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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (218128)	2/13/2007 10:14:07 AM
From: SARMAN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Let me assure you it is not conspiracy. HUSSEIN: The price at one stage had dropped to $12 a barrel and a reduction in the modest Iraqi budget of $6 billion to $7 billion is a disaster. GLASPIE: I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us? chss.montclair.edu In other words, your interpretation is based on an edited transcript released by Saddam's government. Really credible... not. It also could be said about wikipedia. The article could be written by a bias writer. After all anyone can add their 2 cents to wikipedia. An opinion that remains unsupported. How so?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (218128)	2/13/2007 8:20:03 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I dug into this pretty deeply a couple of years ago (or as deeply as I could without access to classified files <g>). My conclusion was that when it comes to Glaspie, she probably did not give as big of the green light as some claim she did. But I also took a look at all the other related things that were going on. Taken in aggregate, the actions and statements of several seemingly unrelated actors/nations does give credence to the idea that Saddam was set up for attacking Kuwait, but until the related info is declassified, we cannot be sure. Certainly knowing Saddam's personality has to be considered when drawing such a conclusion and it is hard to believe the related parties were unaware of his psychology. The short version is this: Saddam saw Iraq as the "Arab Hero" who bled to fight the Iranian threat. The "threat", as he saw it, was not so much to Iraq but all the Arab states in the Persian Gulf and to the US. This was not an unreasonable self image, if one had followed up on the talks and transactions between Iraq and the rest of Arab states in Persian Gulf. So reasonably, Saddam expected some gratitude and help in rebuilding Iraq. What followed was nothing short of a brutal economic warfare against Iraq. The two major factors of this war were over production by Kuwait and UAE (and I think Saudi) to the point of lowering the price of oil to teens and selling the Iraqi debt on open markets for dime on a dollar. The low oil prices meant Iraq could not service its debt. Selling them to Western markets meant that when Iraq defaulted, as it surely would have, the country would not be able to barrow to rebuild. I cannot think of any reason why the few Persian Gulf Arab states would engage in such an economic warfare, where both the low oil prices and selling the Iraqi debt at firesale prices would bring them huge losses. The feather that broke the camel's back came in the form of Kuwaiti slanted drilling into Iraqi territory. In other words, Kuwait was stealing Iraqi oil to wage economic warfare against them. Add to this that much of Kuwaiti land should have actually been Iraq's (Iraq does have a legitimate claim here). I believe that legally, a prosecutor does not have to show that the left hand "knew" what the right hand was doing in order to prove conspiracy. It really was not hard to have predicted the invasion of Kuwait, if one was aware of all the things in play at the time. ST