None of the above. Everything I have said is true.
That’s not even the point. Even if Operation Desert Storm did not turn out to be a turkey shoot, preventing WWIII would have been worth it.
Because it was not analogous to Viet Nam at all - more like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia. Many historians, and Hitler himself, believe that decisive action could have been taken. But the Allied powers were afraid of war. So they didn’t take military action.
Bush, the GOP, and a minority of Democrats in the Senate, knew that war is bad, but some things are worse. Kerry didn’t. He thought sanctions would drive out Saddam, or he could be appeased by letting him invade [del]the Sudetenland[/del] his 19th province, or some other piece of stupidity. Therefore he was either a moral coward, or an idiot.
As it turns out, the US and her allies went thru the Iraqi army like shit thru a goose. Irrelevant. The war was worth fighting even without that.
Hussein is somewhat mischaracterized in popular understanding due to the propoganda efforts against him. Which isn’t to say that he wasn’t a grade A asshole dictator, but so much effort and propoganda was spent making Hussein seem insane and expansionist and discredit anything he might say or do. It gives us the impression that he was basically Kim Jong-Il, but he wasn’t. He was pretty rational, if evil.
When you heard newscasters talk about Iraq’s claim of not having WMDs, or of having a legitimate beef with Kuwait, it felt like they were just barely suppressing a desire to roll their eyes. Basically, they treated certain legitimate claims Iraq made equivelant to how Kim Jong Il claims to score holes in one every time he swings a golf club.
Iraq had a legitimate beef with Kuwait, who were slant-drilling across the border and stealing Iraqi oil. Iraq was also basically told by the US that an invasion of Kuwait would be treated as an internal Arab matter. There was a legitimate causus belli there.
There were no indications that Saddam was going to be aggressive against Saudi Arabia. There was no causus belli there. As part of the justification for desert shield, the US claimed that Iraqi tanks had been lined up on the Saudi border, but the Russians later released extensive satellite photos to prove that this was a complete lie.
So, Iraq had a legitimate reason to invade Kuwait. He also had legitimate reason to suspect that the US would stay out of it, if not tacitly approved. There were no such factors in the case of Saudi Arabia, and so the only reason to suspect he would invade Saudi Arabia is if you buy into the idea that he’s an insane lying bloodthirsty irrational Kim Jong-Il type.
An Iranian-backed terrorist group, Al-Dawa, a group with a long history of airplane hijackings, car bombings, and blowing up the US Embassy in Kuwait in 1982 (and whose current leader Nouri Al-Maliki now heads the Iraqi government) assasinated a senior Ba’athist official in southern Iraq. That kind of thing is more than enough justification for israel to start wars against her neighbours and I’m sure you supported Israel in the recent Lebanon/Gaza wars, so why shouldn’t it be enough for Saddam?
Iraq actually had a bunch of legitimate historical/territorial/etc. beefs with Iran like ownership of the Shatt Al-Arab waterway and the Wikileaks cable shows that Saddam was at least under the impression that he’d gone to war with Iran (as part of a group of Arab nations, King Hussein of Jordan actually fired the first shot of that war from a Jordanian tank) as a proxy for America against their common enemy, as America “couldn’t afford 10 000 dead in a single battle.”
Standard fact checking: al-Da‘wa attempted to assassinate Tariq Aziz after which Sadaam expelled roughly 40,000 Shia of Iranian ancestry and ordered the assassination of Ayatollah Sadr. It should also be noted that Sadaam brutalized Al-Da’wa members for quite some time before Iran’s theocracy even existed. It should also be noted that before the assassination attempt. Iraq essentially created a law that called for the killing of anybody who was or had been associated with al-Da’wa.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
If it was in fact true. There are a number of references to Iraqi allegations that Kuwait was slant-drilling into Iraqi oilfields but I haven’t found any sources that confirm it.
The other grounds for war that Iraq gave were that Kuwait “belonged” to Iraq. This is based on the fact that when Iraq was a province of the Ottoman Empire, it included the territory that is now Kuwait. When the Ottoman Empire broke up, Iraq and Kuwait were formed as seperate countries.
The final grounds Iraq gave was that Kuwait was conducting economic warfare against Iraq. This was based on Kuwait producing more oil than it was supposed to under OPEC agreements. This extra oil on the world market drove down oil prices which in turn drove down the income Iraq got from oil sales.
It’s possible that if he had gotten away with invading Kuwait, the next areas on his list would have been the former Saudi/Iraqiand Saudi/KuwaitiNeutral Zones, and indeed he did renounce the agreement with the Saudis over the first zone just before the invasion. From there, it is plausible that he would have continued to nibble away at Saudi Arabia Sudetenland-style, rather than trying an all-out invasion.