Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  Although Saddam’s anger was directed at all the oil-producing Gulf states, he was particularly irritated by the stance of the Kuwaitis, who, in his view, had a historic obligation to support Baghdad. Ever since Iraq’s creation successive Iraqi regimes had complained that Kuwait, which had formed part of the administrative district of Basra during the Ottoman period, had been illegally separated from Iraq. Given the limited nature of Iraq’s coastline on the Gulf, Kuwait’s well-developed shoreline was looked upon with envy in Baghdad, particularly after the discovery and development of the region’s oil fields. The arbitrary demarcation of the border between Iraq and Kuwait, which had been drawn up by Sir Percy Cox in the 1920s, was another source of complaint, as the Iraqis claimed it unfairly gave the Kuwaitis access to the lucrative Rumaila oil field.

  Iraq had threatened action against Kuwait on several occasions in the past. In 1937 the Iraqi monarch King Ghazi had upset his British overlords by advocating its annexation. When Britain granted Kuwait independence in 1961, President Qassem had responded by insisting that it was an integral part of Iraq, and even announced the appointment of a new Iraqi ruler for the “province.” And in the early 1970s a dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over the two Kuwaiti islands of Warbah and Bubiyan had resulted in them being occupied by the Iraqi armed forces. The islands dominate the estuary leading to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, and possession of them would have increased the size of Iraq’s Gulf shore and provided it with the opportunity to develop a much-needed deep-water port on the Gulf. The Iraqi troops were eventually persuaded to vacate the islands following the intervention of the Arab League and Saudi Arabia, but Iraq continued to press its claim to them.

  In a final attempt to intimidate the Kuwaitis, in July, on the twenty-second anniversary of the Baath revolution, Saddam handed Kuwait a list of demands, which included the stabilization of the international oil price, a moratorium on Iraq’s wartime loans, and the formation of an Arab plan similar to the Marshall Plan to assist with Iraq’s reconstruction program. If the Kuwaitis failed to oblige, he warned, “we will have no choice but to resort to effective action to put things right and ensure the restitution of our rights.”22

  Dr. Ghazi Algosaibi, a Saudi Arabian diplomat who acted as a close adviser to King Fahd during the crisis of the summer of 1990, said that the Saudi monarch was deeply disturbed by Saddam’s attitude toward the Kuwaitis and his other Gulf neighbors. “The king was worried about Saddam’s state of mind. He was convinced that Saddam was about to do something catastrophic.” According to Algosaibi, neither the Saudis nor the Kuwaitis had any realistic expectation that the war loans would be repaid, but both countries thought it would set a bad precedent if they were to announce publicly that they had written them off. However, with Saddam in a bellicose frame of mind and with the largest army in the Middle East at his disposal, the Saudis were prepared to make an exception, and urged the Kuwaitis to do the same. Throughout July King Fahd was in constant telephone contact with the Kuwaiti emir. Eventually he persuaded the emir to accept Saddam’s conditions. The king phoned Saddam and told him, “I have incredible news for you. The emir has agreed to all your terms.” But to King Fahd’s surprise, rather than being relieved that the crisis had been resolved, Saddam gave the impression that he was not impressed with the Saudi initiative. “At that moment the king realized the Kuwait was doomed,” said Algosaibi.23

  In all probability Saddam had made the decision to invade Kuwait prior to the ultimatum he issued on July 18. On July 21 an estimated thirty thousand Iraqi troops began deploying near the Kuwait border. The only issue that prevented Iraq from launching a full-scale invasion of the emirate was Saddam’s desire to win at least tacit consent for his adventure from Washington. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the previous year Saddam believed that the United States was the only power capable of obstructing his plans. Even after the Bazoft execution, Washington was still sending conflicting signals about its attitude toward Baghdad. While the Senate lobbied in favor of imposing sanctions against Iraq, President George Bush was still indicating an interest in cultivating bilateral relations with Baghdad. In June John Kelly, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, argued against a congressional attempt to impose sanctions on the grounds that such a move would be counterproductive to the U.S. national interest.

  On July 25 Saddam summoned April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, for a one o’clock meeting at the Presidential Palace. Saddam wanted to test her reaction to his proposed adventure in Kuwait. Glaspie had already been involved in a diplomatic confrontation with Saddam over a Voice of America broadcast the previous February, which had drawn a direct comparison between Saddam’s Iraq and Romania under Ceausescu, stating: “The success of dictatorial rule and tyranny requires the existence of a large secret police force, while the success of democracy requires abolishment of such a force.” Glaspie had responded to Saddam’s protests by offering an apology, and stressing that the United States had no intention of interfering in the “domestic concerns of the Iraqi people and government.”

  At the July meeting, Saddam made it clear that a conflict could result from his dispute with Kuwait. He accused the United States of supporting “Kuwait’s economic war with Iraq” at a time when it should be grateful to Baghdad for having contained fundamentalist Iran. He further threatened the United States with terrorist retaliation should it continue with its hostile policy against Iraq. “If you use pressure, we will deploy pressure and force,” said Saddam. “We cannot come all the way to you in the United States but individual Arabs may reach you.”

  According to a transcript of the conversation between Glaspie and Saddam, which was leaked by the Iraqis, and whose veracity has never been denied by the U.S. State Department, Ambassador Glaspie, rather than responding to Saddam’s bellicosity, replied simply, “We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” She went on to compliment Saddam on his “extraordinary efforts” to rebuild Iraq after the war with Iran. And when Saddam reiterated his claim that the United States was supporting Kuwaiti attempts to undermine the Iraqi economy, she replied, “President Bush is an intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.” Finally Glaspie said that she had been instructed “in the spirit of friendship” to ascertain Saddam’s intentions with regard to Kuwait, which, from the American point of view, was the main purpose of the meeting. Saddam repeated his contention that Kuwait was the aggressor, because it had deliberately driven down the oil price, thereby threatening the livelihoods of Iraqis, “harming even the milk our children drink and the pension of the widow who lost her husband during the war, the pensions of the orphans who lost their parents.” He concluded the meeting by stating that, if an agreement was not reached with Kuwait, “then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.”

  Glaspie apparently came away from the meeting believing that Saddam was full of bluster, and was not intent on invading Kuwait. Five days later she flew back to Washington to consult with President Bush. Three days after that Iraq invaded Kuwait. When details of Glaspie’s meeting with Saddam were published by the Iraqis in Baghdad, the forty-eight-year-old career diplomat, who had wide experience of the Arab world, was accused of, at best, naivete, or, at worst, having given Saddam a “green light” to invade Kuwait. It was an accusation she rigorously denied. In an interview published in the New York Times in late 1990, she said: “Obviously I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait. Every Kuwaiti and Saudi, every analyst in the Western world, was wrong too.”

  Sir Harold Walker, the British ambassador at the time, sympathized with Glaspie’s position. In his view, none of the Western diplomatic missions took Saddam’s posturing seriously. Furthermore, President Mubarak of Egypt had personally assured Washington and London that Saddam had no intention of invading Kuwait, and that the crisis would be resolved by Arab diplomacy. “For that reason,” said Walker, “w
e all believed that Saddam was involved in a game of brinkmanship that would suddenly end with an agreement, and everybody would behave as though nothing had happened.” When Glaspie announced she was taking a vacation, Walker followed suit without a moment’s hesitation.24

  Glaspie’s comment, however, that she did not believe Saddam was “going to take all of Kuwait,” was intriguing. Prior to the Iraqi invasion there had been a general expectation that if Saddam did take military action it would be confined to the Rumaila oil field and the disputed islands. Indeed, had he confined his activities to these areas, it is unlikely that the United Nations would have gone beyond the imposition of sanctions, or that the United States would have dispatched a single soldier to the region. But this assessment gravely underestimated the basic pan-Arab principles of Baathist ideology, which looked forward to the complete eradication of the colonial boundaries imposed on the Middle East at the end of the First World War. Saddam’s invasion of “all of Kuwait” was entirely consistent with Baathist ideology. It was also a policy that was, initially, immensely popular with the Iraqi people.

  ELEVEN

  The Loser

  At 2 A.M. on August 2, 1990, 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, crushed the 16,000-strong Kuwaiti army and seized control of the principality. Unlike the invasion of Iran ten years previously, the Iraqis met with hardly any resistance. There was no resistance at the Kuwaiti border, and it was only when the Iraqi armed forces entered Kuwait City itself that they came across a few gallant Kuwaitis who tried to impede their progress, but they were easily overwhelmed by the Iraqis’ superior firepower. The Kuwaiti air force took to the skies, but only to fly their fighters to safety in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwaiti navy remained quietly at anchor.

  The only setback for Saddam was that the Kuwaiti emir and all his ministers had managed to escape, thanks to a carefully orchestrated plan that had been arranged with the help of the CIA some months previously. An elite unit of the Republican Guard had been ordered to go straight to the Dasman Palace the moment they entered Kuwait and take the royal family prisoner. Had this happened, the emir would have been given the choice of cooperating with the invaders, and ordering a cessation of all resistance, in return for which his life would have been spared and he would have been appointed head of a quisling government directed from Baghdad. If as expected, the emir declined to cooperate, he was to be executed at the palace. The only member of the royal family who stayed behind was Sheikh Fahd, the emir’s brother, who managed the Kuwaiti soccer team. He stood with a few guards at the top of the palace steps as the first Iraqis arrived, barring their way with his drawn pistol. One of the Iraqis casually shot him dead.

  Within seven hours the invasion had been completed and Kuwait was firmly under the control of the Iraqis. The government had fled, together with an estimated 300,000 citizens, armed resistance was at an end, and the airport was closed. Saddam had the added bonus of capturing a British Airways plane that had inadvertently landed at Kuwait on a refueling stop just as the invasion began. The plane was on a scheduled flight from London to Delhi, and although Western intelligence knew that Iraq was in the process of invading Kuwait, no one thought to alert the airline. When the plane landed at Kuwait, the crew and passengers were taken prisoner, and the men moved to Baghdad to form part of the human shield that Saddam began to deploy to protect vital targets from attack.

  Although Saddam was initially euphoric about the capture of Kuwait, his enjoyment proved to be short-lived. He had calculated that, while he might not expect any plaudits for his move, he would not meet much resistance. Indeed, U.S. satellite intelligence pictures taken shortly after the invasion clearly showed lines of Iraqi tanks deployed on Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia, and one of the great mysteries of the invasion of Kuwait was why Saddam halted his advance at the emirate, and did not advance farther south and take the oil fields of the United Arab Emirates. But as he had shown during the Iran war, Saddam was not tactically astute and his actions were always tempered with caution. He believed he had received a “green light” from April Glaspie to occupy Kuwait, and having done so, he decided to gauge the strength of international reaction to the invasion before considering his next move. For that reason the signals emanating from Baghdad in the immediate aftermath of the occupation were confusing.

  Initially Saddam set up a “provisional revolutionary government,” and he gave the impression that Iraq intended to withdraw from Kuwait once it had satisfied its strategic needs with the annexation of the Warbah and Bubiyan islands, together with some territories along the joint boundary, including the south Rumaila oil fields. It is, however, extremely unlikely that Saddam ever gave any serious thought to vacating Kuwait City; even if he had succeeded in setting up a government that was well-disposed to Baghdad, he would have been reluctant to do so. Arab apologists have suggested that Saddam would have withdrawn from Kuwait in time, but was forced into annexing the emirate by the uncompromising international response that greeted the invasion. Given his previous track record, however, it is unlikely that Saddam could ever have been persuaded to withdraw voluntarily. Historically the Iraqis regarded Kuwait as their territory, the country’s “nineteenth” province, which had been denied to them by the perfidy of the British when they drew up Iraq’s original boundaries in the 1920s. In Ottoman times Kuwait had been placed under the control of the provincial government in Basra, and it was almost an article of faith for the Iraqis that they should control Kuwait.

  Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait will be remembered as one of the great military miscalculations of modern history. It was an unprovoked attack on an unprepared neighbor, and was widely condemned as such. The Iraqi action provoked international condemnation that was almost unprecedented in its ferocity. Within hours of the invasion President George Bush imposed an economic embargo against Iraq and ordered the aircraft carrier Independence to move from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf. All Kuwaiti and Iraqi assets and property in American banks and companies were frozen, and the movement of goods and people to and from Iraq was suspended. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, who was attending a conference at Aspen, Colorado, hosted by President Bush on the day the invasion occurred, drew an immediate parallel between Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait and Adolf Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in the 1930s, and insisted that Britain’s response be based on the policy that “aggressors must never be appeased.”1 The United States and the Soviet Union took the unusual step of issuing a joint declaration condemning the invasion. Iraq was also condemned by the United Nations and the Arab League, the UN Security Council imposed a total economic and trade embargo on Iraq, and Iraq’s oil export pipelines through Turkey and Saudi Arabia were promptly cut. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia, alarmed by the deployment of Iraqi armored units on its border, asked for U.S. military assistance. The United States, committing itself to the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait, began a military airlift that would ultimately result in the deployment of some 600,000 foreign troops in Saudi Arabia within the next six months. By any standard Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was a spectacular miscalculation.

  The strength of the international response to the invasion undoubtedly took Saddam by surprise. Even though he appreciated that his occupation of Kuwait would attract criticism, he still believed that, one way or another, the invasion would ultimately be to his advantage. If he were forced to withdraw, he would surely be able to win some concession, such as the eradication of Iraq’s foreign debt, recognition of Iraq’s claim to the Rumaila oil fields, or, alternatively, recognition of Iraq’s claim to the disputed islands of Warbah and Bubiyan. At the very least he expected Iraq’s enduring complaint about the inadequacy of its fifty-kilometer shoreline in the Gulf to be resolved. But when calculating the options available to him, Saddam had not reckoned on such an uncompromising response from the West.

  One of the key factors that weighed heavily against Saddam was that, in 1990, the international community was still coming to ter
ms with the new political realities of the post–cold war world. The collapse of the Iron Curtain in the autumn of 1989 had freed a number of East European countries who had been forcibly subjected to Moscow’s communist dogma for more than forty years. As one tyranny ended in Europe, the leaders of the free world were unwilling to see another develop in the Middle East.

  In an attempt to counter the mounting international criticism, Saddam claimed that Iraqi troops had entered Kuwait at the request of a revolutionary movement that was opposed to the ruling al-Sabah family, but this claim was soon discredited by his inability to find any Kuwaiti nationals willing to serve in a puppet government. Even so, the Iraqis pressed ahead with the establishment of a provisional cabinet on August 4, which three days later declared Kuwait a republic. On August 6, while Washington was considering how best to protect Saudi Arabia, Joseph Wilson, the American chargé d’affaires in Baghdad (who was acting ambassador in Glaspie’s absence) had a meeting with Saddam at which he sought guarantees for the security of Saudi Arabia. Saddam was happy to provide them, telling Wilson to inform the Saudis, “We will not attack those who do not attack us, we will not harm those who do not harm us.”

  On August 7, President Bush announced in a televised address to the nation that the 82nd Airborne Division was being dispatched to Saudi Arabia. This was the start of Operation Desert Storm, the largest deployment of American troops overseas since the Vietnam War. In his address, Bush was uncompromising. He accused Saddam of an “outrageous and brutal act of aggression.” And, consciously echoing the sentiments that had been expressed by Mrs. Thatcher, he indirectly compared Saddam with Hitler. “Appeasement does not work,” he declared. “As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.” The clear implication was that if the West did not act to evict Saddam from Kuwait, he would eventually take control of the Gulf, and with it more than 50 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. Bush then went on to list the four guiding principles that would underpin his policy during the next six months: (1) the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait, (2) the restoration of the legitimate Kuwaiti government, (3) a reaffirmation of the U.S. commitment to stability in the Gulf, and (4) America’s determination to protect the lives of its citizens. Saddam’s response the following day was to proclaim the annexation of Kuwait, the first annexation of a sovereign state since the Second World War. On August 8 the Revolutionary Command Council rubber-stamped the return of the “branch, Kuwait, to the root, Iraq,” and three weeks later, on August 28, Kuwait officially became the nineteenth province of Iraq. The announcement of “a comprehensive and eternal merger,” as the Iraqis described it, turned out to be another grave tactical error on Saddam’s part. Even his putative allies in the Security Council, Yemen and Cuba, now found it difficult to defend his actions.