The Gulf Crisis • 399papers, and radio and television stations. Syria pioneered the development
of Arab nationalism, even though Iraq became independent sooner and
championed Arab unity in the 1930s and 1940s. And Saudi Arabia's oil, al¬
though discovered later than Iraq's, has proved to have greater output and
more extensive reserves. Iraqis feel, therefore, that other Arabs (to say
nothing of non-Arabs) do not respect them. Although many Arab states
furnished huge loans and supplied arms to Saddam Husayn's regime dur¬
ing its war against Iran, they underestimated what Iraq spent in blood and
treasure purportedly to blunt the spread of Islamist militancy from Tehran
to the Arab world.
A related complex is Iraq's belief that Western imperialism in general and
Britain in particular tried to strangle its development by creating a separate
emirate called "Kuwait." Iraq maintained that Kuwait had no right to inde¬
pendence. Its ruling Sabah family had recognized Ottoman suzerainty over
Kuwaiti territory during the nineteenth century. In 1899, however, Shaykh
Mubarak Al Sabah (r. 1896-1915) had signed a treaty giving the British re¬
sponsibility for the defense and foreign relations of Kuwait, thus severing it
from Ottoman control. The British, seeking to protect their routes to India,
had already made similar treaties with other tribal leaders along the Persian
Gulf. During the twentieth century, such pacts preserved an archaic politi¬
cal alignment in that area long after other Middle Eastern states had cast off
monarchical rule and colonial dependency. When the British fixed the bor¬
ders of their Iraqi mandate in 1921, its leaders complained that Kuwait's ex¬
cision left Iraq with almost no access to the Gulf. Once Iraq gained its
independence in 1932, it called for border adjustments. When British
forces withdrew from Kuwait in 1961, Abd al-Karim Qasim tried to replace
them with Iraqis, but the other Arab states and Britain sent in troops to
stop Iraq's leader from annexing the emirate. Baghdad argued intermit¬
tently that Kuwait was legally Iraqi territory and that it had never formally
ratified its recognition of Kuwaiti independence.
During its eight-year war with Iran, however, Iraq needed loans more
than land and borrowed more than $15 billion from Kuwait—a sum it
would not and could not repay after the war. Kuwait had islands, as yet un¬
developed, that could have served as loading and shipping facilities for
Iraq's petroleum exports. Both Iraq and Iran needed more oil income after
1988 to rebuild their war-torn economies. Raising revenues would require
either greater production or higher export prices, and Kuwait's aggressive
oil sales (at cut-rate prices) helped neither Baghdad nor Tehran.
Kuwait's legendary wealth, derived wholly from selling oil discovered
and developed by foreigners, served mainly to enrich the Sabah dynasty
and a few Kuwaitis who could prove that their families had long lived in