of the most advanced in the region, and religious freedom was extended to all churches.
Anglo-American strategy was thus to use economic warfare measures, including embargos on key
technologies, to back Saddam Hussein into a corner. When the position of Iraq was judged
sufficiently desperate, secret feelers from the Anglo-Americans offered Saddam Hussein
encouragement to attack Kuwait, with secret guarantees that there would be no Anglo-American
reaction. Reliable reports from the Middle East indicate that Saddam Hussein was told before hetook Kuwait that London and Washington would not go to war against him. Saddam Hussein was (^)
given further assurances through December and January, 1991 that the military potential being
assembled in his front would not be used against him, but would only permanently occupy Saudi
Arabia. It is obvious that, in order to be believable on the part of the Iraqi leadership, these
assurances had to come from persons known to exercise great power and influence in London aWashington-- persons, let us say, in the same league with Henry Kissinger. One prime suspect whond (^)
would fill the bill is Tiny Rowland, a property custodian of the British royal family and
administrator of British post-colonial and neo-colonial interests in Africa and elsewhere. Tiny
Rowland had been in Iraq in July, shortly before the Iraqi military made their move.
It is important to note that every aspect of the public conduct of the Bush regime until after the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait had become a fait accompli was perfectly coherent with the assurances Saddam
Hussein was receiving, namely that there would be no US military retaliation against Iraq for taking
Kuwait.
The British geopoliticians so much admired by Bush are past masters of the intrigue of the invitatio
ad offerendum, the suckering of another power into war. Invitatio ad offerendum means in effect
"let's you and him fight." It is well known that US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a close
associate of Averell Harriman, had in January, 1950 officially and formally cast South Korea
outside the pale of American protection, proviKorean war. There is every indication that the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950 wding encouragement to Kim Il Sung to start the (^) as
also secretly encouraged by the British. Later, the British secretly encouraged Chinese intervention
into that same war. The Argentinian seizure of the Malvinas Islands during 1982 was evidently
preceeded by demonstrations of lethargic disinterest in the fate of these islands by the British
Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. Saddam Hussein's attack on Iraby US and British assurances that the Teheran government was collapsing and incapable ofn in 1980 had been encouraged
resistance.
As we have seen, the Pentagon knew of Iraqi troops massing on the border with Kuwait as for July
16-17. TWashington Post reported that "Iraq has moved nearly 30,000 ehese troop concentrations were announced in the US press only on July 24, when thelite army troops to its border with (^)
Kuwait and the Bush administration put US warships in the Persian Gulf on alert as a dispute
between the two gulf nations over oil production quotas intensified, US officials and Arab
diplomats said yesterday." The Iraqis had invited a group of western military attaches to travel by
road from Kuwait City to Baghdad, during which time the western officers counted some 2,000 to3,000 vehicles moving south with a further reinforcement of two divisions of the Republican
Guards. [fn 30]
If Kuwait had been so vital to the security of the United States and the west, then it is clear that at
any time between July 17 and August 1 --and that is to say during a period of almost two weeks--Bush could have issued a warning to Iraq to stay out of Kuwait, backing it up with some blood-
curdling threats and serious, high-profile military demonstrations. Instead, Bush maintained a
studied public silence on the situation and allowed his ambassador to convey a message to Saddam
Hussein that was wholly misleading, but wholly coherent with the hypothesis of a British plan to
sucker Saddam into war.