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 he took 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 and Washington-- persons, let us say, in the same league with
Henry Kissinger. One prime suspect who 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,
providing encouragement to Kim Il Sung to start the Korean war. There is every
indication that the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950 was 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 Iran in
1980 had been encouraged by US and British assurances that the Teheran government
was collapsing and incapable of resistance.
As we have seen, the Pentagon knew of Iraqi troops massing on the border with Kuwait
as for July 16-17. These troop concentrations were announced in the US press only on
July 24, when the Washington Post reported that "Iraq has moved nearly 30,000 elite
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 to 3,000 vehicles moving south with
a further reinforcement of two divisions of the Republican Guards. [fn 30]