewhat surprising that Iraqi spokespersons did not attempt to exploit the controversy further, other than by releasing the transcripts. Indeed Tariq Aziz in a 2000 interview for PBS claimed that "There were no mixed signals. We should not forget that the whole period before August 2 witnessed a negative American policy towards Iraq. So it would be quite foolish to think that, if we go to Kuwait, then America would like that." He characterized the meeting with Glaspie as "nothing extraordinary" and said that Saddam "wanted her to carry a message to George Bush--not to receive a message through her from Washington." Some have argued that Saddam would not likely have invaded Kuwait had he been given an explicit warning that such an invasion would be met with force by the United States. Glaspie can only be criticised for not giving such a warning if it can be established that she knew that Saddam was planning an invasion. There is nothing in the transcripts to suggest this. The most that can be argued is that, given the Iraqi troop build-up in the Kuwait border area, she should have been instructed by the State Department to give Saddam an explicit warning. Glaspie later testified that she had given Saddam such a warning, but no mention of this appears in the published transcripts. This is hardly surprising since these transcripts were released to further Iraq's ends. Edward Mortimer wrote in the New York Review of Books in September 1991: "It seems [likely] that Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he believed the US would not react with anything more than verbal condemnation. That was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting with US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly disavowing any US security commitments to Kuwait." Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institute, writing in the New York Times on September 21 2003, disagrees with this analysis: "In fact, all the evidence indicates the opposite: Saddam Hussein believed it was highly likely that the United States would try to liberate Kuwait, but convinced himself that we would send only lightly armed, rapidly deployable forces that would be quickly destroyed by his 120,000-man Republican Guard. After this, he assumed, Washington would acquiesce to his conquest." Consistent with this line of thought, Tariq Aziz claimed in a 1996 PBS interview that Iraq "had no illusions" prior to the invasion of Kuwait about the likelihood of U.S. military intervention. ..... In August 2002 the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs published a new account of the Glaspie-Saddam meeting. The author, Andrew I. Kilgore (a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar), summarised the meeting as follows: "At their meeting, the American ambassador explained to Saddam that the United States did not take a stand on Arab-Arab conflicts such as Iraq’s border disagreement with Kuwait. She made clear, however, that differences should be settled by peaceful means. "Glaspie’s concerns were greatly eased when Saddam told her that the forthcoming Iraq-Kuwait meeting in Jeddah was for protocol purposes, to be followed by substantive discussions to be held in Baghdad. "In response to the ambassador’s question, Saddam named a date when Kuwaiti Crown Prince Shaikh Sa’ad Abdallah would be arriving in Baghdad for those substantive discussions. (This appears in retrospect to have been Saddam’s real deception.)" ....