"History They Didn 't Teach You in School"--Origins of Gulf War of 1990-91 : Houston Indymedia

In the last week of July, 1990, Iraq, with the tacit approval of the United States, began taking steps that would culminate in the Gulf War of 1991.

On August 2d, 1990, armed forces from Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting into motion an American response that would culminate in the Gulf War of 1991, which ended with the destruction of Iraq and sanctions against that country which continue d to decimate that country for a dozen years, until the destruction of the most recent war led to the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

US President George Bush waged war against Iraq in 1990 and 91 because, he repeatedly charged, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a “new Hitler”–the gravest threat to world stability in the postwar era–and he had to be stopped. In the media frenzy surrounding the war, few ever learned about the role the U.S. played in supporting Saddam PRIOR TO Aug. 2d 1990. If Saddam was in fact a new Hitler, he was just as surely America’s Hitler.

America had been deeply involved in Iraqi politics throughout the Cold War. In 1955, the U.S. established the “Baghdad Pact” a group of Middle East nations and Britain which would cotain the Soviet Union and make the Mid East safe for western corporations.

But in 1958, an Iraqi General, Abdel Karim Kassim, led a coup to overthrow the pro-American and decrepit monarchy, and a year later Kassim irked the Americans by pulling Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact.

Five years later, Kassim himself was overthrown, much to American pleasure, by a coup which involved many Iraqi dissident groups, including the Ba’ath Party and one of its minor functionaries, Saddam Hussein. By 1968, the Ba’ath had consolidated power and ruled Iraq, and within a few years Saddam, by making alliances with army officers and murdering those who got in his way, surfaced as the most powerful man in the country. The Americans had never liked Karim Kassim and were not unhappy with the Ba’ath coups or with Saddam, who began killing off dissidents, especially the Iraqi Left and including the Iraqi Socialist party. Saddam also repressed minority groups like the Kurds in the north of Iraq, prompting the U.S. to briefly support clandestine efforts to help the Kurds and oust Saddam, but then reversed policy and quit supporting the Kurds in 1975, at which point Saddam murdered about 25,000 of them, and prompted Henry Kissinger’s famous explanation that “covert operations is not missionary work.:”

By the 1980s Saddam was one of America’s most reliable allies. The greatest threat in the Middle East, from 1979 on, became the Islamic Fundamentalist revolutionaries in Iran, led by Ayotallah Khomenei. Iraq, a sworn enemy of Iran, thus became America’s great friend.

In September 1980, Saddam went to war against Iran and the U.S. was there to encourage and support and arm him. Iraq hoped to gain Iranian oil lands, control the Shatt al Arab waterway, and topple Khomenei’s Shiite regime. The U.S. became Saddam’s biggest patron. In the 1980s, the Reagan junta made off-the-books arms transfers to Iraq and kept them secret from congress, sent about $40 billion in arms to Iraq, and about $5 billion in technology for nuclear and chemical weapons programs.

Throughout this time, Saddam continued to kill and gas dissidents and minorities like the Kurds in Iraq, without any attempt by the U.S. to stop him and, in fact, with American military advisors present in the field. Moreover, in 1987 an Iraqi aircraft bombed U.S. frigate STARK and killed 37 American sailors, but accepted the Iraqi apology and continued to support Saddam. Finally in 1988 the Iran-Iraq war ends, inconclusively, with huge losses of life and money.

Saddam thus faced huge debts because of the war, and with oil revenues dwindling, had to find a way to regain economic strength, and he began to look south at Kuwait, which had actually been a part of Iraq until separated arbitrarily and invented as a country by the British in the 1920s and which had been apparently stealing Iraqi oil via diagonal drilling equipment.

In 1990, however, the U.S. was on good terms with Iraq: Assistant Secretary of State John Kelley called Saddam a “force of moderation” in the Mideast. And U.S. Ambassador April Glasbie, on orders from officials i Washington, told him America “has no opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait.”

Saddam not illogically took that as a green light and began his invasion on 2 August 1990; Bush initially wavered but was given a pep talk by British P.M. Margaret Thatcher and he decided that “this will not stand.” Saddam, one of America’s best friends in 1980s, had become the New Hitler, but clearly was a dictator who could proudly wear the “Made in the USA” label.

For more information, see “How Did Iraq and the United States Become Enemies?” at http://hnn.us/articles/1066.html