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| Ambassador Glaspie (L) and Saddam Hussein |
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War were consequences of failed United States diplomacy. For almost a decade, from 1980 to 1988, Iraq had been at war with Iran. To a certain extent, the U.S. had aided Saddam Hussein’s government in their conflict with Tehran, Washington’s intent being to deny the Iranians hegemony in the Middle East. The long war placed a severe strain on Iraq’s economy which, with their large standing army, contributed to Iraq’s worsening relations with its neighbors, especially Kuwait. Disputes arose over their shared border, over drilling rights, over crude pricing, and such things. But Iraq’s issues with Kuwait went back much further than that. There had been a crisis in 1961-62 very similar to the 1990 dispute, which had only been quelled by a British show of force.
There was also a study done in 1979 by Pentagon “conservatives”[1] that warned of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—a scenario very much like what actually occurred in 1990. The study was shelved by the Democrat administration because the 800-pound gorilla in the living room at the time was not Iraq but Iran. It was about that time, in fact, when the American embassy in Tehran was overran by Iranian students and the 444-day hostage drama torpedoed the Carter presidency. The subsequent Iran-Iraq war was seen in Washington as a way to beat down Iran’s designs on the larger Middle East, even if it meant sharing intelligence with Saddam. The Saudis also thought it was a good idea to back the Iraqi regime. By the end of that war, however, old tensions between Iraq and Kuwait resurfaced. A cash-strapped Iraqi government with long-standing designs on its neighbor’s wealth and its access to the sea couldn’t just do nothing. Especially with a 280,000-man army.[2] And the irony of it all was that some of the more prominent “conservative” members of that 1979 study team were serving in the Bush Administration.
Too much is made, I think, about the role of April Glaspie, the United States Ambassador to Iraq.
Ambassador Glaspie came in for some severe criticism after Kuwait fell to the Iraqi. Many said she projected weakness. But she was merely following orders. It was the Bush Administration that had been projecting weakness for more than a year. The situation in Europe and the collapse of Soviet communism had everyone’s attention at the time. No one had time for a thirty-year old border dispute between two minor Arab countries. If Ms. Glaspie had received communication from the State Department instructing her to explain to Saddam that certain consequences would follow any attempt on his part to influence Kuwait by military force, she would have straightway delivered it. “Never deviating from established policy,” as one writer described her, Glaspie herself had no “authority to threaten an American use of force.” She was an ambassador and an ambassador’s job is to represent his government. Ms. Glaspie represented the United States Government and the administration of President George H. W. Bush. Her job was to represent President Bush before Saddam Hussein. As it was, the position of the government Ms. Glaspie represented was a position of weakness. And Ms. Glaspie represented that position to Saddam quite accurately. Like the U.S. president, like his State Department, Ms. Glaspie spoke softly. The problem was that no big stick existed, and Saddam was quick to pick up on it. To Saddam, Ms. Glaspie projected weakness. I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. She projected weakness because she had no position of strength from which to deal, and because she was a woman. And, on 25 July 1990 when Saddam Hussein summoned her at midnight for what was tantamount to a one-way conversation, one last opportunity for him to gauge the tensile strength of the United States’ backbone, she appeared before him, a woman, alone, bearing the same tired message “consistently communicated in American foreign policy for fifteen years, that the U.S. would not jeopardize its relationship with Iraq by involving itself in inter-Arab conflicts.”[3]
Ambassador Glaspie came in for some severe criticism after Kuwait fell to the Iraqi. Many said she projected weakness. But she was merely following orders. It was the Bush Administration that had been projecting weakness for more than a year. The situation in Europe and the collapse of Soviet communism had everyone’s attention at the time. No one had time for a thirty-year old border dispute between two minor Arab countries. If Ms. Glaspie had received communication from the State Department instructing her to explain to Saddam that certain consequences would follow any attempt on his part to influence Kuwait by military force, she would have straightway delivered it. “Never deviating from established policy,” as one writer described her, Glaspie herself had no “authority to threaten an American use of force.” She was an ambassador and an ambassador’s job is to represent his government. Ms. Glaspie represented the United States Government and the administration of President George H. W. Bush. Her job was to represent President Bush before Saddam Hussein. As it was, the position of the government Ms. Glaspie represented was a position of weakness. And Ms. Glaspie represented that position to Saddam quite accurately. Like the U.S. president, like his State Department, Ms. Glaspie spoke softly. The problem was that no big stick existed, and Saddam was quick to pick up on it. To Saddam, Ms. Glaspie projected weakness. I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. She projected weakness because she had no position of strength from which to deal, and because she was a woman. And, on 25 July 1990 when Saddam Hussein summoned her at midnight for what was tantamount to a one-way conversation, one last opportunity for him to gauge the tensile strength of the United States’ backbone, she appeared before him, a woman, alone, bearing the same tired message “consistently communicated in American foreign policy for fifteen years, that the U.S. would not jeopardize its relationship with Iraq by involving itself in inter-Arab conflicts.”[3]
The problem with Ambassador Glaspie is the way in which her government defended her and its pre-war policy vis-à-vis Iraq, and the way in which she defended herself. Facing Senate interrogation following the war, Ms. Glaspie appeared on 20 March 1991 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the same way she had appeared before Saddam Hussein eight months before … alone.[4]
Operation IVORY JUSTICE played a key role in the deterioration of relations between the United States and Iraq. According to an undated summary by a Navy historian, IVORY JUSTICE was “a July 1990 exercise ordered by Washington, involving only two American frigates, several Air Force aircraft, and a few jet fighters of the United Arab Emirates. It could not be called a show of force.”
Messrs. Gordon and Trainor specify that the U.S. sent “two KC-135 refueling planes and one C-141” [Starlifter] and that Rear Admiral William Fogarty, the fleet commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East participated. The aircraft furnished by the Emirates were “French-made Mirage’s. The exercise was not intended as a “show of force” as the naval historian criticized. It was intended to demonstrate that, with U.S. support—the KC-135s—the operational range of the Mirages could be extended. With an air-refueling capability, the aircraft could remain on station longer and more effectively defend the UAE from Iraqi air threats. Mistakenly, Saddam presumed that Kuwait was involved in the exercise, which according to Gordon and Trainor, “did not go smoothly.”[5] Saddam’s mistaken conclusion that Kuwait was a participant enraged him and he was encouraged in his designs on the tiny nation by the sloppy nature of the exercise, which was to the Iraqi dictator a further sign of American weakness.
All these errors had a cumulative effect. However, probably the chief mistake, the one that compounded all others, was, as Messrs. Trainor and Gordon point out, the U.S. “failure to understand the explosive relationship between the deteriorating Iraqi economy and its outsized military.”[6] They were an accident looking for a place to happen. The most likely place was Kuwait—as had long been predicted.
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[1] Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995), 8. Paul D. Wolfowitz, Dennis B. Ross, and Geoffrey Kemp were a few of the more prominent members of the 1979 study team.
[2] Ibid., 7.
[3] Lauren Holland, "The U.S. Decision to Launch Operation Desert Storm: A Bureaucratic Politics Analysis." Armed Forces and Society 25, no. 2 (1999): 219-242, http://search.proquest.com/
docview/236490868?accountid=8289 (accessed September 11, 2012).
[4] CSPAN Video, “April Glaspie's role in Invasion of Kuwait, 21 March 1991,” http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/17195-1 (accessed 12 September 2012).
[5] Gordon and Trainor, 19.
[6] Ibid., 9
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