Bush, Saddam and the Kuwait invasion

An extract from William Engdahl's Century of War

...Iraq, unlike Khomeini's Iran, emerged from the costly war with an enormous foreign debt burden. In 1988 she owed an estimated $65 billion to various creditors...

The Anglo-American gameplan was to lure Saddam Hussein into a trap he could not resist, in order to provide a pretext for military intervention from the united States and Britain, professedly to secure the safety of world oil supplies. In June 1989, a top-level delegation from an organisation known as the United States-Iraq Business Forum, which included Kissinger Associates' Alan Stoga and senior executives of Bankers' Trust, Mobil Oil, Occidental Petroleum and other large US multinationals, came to Baghdad at the request of Saddam Hussein. He wanted to discuss an Iraqi post war plan to develop his country's agricultural and industrial potential.

Iraq had a five-year $40 billion plan to complete the large Badush Dam irrigation project, which would have enabled her to become self-sufficient in food production; Iraq at that time depended on US Government Commodity Credit Corporation grain imports for as much as $1 billion worth of grain in 1989. In addition, Iraq proposed to the US group major investment in building up its petrochemicals industry, agriculture fertiliser plants, an iron and steel plant, and auto assembly plant, as part of an effort to develop the country. The American businessmen told Saddam he must first restructure his foreign debts, and in return agree to privatise Iraq's national oil resources, or a major portion of it. According to best British and American geophysical calculations, Iraq was perhaps the largest unexplored oil region in the world, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union.

Predictably, Saddam refused the American 'offer' to surrender sovereignty over Iraqi petroleum in exchange for vague assurances on future loans. By late 1989, some $2.3 billion in Bush administration-authorised credits for Iraq, which had been deliberately channelled through the Atlanta, Georgia, subsidiary of the Italian Banco Nationale del Lavoro (BNL) were abruptly cut. The cut-off of credit followed a series of sensational allegations in the London Financial Times, which claimed that the monies were secretly being used by Iraq to build its war machine. The combined effect of the Stoga talks and the BNL exposes was a total Western bank credit cut-off to Iraq by early 1990. At this critical juncture, the emir of Kuwait, an ally of Her Majesty's Foreign Office ever since the end of the previous century, entered the picture. The emir had earlier been instructed by London and Washington to funnel credits from Kuwait's vast oil revenues in order to keep Iraq from suing for peace during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. The cynical Anglo-American purpose at that time, as later scandals were to reveal, was to keep the Iran-Iraq War simmering and to maintain a sufficient 'strategy of tensions' to absorb large Western arms deliveries to both Iran and Iraq.

But in the early spring of 1990, Kuwait's 'mission' had changed. She was told to flood OPEC markets with her oil, in violation of OPEC production ceilings which had been agreed in order to stabilise world oil prices following the debacle of 1986-87. By the summer of 1990, Kuwait had succeeded in drawing oil prices from their precarious level of some $19 a barrel down to little more than $13 per barrel. Iraq and other OPEC members made repeated diplomatic efforts to persuade the emir, Sheikh al-Sabah, and the oil minister, Ali Khalifa al-Sabah, to stop the deliberate economic pressure on Iraq and the other economically hard-pressed OPEC producers. The appeal fell on deaf ears. By July, oil traders were predicting a repeat of 1986, with price levels of less than $10 per barrel in sight. Iraq was not even able to service its old debt of finance much-needed food imports.

The previous February, in Amman, Jordan, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had told fellow members of the Arab Cooperation Council... that the strategic implications of the collapse of the old communist order in eastern Europe, and the apparent emergence of the United States as the only military 'superpower', presented the Arab world with special dangers.

Saddam pointed, with concern, to the fact that despite the clear end to the Iran-Iraq War one year earlier, US military forces and warships in the Gulf had not shown any signs of pulling back. Rather, he noted with foreboding, 'the United States makes many statements that it is staying.'...

Saddam's conclusion in his remarks that February was that oil-wealthy Arab countries should join forces and make use of their 'possession of an energy source unparalleled in the world... I think we should forge relationships with Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union in a manner that will make us benefit from this element as soon as possible'.

If anything had stiffened the resolve of Anglo-American establishment circles to go ahead with plans for a dramatic new Middle East military action, it was this speech of Saddam's. On July 27 1990, when tensions between Iraq and Kuwait over oil prices were at a peak, the US Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, asked for a meeting with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to discuss the tense situation. According to official Iraqi transcripts of the exchange, later released by the Baghdad government and confirmed by US Congress almost a year later, Glaspie told Saddam that Washington would not take a position on the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait. Less than one week later, Iraqi forces occupied Kuwait City. The Kuwaiti al-Sabah royal family had fled will in advance, able to escape with Rolls-Royces, their gold and other valuables, because, according to one bitter former Kuwaiti government official in exile in Europe, 'the CIA informed the royal family in good time to get out, but the al-Sabahs "conveniently" forgot to inform the country's military of their information that Kuwait was about to be invaded.'...

What followed during the ensuing six months was one of the most cynical calculated acts of recent history. Despite initial claims that the United States, immediately backed by Thatcher's British government, would send military forces only to defend Saudi Arabia against an allegedly threatened Iraqi invasion ... President Bush, who had been together with Thatcher during the initial hours of decision in early August, appropriately at Aspen, Colorado, proclaimed what he soon referred to as his 'New World Order'.

On September 11, Bush declared:

'Out of these troubled times a New World Order can emerge, under a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders. We stand at a unique and extraordinary moment. This crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers us a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Today that New World Order is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we've known'.

Further evidence that George Bush an Margaret Thatcher never intended anything other than a military 'solution' to the Iraq-Kuwait crisis was given in the personal account of the Soviet special Middle East envoy, Evgeniy Primakov, some months later. In an extensive personal interview published in Time magazine on March 4,1991, some days after the end of the devastating bombardment of Iraq, Primakov, as personal envoy of President Gorbachev, recounted his meeting in Baghdad in the early days of October 1990 with Saddam Hussein and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, which convinced Primakov that 'a war could have been averted'. Primakov recounted for Time his subsequent October 19 mediation mission to Washington, where he met with George Bush, Secretary Baker and other top officials at the White House. The Moscow envoy reported that Bush listened with apparent interest, but that some hours later he sent the clear message to PRimakov that Washington was not interested in exploring the new opening further.

After leaving Washington, Primakov received instructions to stop over in London to deliver the same report to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Primakov's account is revealing:

'The Prime Minister received us at her country residence, Chequers. She listened attentively to the information I presented her, without interrupting. But then, for a good hour, she allowed no one to interrupt her monologue, in which she outlined in a most condensed way a position that was gaining greater momentum: not to limit things to a withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait but to inflict a devastating blow at Iraq, 'to break the back' of Saddam and destroy the entire military, and perhaps industrial potential of that country'.

…

The former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, a respected Washington expert on Middle East affairs, ... came out publicly against the Bush war plan against Iraq. Akins pointed out, in a signed article published in the Los Angeles Times of September 12… that the White House had an ‘ulterior motive’. Akins charged that the US Defence Secretary Cheney had deliberately misled Saudi King Fahd on the likelihood of such an invasion in order to be allowed to station US troops on Saudi soil, something fiercely resisted by the Saudis for decades. In 1975, Akins related, plans to find a pretext to sent US troops to occupy vital Mideastern oilfields had been encouraged by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He noted that Kissinger, then Akins’ superior, had opposed Akins’ adamant attacks on such ideas.

‘Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary, had another view, and my career in the Foreign Service did not extend much beyond that point… There are those in the Bush administration who will point out that conditions are more propitious now than in 1975’

Notably, in 1990, the former Kissinger Associate president Lawrence Eagleburger was deputy secretary of state under James Baker, and former Kissinger employee Brent Scowcroft was Bush’s White House national security adviser during this period…