By PATRICK COCKBURN
Twenty years ago there was a witch-hunt in Washington over why nobody had forecast that Saddam Hussein would invade and occupy Kuwait. A chief casualty of this was April Glaspie, the US ambassador in Baghdad, who had met for two hours with the Iraqi leader on 25 July 1990, a week before the invasion. During this meeting she was alleged to have \\\"given a green light for the invasion\\\" or at least not made clear that the US would use military force to reverse an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait.
Transcripts of varying levels of credibility have been released over the years, but this week WikiLeaks published Glaspie\\\'s cable to the US State Department reporting her discussion with Saddam. What comes shining through is that the Iraqi leader never made clear that he was thinking of annexing the emirate as Iraq\\\'s 19th province. Notorious though he was for his bloodcurdling and exaggerated threats, for once he was not threatening enough. Everybody suspected he was conducting a heavy-handed diplomatic offensive to squeeze concessions, financial and possibly territorial, out of the Kuwaitis. Almost nobody predicted a full-scale invasion and occupation of Kuwait, in large part because this was an amazingly foolish move by Saddam, bound to provoke a backlash far beyond Iraq\\\'s power to resist.
I have always sympathized with diplomats and intelligence agents unfairly pilloried for failing to foresee that a country, about which they claim expert knowledge, is going to commit some act of stupidity much against its own interests.
History is full of examples of experts being dumbfounded by countries acting contrary to their own best interests. Stalin is often denigrated for disbelieving Soviet spies who told him that the German army was going to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. No doubt his paranoid suspicion that Britain was trying to lure him into a war with Hitler played a role. But another factor was that Stalin simply did not believe that Hitler would commit such a gross error as attacking him before finishing off Britain and thus start a war on two fronts, something that the Nazi regime had previously taken great pains to avoid.
(Cpurtesy:Counterpunch)
Twenty years ago there was a witch-hunt in Washington over why nobody had forecast that Saddam Hussein would invade and occupy Kuwait. A chief casualty of this was April Glaspie, the US ambassador in Baghdad, who had met for two hours with the Iraqi leader on 25 July 1990, a week before the invasion. During this meeting she was alleged to have \\\"given a green light for the invasion\\\" or at least not made clear that the US would use military force to reverse an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait.
Transcripts of varying levels of credibility have been released over the years, but this week WikiLeaks published Glaspie\\\'s cable to the US State Department reporting her discussion with Saddam. What comes shining through is that the Iraqi leader never made clear that he was thinking of annexing the emirate as Iraq\\\'s 19th province. Notorious though he was for his bloodcurdling and exaggerated threats, for once he was not threatening enough. Everybody suspected he was conducting a heavy-handed diplomatic offensive to squeeze concessions, financial and possibly territorial, out of the Kuwaitis. Almost nobody predicted a full-scale invasion and occupation of Kuwait, in large part because this was an amazingly foolish move by Saddam, bound to provoke a backlash far beyond Iraq\\\'s power to resist.
I have always sympathized with diplomats and intelligence agents unfairly pilloried for failing to foresee that a country, about which they claim expert knowledge, is going to commit some act of stupidity much against its own interests.
History is full of examples of experts being dumbfounded by countries acting contrary to their own best interests. Stalin is often denigrated for disbelieving Soviet spies who told him that the German army was going to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. No doubt his paranoid suspicion that Britain was trying to lure him into a war with Hitler played a role. But another factor was that Stalin simply did not believe that Hitler would commit such a gross error as attacking him before finishing off Britain and thus start a war on two fronts, something that the Nazi regime had previously taken great pains to avoid.
(Cpurtesy:Counterpunch)
