How Washington worked for a war few kilometers into Kuwait across Irag's southern border.
During July of 1990, Saddam ordered over 100,000 troops to the Kuwaiti border. At the same time negotiations were being conducted in advance of a summit meeting at Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to be attended by Saudi King Fahd, the emir of Kuwait
SINCE the start of the Gulf crisis in August 1990 Washington's
"Authorized Version" of the roots and meaning of the conflict has been challenged by a series of insights into American diplomatic activity before its outbreak. Further
"counter-evidence" appeared in the March 5 edition of the
New York weekly, Village Voice. This comment on that information is taken from the April 1991 number of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, the journal of the Fourth
Internationalist Tendency, an organization of sympathizers of the Fourth International in the United States.
BIDOM
W
RITING in the March 5
Village Voice's lead story
[published in New York
City] Michael Emery has compiled conclusive evidence to prove that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait could have been prevented and that even afterwards, an Iraqi withdrawal could have been effected without war. He also shows that the invasion, whether justified or not, was in no way an act of wanton aggression, but the consequence of months of
Kuwaiti and Saudi provocations against
Iraq. Emery writes:
"The evidence shows that President
George Bush, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian president Hosni
Mubarak, and other Arab leaders secretly cooperated on a number of occasions, beginning in August 1988, to deny Saddam Hussein the economic help he demanded for the reconstruction of his nation.
"In addition, parties to the Arab negotiations say the Kuwaitis - who had actively supported Saddam in his war with the
Shi'ite fundamentalists of Iran, providing billions of dollars in loans and helping him to acquire sophisticated weapons otherwise unavailable to the widely mistrusted Iraqi regime — had enthusiastically participated in a behind-the-scenes economic campaign inspired by Western intelligence agencies against Iraqi interests. The Kuwaitis even went so far as to dump oil for less than the agreed upon
OPEC price, something the Kuwaitis, with their vast holdings in the West, could easily afford, but which undercut the oil revenues essential to a cash hungry Baghdad."
Emery's source is not a confidential informant. It is none other than King
Hussein of Jordan, who has been directly involved in the diplomacy between Irag and Kuwait since long before anyone out-
20 side the region kew there aas ee co a.
International Viewpoint #204 • April 15, 1991 slight problem. King Hussein has no reason to lie: his track record as a friend and ally of US imperialism is unassailable.
Making the Mideast safe for imperialism
He has held power for 38 years - quite literally all his adult life and a remarkable achievement for a Middle Eastern ruler — and he has done everything within his power to make the Middle East safe for imperialist exploitation.
His biggest accomplishment in that regard was the decisive defeat his forces inflicted on the
PLO in "Black September" of 1970.
Furthermore,
Jordan is because in natural poor and rich resources in Palestinian refugees, he has had to depend on foreign aid to keep his country afloat. One of the biggest sources of foreign aid has been
Kuwait.
confirms
Emery that the issues which led to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait were:
Iraq's war debt of about $80 billion;
Kuwait's refusal to abide by
OPEC production quotas, thereby keeping the price of oil too low for Iraq to meet its debt obligations; and the border dispute centering on the
Rumailah oilfield, which extends for a
Jaber al-Ahmad as-Sabah, and Saddam Hussein. Emery writes:
"The secret arrangement... was that the Saudis and the Kuwaitis would pledge an initial $10 billion to assist the war-weary Iragis, as a down payment on the $30 billion Saddam demanded last May. The issue of war debt reduction, the disputed boundary and secret oil production were all supposed to be on the table....
"King Hussein told the Voice that he had been SO concerned about the parlous nature of the Jidda conference that he and his entourage flew to Baghdad on July 30. That's when he first discovered how truly angry Saddam was....
"The king immediately flew from Baghdad to Kuwait to urge the as-Sabahs to soften their attitude toward Iraq (at the time, the king had no idea that a rough agree. ment had already been sketched out). According to both the king and another participant, despite Saddam's army on their border, the Kuwaitis were in no mood to listen. Why were the rulers of this tiny city-state sure of themselves?
"Apparently, the Kuwaitis thought they knew something the Iraqis didn't. In their July 30 meeting, Kuwaiti foreign minister, Sheikh Sabeh Ahmed al-Jaber as-Sabah, the emir's brother, began by making sarcastic remarks about the Iraqi soldiers near the border. The Jordanians rebuked him,
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urging the sheikh to take the Iraqis seriously at the mini-summit scheduled for the next day. Then Sheikh Sabeh shocked the Jordanian delegation by saying: 'we are not going to respond to [Iraq].... If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory...we are going to bring in the Ameri-
"The Jidda session lasted
Saddam's astonishment, according to a source close to the discusthe Kuwaitis offered an enraged Izzat Ibrahim [the Iraqi vice president] the man who announced Iraq's rejection of the Bush ultimatum....a mere $500,000. The meeting broke up without even a discussion of Iraq's oil production and border complaints. Two days later, Saddam
The Village Voice obtained a copy of King Fahd's invitation to the emir to the Jidda conference. Across the top is a note handwritten by the emir to his foreign minister. It reads as follows:
"We will attend the meeting according to the conditions we agreed upon. What is important to us is our national interest. Do not listen to anything you hear from the Saudis and Iragis on brotherhood and Arab solidarity. Each of them has their
"The Saudis want to weaken us and exploit our concessions to the Iraqis, so that we will concede to them [the Saudis] in the future the divided [neutral] zone (where new oil reserves are reported]. The Iraqis want to compensate their war expenditures from our accounts. Neither this nor that should happen. This is also the opinion of our friends in Egypt, Washington and London. Be unwavering in your discussions. We are stronger than
Wishing you success." [Emphasis added].
"Arab solution" attempted
After the invasion, King Hussein attempted to bring about an "Arab soluwith the misunderstanding that he had Saudi and Egyptian support for his efforts. He went to Baghdad to convince Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from Kuwait. On August 3 — the day after the invasion — the king had agreement from Saddam that the troops would be withdrawn starting August 5 and that either Saddam himself or a representative would attend a second Arab summit meeting in Jidda on August 5. Saddam's condition was that there be no public condemnation of Iraq and that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait live up to the terms of their pre-July 31 agreement. However, by the evening of August 3, the Arab League, meeting in Cairo, had at Mubarak's urging issued a public condemnation of Iraq, and it was common knowledge that London and Washington were pressuring Mubarak to get the resolution adopted. King Hussein insists that, in spite of George Bush's dire warnings about the danger of Saddam Hussein's "expansionism" Saudi Arabia was never in danger:
"The king recalls how on August 7, after receiving an American cable warning that Saddam might gobble up the Saudi regime, he offered a visiting Saudi official 'half of the [Jordanian] army' if a genuine threat existed. But the Saudi said that help was not needed, that he had been with King Fahd that very day and the king had seemed confident and secure. Certainly no urgent need for Jordanian military help was mentioned.
"But within 30 minutes of the Saudi received news that the first US troops had arrived. President Bush cited the threat to Saudi Arabia in his decision to send the Rapid Deployment Force to form the first skirmish of Desert Shield...
"But Saddam's intentions were actually less critical at this juncture than Western intentions. In another conversation King Hussein had at around this time, with then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady let it slip that 'troops were halfway to their destination before the request came for them to come'."
Kuwaiti stance encouraged
Emery's report shows that had the United States and Britain encouraged measures which could have addressed Iraq's economic difficulties after the war with Iran, Saddam would have chosen not to invade Kuwait. Instead, however, Washington and London Kuwaitis in their intransigent insistence on payment with interest on their outstanding loans and their refusal to provide the least financial assistance, even though Iraq was virtually bankrupted by the war which the Kuwaitis and Americans had
"Instead of warning of the serious consequences of any Iraqi military against Kuwait, in the famous July 25 meeting between Ambassador April Glaspie and Saddam Hussein, the US disclaimed any interest in 'border disputes'. Had such a warning been issued it is more than likely that Saddam would have taken pushed for immediate Arab League condemnation of the Iraqi invasion in days immediately thereafter, King Hussein's arrangement for Iraqi withdrawal
"None of the Iraqi proposals for settling the conflict diplomatically were unreasonable. If the US and its allies had seriously wanted to avoid war, any of the Iraqi proposals could have been the basis for further negotiations if they were not immediately acceptable... Washington's refusal to work for a diplomatic solution clearly demonstrates that it did not want a diplomatic solution. When George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker said that they had done all they could to avoid war they were lying. *
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