As far as Saddam Hussein was concerned, Thatcher's argument is known to have been
built around the ominous warning, "He won't stop!" Her message was that MI-6 and the
rest of the fabled British intelligence apparatus had concluded that Saddam Hussein's
goal would be an immediate military invasion and occupation of the immense Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia, with its sensitive Moslem holy places, its trackless deserts and its
warlike Bedouins. Since Thatcher was familar with Bush's racist contempt for Arabs and
other dark-skinned peoples, which she emphatically shared, she would also have laid
great stress on the figure of Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed to Anglo-Saxon
interests. The Tavistock profile would have included how threatened Bush felt in his
psycho-sexual impotence by tough customers like Saddam, whom nobody had ever
referred to as little Lord Fauntleroy.
At this moment in the Gulf crisis, the only competent political-military estimate of Iraqi
intentions was that Saddam Hussein had no intent of going beyond Kuwait, a territory to
which Baghdad had a long-standing claim, arguing that the British Empire had illegally
established its secret protectorate over the southern part of the Ottoman Empire's
province of Basra in 1899. This estimate that Iraq had no desire to become embroiled
with Saudi Arabia was repeated during the first week of the crisis by such qualified
experts as former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Aikens, and by the prominent
French military leader Gen. Lacaze. Even General Schwarzkopf though it highly unlikely
that Saddam would move against Saudi Arabia.
In her public remarks in Aspen, Thatcher began the new phase in the racist demonization
of Saddam Hussein by calling his actions "intolerable" in a way that Syrian and Israeli
occupations of other countries' lands seemingly were not. She asserted that "a collective
and effective will of the nations belonging to the UN" would be necessary to deal with
the crisis. Thatcher's travelling entourage from the Foreign Office had come equipped
with a strategy to press for mandatory economic sanctions and possible mandatory
military action against Iraq under the provisions of Chapter VII of the United Nations
Charter. Soon Bush's entourage had also picked up this new fad.
Bush had now changed his tune markedly. He had suddenly and publicly re-acquired his
military options. When asked about his response, he stated:
We're not ruling any options in but we're not ruling any options out.
Bush also revealed that he had told the Arab leaders with whom he had been in contact
during the morning that the Gulf crisis "had gone beyond simply a regional dispute
because of the naked aggression that violates the United Nations charter." These
formulations were I.D. format Thatcher-speak. Bush condemned Saddam for "his
intolerable behavior," again parrotting Thatcher's line. Bush was now "very much
concerned" about the safety of other small Gulf states. Bush also referred to the hostage
question, saying that threats to American citizens would "affect the United States in a
very dramatic way because I view a fundamental responsibility of my presidency [as
being] to protect American citzens." Bush added that he had talked with Thatcher about
British proposals to press for "collective efforts" by members of the United Nations