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Confirmed User
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: The other side of Hell
Posts: 5,814
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...cont
Invading Kuwait
Saddam's grievances against Kuwait were recent and ancient. He reasserted the old claim that Kuwait was unjustly severed from Iraq by the British after World War I. But the key issues were oil and money.
Kuwait insisted on repayment of billions of dollars it had lent to Iraq during the war with Iran. Saddam, who felt he had fought on behalf of all the gulf's Arab states, wanted the loans forgiven. Iraq also accused Kuwait of using "slant drilling" techniques to suck Iraqi oil across the border. And there was Kuwait's insistence on producing more than its OPEC-established quota of oil, which kept prices down and interfered with Iraq's postwar economic recovery program.
On July 24, 1990, Saddam massed troops on the Kuwaiti border.
Bush administration statements on the crisis in the weeks leading up to the Iraqi invasion have led to a long-standing argument over whether -- intentionally or unintentionally -- the United States gave Saddam a "green light" to invade Kuwait.
U.S. officials generally stated U.S. opposition to the use of force to settle Iraq's dispute with Kuwait. But none pledged a U.S. military response if Saddam invaded. And some implied the opposite. For example, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said publicly on July 25 that the United States had "no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait."
The most famous incident contributing to the "green light" theory was the July 26 meeting in Baghdad between Saddam and U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie. An Iraqi transcript of the meeting has been disputed by Glaspie. But Glaspie's cable to Washington after the meeting is consistent with the Iraqi account in most respects.
According to the transcript, Glaspie assured Saddam that Bush still opposed sanctions and wanted better relations with Iraq, that the United States admired Saddam's efforts to rebuild his country and sympathized with the economic problems he was having, including those caused by the oil policies of nations such as Kuwait. In the most famous portion of the transcript, Glaspie told Saddam that "we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait."
A week later, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi troops and 300 tanks crossed the border.
Desert Storm
Three weeks after the 1990 invasion, the United Nations imposed sweeping sanctions on Iraq. The sanctions are still in place.
On Nov. 29, 1990, the Security Council voted 12-2 with one abstention to authorize the use of force unless Iraq withdrew by Jan. 15. Of the veto-wielding permanent members, four voted for the resolution, and China abstained. It was the first time since the Korean War that the United Nations had authorized such an action.
The United States contributed about half of the 660,000 troops who participated in the alliance, but about 100,000 came from predominantly Muslim nations, including Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
On Jan. 17, 1991, the allied forces started five weeks of missile and bomb assaults on Iraq and the Iraqi troops in Kuwait. Saddam responded by launching Scud missiles at Israel, Saudi Arabia and U.S. troop positions. One missile hit a barracks and killed 28 U.S. soldiers. The 39 Scud missiles aimed at Israel caused property damage but few casualties.
When the allied ground assault began on Feb. 24, the Iraqi troops were virtually unable to resist. They surrendered, retreated or were killed by the thousands. The ground war lasted just 100 hours.
On Feb. 28, Bush and his military team made the fateful decision to stop the war rather than proceed into Baghdad to remove Saddam from power.
Bush has explained that he was honoring the U.N. resolution, which authorized the allies to liberate Kuwait, not to change Iraq's government.
Historians and analysts have pointed to several considerations that may have contributed to Bush's decision:
The war had been astonishingly successful, with 148 U.S. combat deaths compared with more than 100,000 on the Iraqi side. Taking the war into Baghdad could have increased the U.S. casualty rate.
The ground war had become what some called a "turkey shoot" with U.S. troops killing tens of thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, expressed concern about the psychological effect on his soldiers if the slaughter continued.
The task of occupying and running postwar Iraq would be difficult and especially unappealing to an administration with a distaste for "nation-building" missions. Key U.S. allies, especially Arab states, strongly opposed a U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Bush believed that Saddam had been so damaged that he soon would be overthrown.
Bush publicly called on Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands -- to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside."
It almost happened. Separate uprisings by the Kurds in the north and the Shiia in the south took control of the majority of the country by mid-March. But the rebels counted on U.S. aid that never came. Using helicopter gunships, Saddam crushed the uprisings. U.S. jets were in the sky, above the helicopters, but didn't intervene.
No-fly zones
The U.N. demanded that Iraq stop repressing the Kurds and the Shiites but specified no enforcement mechanism. The United States, Britain and France, with backing from the European Union, offered a measure of protection by imposing no-fly zones in the north and south, starting in April 1991. The restrictions put most of Iraq's air space off limits to its planes.
As part of the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War and a U.N. resolution, Saddam agreed to give up biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and to submit to inspections.
That commitment -- and the argument that Saddam has failed to fulfill it -- is at the heart of the current Bush administration's case for a possible new attack on Iraq.
Saddam in a box
In April 1993, Kuwaiti authorities intercepted a Toyota Land Cruiser packed with explosives and driven by Iraqi agents. The Kuwaitis and ultimately the U.S. government concluded that the car bomb was intended to assassinate former President Bush, who was due to visit Kuwait the next day. President Bill Clinton retaliated in June by launching 23 cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
During the 1990s, the Clinton administration said that it had Saddam "in a box," through sanctions, no-fly zones, U.N. inspectors and intermittent bombing attacks.
Humanitarian groups have argued that the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through starvation, shortages of medicine and the degradation of sanitary systems.
Sanction supporters generally reply that Saddam was to blame for the continuation of the sanctions, for his refusal to comply with U.N. resolutions. In one famous remark by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the goal of containing Saddam made the sanctions "worth the price."
In 1995, the U.N. modified the sanctions, allowing Iraq to essentially trade oil for food and medicine.
The first inspection team, known as UNSCOM (U.N. Special Commission to Oversee Destruction of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction) did supervise the destruction of large quantities of banned weapons.
But it wasn't until Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan in 1995 that the inspectors learned about large hidden quantities of chemical and biological weapons. The Iraqi explanation was that Kamel had been hiding the materials himself.
Saddam publicly promised his errant son-in-law a pardon if he would return to Iraq. Kamel returned on Feb. 20, 1996. He was gunned down Feb. 23.
The U.N. inspectors continued to find themselves in a frustrating game of cat and mouse. And the Iraqis complained that no level of cooperation or disarmament would end the sanctions. They cited comments by several top U.S. officials suggesting that the sanctions would continue as long as Saddam was in power. In fact, from 1991 to 1996, the Washington Post reported, the CIA spent about $100 million trying to overthrow Saddam.
Iraq complained that UNSCOM was providing cover for U.S. spies. In fact, the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe all reported later that UNSCOM teams did include undercover agents planted to gather intelligence on Saddam and his military.
The breakdown between Iraq and UNSCOM was complete in 1998. Saddam placed restrictions on inspections, leading UNSCOM chief Richard Butler to withdraw the inspectors to protest Iraq's lack of cooperation.
The United States and Britain responded to the end of inspections with a four-day blitz of missiles and bombs aimed at suspected weapons sites.
During 2001, the new Bush administration had military planners working on contingency plans for an attack on Iraq but had no timetable. But, within a few hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld began proposing that, as part of its response against terrorism, the United States should go after Iraq.
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