Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 553from its country into Iraqi oil fields and, in essence, steal Iraq’s oil. As soon as
the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, then, Iraq and Kuwait began to bicker and
skirmish, with Iraq sending troops toward the Kuwait border.
The situation worsened and in 1990, the U.S. began to talk to both parties.
In July of that year, the U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with
Saddam and, according to a transcript of the meeting told him that the U.S.
was “inspired by friendship and not by confrontation” and that it did not
expect “to start an economic war against Iraq.” Glaspie then added the now-
infamous statement that “we have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts,
such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to empha-
size the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is
not associated with America.” Glaspie’s words were crucial. To Saddam, the
U.S. had just given him a green light to do whatever it took to bring Kuwait
into line, and on August 2d, 1990, he sent Iraqi troops over the border into
the northern oil fields of Kuwait, both to seize control of them to bring the
world petroleum market back into line and to “reclaim” what was a histori-
cally a part of Iraq.
After a few days of indecision, the Americans began to send troops to the
region to challenge Saddam. President George Bush, declared “this shall not
stand” and began Operation Desert Shield, and eventually sent about 500,000
troops into the Persian Gulf area, especially as Iraqi forces moved southward and
took control of all of Kuwait. The initial goal was to expel Iraq from Kuwait,
but, perhaps more importantly, protect the neighboring country of Saudi Arabia,
the world’s largest oil producer, from any possible Iraqi aggression. To some
degree, the U.S. also could use the Iraqi invasion to build up military spending
at home. With the breakdown in European Communism and the “end of the
Cold War,” it was harder to justify massive defense budgets. In military planning
in 1989-90, the Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney, and the pentagon had developed
strategies for new enemies, in particular “rogue states.” Rogue states were gov-
ernments that lived outside the law and could be potentially dangerous to
global stability, and might even possess so-called WMDs, or Weapons of Mass
Destruction. And no country fit the rogue state label better than America’s
recent ally, Iraq. So the U.S. drew up plans for a potential war against Saddam.
Once this was made public, some critics have asserted, plausibly, that Glaspie
was in fact trying to bait Iraq into war so that the U.S. could put its war plans
into effect and have a reason to continue its large amount of military spending.