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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (2078)	4/6/1999 6:00:00 PM
From: nuke44	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

My most intensely researched and documented source was a paper I delivered to a seminar at the Air Force Leadership School at RAF Upwood, Norfolk, England in July 1984, on the effects of a possible alliance between Kuwait and the USSR. At that time Kuwait was accepting overtures from the USSR in return for promised military assistance in opposing a possible attack from Iraq. They were accepting these overtures because they had been turned down by the U.S. in their attempts to obtain advanced weapons systems such as the Stinger and armor mounted Hellfire missile systems. This paper also included the official U.S. stance in regards to Iraqi intentions on Kuwait. That stance, well known to Hussein, was an unqualified "hands off". That stance was in place when Saddam decided to annex Kuwait in 1990. My paper was a military scenario briefing, not a scholarly document, but I believe it was cogent to the Iraqi/Kuwaiti issue. By October of 1984, the U.S. and Kuwait had come to an understanding that the U.S. would provide assurance, through it's own military might that it would not allow Kuwait to be overrun and annexed by Iraq. Those guarantees, combined with similar guarantees from the British government, were in place at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 Aug 90. Saddam Hussein knew that, but underestimated U.S. and British resolve to stand by their guarantees. Perhaps we should have been more adamant in making our position on Kuwait the basis of any dialogue we had with Saddam. Instead we may have encouraged him by agreeing that he might have had a legitimate grievance with the Kuwaitis over the Rumailah oil field that straddled an already disputed area of the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border. At no time did we ever imply though, that we would accept any move by him to settle his claims on Kuwait with military force. His assumption was that once he had occupied Kuwait that Iraqi sovereignty would be a fait accompli. That was his mistake, not ours. Our mistake was in underestimating Saddam's ambition to be the most powerful figure in the Middle East by controlling it's oil and defying the superpowers in the process. Much as we may have underestimated Milosevic's concept of himself as a Serbian angel of vengeance, destined to overcome the forces of the ungodly (read that anyone not Serbian or of the Orthodox faith), or to die in the attempt, taking friend and foe alike with him.