Chapter 75 Saddam and Operation Desert Storm

Top figures in the Thatcher and Bush administrations decided to create an artificial pretext for the US and the UK to establish direct military bases in key areas of the world, especially in continental Europe and the oil fields. In the early 1990s, the economic depression and financial difficulties in the United Kingdom and the United States made them dare to take risks when implementing this plan.Thatcher's economic "revolution" quickly failed. After October 1987, the stock market crash and rising UK interest rates fueled the worst housing, industrial and banking crisis of the post-war period.In the United States, George Bush faced a runaway federal budget deficit, collapsing banks, skyrocketing unemployment and a general depression that some in the White House privately compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Iraq, a country of 16 million people just emerging from an eight-year fruitless war with Iran, simply provides a huge market for Western arms manufacturers to sell weapons to the Middle East.Washington secretly encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980, deliberately giving him early false intelligence that it was going well, suggesting that success would be imminent.By 1989, Iraq's economy was in ruins, with most industrial and agricultural investments halted by the war, which claimed the lives of an estimated more than a million people. But, unlike Iran under Khomeini, Iraq ended the war heavily in debt. In 1988, her total debt owed to various creditor countries was estimated at $65 billion.The main creditors were Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Soviet Union and some Eastern European countries, who had hoped that Iraq would use oil to repay these debts.The remaining creditors were mostly French, British and American banks.France is Iraq's second largest arms supplier after the Soviet Union.

To provide a pretext for US and UK military intervention, their strategy, ostensibly to protect the security of world oil supplies, was in fact to lure Saddam Hussein into a trap from which he could not extricate himself. In June 1989, it became known that a high-level delegation from the so-called U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, including Alan S. Senior officials of Toga, Bankers Trust, Standard Oil, Occidental Petroleum, and other large multinational corporations in the United States.Saddam wanted to discuss Iraq's postwar agricultural and industrial development plans. Iraq has a five-year, $40 billion plan to complete the Badas Dam irrigation project.After the completion of the plan, Iraq could achieve self-sufficiency in food production; at that time, Iraq's food imports mainly relied on the US government's Commodity Credit Corporation, and the import volume in 1989 was equivalent to 1 billion US dollars.In addition, Iraq proposed to the U.S. delegation that as part of national development, investment would be mainly used to strengthen the petrochemical industry, fertilizer plants, steel plants, and automobile assembly plants.The American businessman told Saddam that he must first adjust his foreign debt, and in return Iraq would agree to privatize the country's oil resources, or most of them.According to the calculations of the best British and American geologists, Iraq was perhaps the largest undeveloped source of oil in the world, outside the Soviet Union.

Predictably, Saddam refused to surrender Iraqi oil sovereignty in exchange for vague guarantees of future loans.By the end of 1989, the Bush administration had abruptly suspended some $2.3 billion in authorized loans to Iraq, money that had been deliberately raised from Atlanta, Georgia, and branches of the Italian National Bank of Labor (BNL).Then London's "Financial Times" published a series of sensational statements, claiming that the money was quietly being used by Iraq to build a war machine. As a result of Stoga's negotiations and disclosure of the truth about the Italian National Labor Bank, in early 1990, all Western banks suddenly suspended their loans to Iraq.At this juncture, a Kuwaiti king, who has been an ally of the British Foreign Office since the late 20th century, comes into view.During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the king used Kuwait's large oil revenues to provide loans to Iraq in accordance with the instructions of London and Washington, with the aim of keeping Iraq from seeking peace.As the scandal was later revealed, the Anglo-American intentions at the time seemed absurd. The purpose was to keep the Iran-Iraq war alive and maintain enough "strategic tension" that large quantities of Western weapons could be sold to Iran and Iraq.

However, in the early spring of 1990, Kuwait's "mission" changed.Kuwait was asked to use her oil to hit the OPEC market, which violated the OPEC oil production ceiling, which was an agreement reached by OPEC to stabilize world oil prices after the 1986-1987 oil crisis. In the summer of 1990, Kuwait had managed to bring the price of crude oil down from a volatile roughly $19 a barrel to just over $13 a barrel.Iraq and other OPEC members have engaged in repeated diplomatic efforts to persuade King Sabah and Oil Minister Ali Khalifa Al-Sabah to stop deliberate economic pressure on Iraq and other already struggling OPEC members.All these efforts are like playing the piano against the cow.By July, oil traders were predicting that history would repeat itself, with the 1986 sub-$10-a-barrel return.Iraq can't even pay off old debts or finance much-needed food imports.

Earlier in February, in Amman, the Jordanian capital, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had warned members of the Arab Cooperation Council, which included the presidents of Egypt and northern Yemen, to be mindful of the strategic consequences of the upheaval in Eastern Europe. Clearly, the U.S. will emerge as the sole military "superpower", which poses a particular threat to the Arab world. Saddam worriedly pointed out the fact that although the Iran-Iraq war had been completely over a year ago, there was no sign of withdrawal of US troops and warships in the Gulf region.Instead, he predicted, "The United States has made multiple statements that she will stay." He pointed out that the Soviet Union was being preoccupied with its own domestic affairs. It no longer exists. The United States keeps repeating that she wants to stay at this time, which cannot but attract people's attention."

In February of the same year, Saddam's speech concluded that the oil-rich Arab countries should unite to take advantage of "the energy resources that are unparalleled in the world... I think we can establish a relationship with Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union that will enable us to obtain beneficial relationship." If anything spurred the Anglo-American establishment to contemplate a new Middle East military operation, it was Saddam's comments. On July 27, 1990, when the tense standoff between Iraq and Kuwait over crude oil prices was at its peak, U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad April Glaspie asked to meet Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to discuss the tension.According to official Iraqi records, Glaspie told Saddam that Washington would not interfere in the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait.The record was later released by the Baghdad government and confirmed by the US Congress almost a year later.Within a week, Iraqi forces captured Kuwait City.Members of the Kuwaiti royal family had known the news beforehand and fled in a Rolls-Royce with gold and valuables.According to a former Kuwaiti government official in exile in Europe: "The CIA informed the royal family in time that Kuwait was about to be invaded, but the royal family forgot to notify their own country's military."

Within hours of occupying Kuwait, the Bank of England and the US government moved to freeze all assets in Kuwait, taking control of what is believed to be the world's largest single investment fund, the London-based Kuwait Investment Authority.Its total assets, although not disclosed, are estimated to be worth more than $100 billion to $150 billion. What happened in the next six months is one of the most absurd actions in modern history.This is despite the initial US statement that the troops were only being sent to protect Saudi Arabia from the threat of an Iraqi invasion (threats that later turned out to be entirely fabricated by Washington).But President Bush, backed by Thatcher's British government, was quick to speak of his "New World Order". Bush was with Thatcher in Aspen, Colorado, during the hours of the decision in early August.

On September 11, Bush announced: In this eventful year, a new world order will be born, and this new order will operate in the way the founders of the United Nations envisioned.We are at a very critical moment.The crisis in the Persian Gulf region is serious, but it also presents us with a rare opportunity to move towards a historic period of cooperation.Today this new world order is being born with difficulty.It's a whole new world for us. There is even more evidence that George Bush and Margaret Thatcher never considered any other than military options for "solving" the Iraq-Kuwait crisis.The evidence was found a few months later in the personal report of Yevgeny Primakov, the Soviet envoy to the Middle East.Primakov, President Gorbachev's personal envoy, described The meeting with Saddam Hussein and his foreign minister Aziz in Baghdad in early October 1990 convinced Primakov that war "could have been avoided".Primakov recounted to TIME magazine the October 19 trip to Washington on a mediation mission.In Washington, he met with President George Bush, Secretary of State Baker and other top White House officials.According to the Moscow envoy, President Bush showed a clear interest in listening to the Soviet Union, but only a few hours later he sent Primakov a clear message that Washington was keen to explore new approaches not interested.

Leaving Washington, Primakov was instructed to visit London to convey the same to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.Primakov's description is instructive: the Prime Minister received us at her country house in Checkers.She listened attentively to the information I provided without interrupting.But after a pleasant hour, without letting anyone interrupt her monologue, she outlined in a succinct way an increasingly clear position: not just to let Iraq withdraw from Kuwait, but to It was to deliver a devastating blow to Iraq, to ​​"break Saddam's back," destroying all his troops and possibly even the industrial potential of that country.

In the following months, they carefully coerced and lured major members of the UN Security Council, Arab countries, Turkey and other countries, not only passed a resolution to impose a comprehensive economic blockade on Iraq, but also obtained the use of force to liberate Kuwait. authorized.In his State of the Union address to Congress on January 29, 1991, President Bush said: "The international community can seize the opportunity to resolve the current crisis in the Persian Gulf and realize its long-cherished desire to establish a new world order..." However, in early January 1991, when the United States was preparing for the largest military build-up in Saudi Arabia since the Vietnam War and preparing for an intensive offensive bombing of Iraq, there were different voices within the Washington establishment. The wisdom of intentions begins to express serious concern. On November 12, 1990, in a television interview, former Reagan administration Navy Secretary James Webb stated: "The purpose of our presence in the Persian Gulf is to advance the Bush administration's new world order, and I don't like it." About ten weeks later, on Jan. 31, Webb took the opportunity to write an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal to reiterate his point. Despite being attacked from all sides by public opinion... the Bush administration has relentlessly pushed our country into war.If we reflect on William Randolph Hearst’s Spanish-American War, we will find some similarities with the pressure of public opinion we are facing today.We must look further, perhaps in the Mexican War, for a president who was so zealously eager to put this country in danger before it was attacked. James Akins, the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a respected expert on Middle East affairs in Washington, also came out to openly oppose Bush's war plan against Iraq.Akins pointed out in a signed article in the "Los Angeles Times" published on September 12 that in order to "protect" Saudi Arabia against the invasion of Iraq, just a few days after President Bush made the decision to send US troops, the White House had " ulterior motive".Eakins accused U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney of deliberately misleading the Saudi king about the possibility of an invasion in order to gain permission to station U.S. troops on Saudi soil, which has been strongly resisted by the Saudis for decades.Eakins recounts: In 1975, a plan to justify the American military occupation of key Middle Eastern oil fields was egged on by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.He noted that Kissinger was Eakins' superior at the time and had objected to Eakins' strong criticism of these views. Henry Kissinger certainly had other ideas as US Secretary of State at the time, but not that far in my diplomatic career... Someone in the Bush administration might point out that conditions are more favorable now than they were in 1975... It is noteworthy that in 1990 the former vice president of Kissinger Consulting, Lawrence Eagleberg, and employee Brent Scowcroft were the ones who ensured that Kissinger's views dominated U.S. foreign policy in the Gulf War. Key figures in policy dominance.At the time, Lawrence was James Baker's deputy secretary of state, while Brent was the White House's national security adviser.In addition, during this period, Kissinger also hyped up the war against Iraq in the media.Voices of domestic opposition in the media were drowned out in the president's mobilization for war.