January 12, 1991
First of all, Saddam Hussein has a million-man army. Technically, it’s only 500,000, counting the 11-year-olds, but you know, the Sandinites had a million-man army too for a couple of weeks, until I remembered there were only 3 million people in the country. But anyway, I enjoy filling you in on these things because you tend to believe them. Some of them. Some of you.
Now Iraq has long since positioned itself on top of the Ramaila oil fields—that is to say, they are in Iraq. Except for two little fingers of it that stick out into Kuwait, just across the line that is there, that is, the line in the sand. Now a certain corporation has been taking some oil out of those two fingers, a corporation known in business circles as Kuwait. And Saddam doesn’t understand that this is how pirate enterprise works.
Regarding the celebrated Glaspie incident: just prior to the August 2 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam, our ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, did tell Saddam that this border dispute was an Arab- Arab matter that the US had no interest in. And Undersecretary of Defense John Kelly said the same thing to Congress, and Margaret Tutweiler passed it to the press. Saddam misunderstood that signal. We have no interest in it, but there is still the principle. Someone had to mediate that dispute, someone objective, and we have an objective there, so it fell to us. Because we are a kinder, gentler world police.
All these so-called signals followed an international meeting at the White House in April 1990 at which it was decided to go for disarmament in the Meddle East—that is, to disarm the powers there, that is, the other powers, that is, not us. We felt that it was superfluous for there to be more than one power in a New World Order. Of course you can only have disarmament after a war, and we couldn’t very well start a war. That would be New World Disorderly. So we passed to the Iraqis the option of starting a war with us. And so we succeeded in getting Saddam into Kuwait, and once he realized that he’d been took, or taken in there, he decided to dig himself an underground shelter and wait us out. Or wait us in.
Why is it so important to put the Sabah family back into the palace in Kuwait City? It’s a question of jobs. And dollars. The Emir and his relations do have just a few hundred billion dollars in our Western banks, and they’ve been sort of keeping us afloat in that sense, and I think we ought to return the favor.
So the new Hitler was actually on his way to take Saudi Arabia. He didn’t know that at the time, but I did. Following which, you did. Later it turned out he wasn’t, but it was a bit too much later.
Above and beyond all these other reasons for us to be there, the most important is to destroy Iraq’s military-industrial complex, because we are opposed to military-industrial proliferation. There is a document called “Iraqi Power and US Security in the Middle East” which says basically that Iraq has become, through its very notable ability to learn from experience, the foremost mechanized warfare machine in the world today.That disturbs the balance of power, especially ours. We need to take them down a peg so somebody else can get a chance to be the best, so we can take them down a peg.