It's the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.  I heard about it from my friend's car radio as we began pulling out of a grocery store parking lot.  A girl we knew named Cathy drove into the lot right then and shouted a smiling hello.  We had bought cheese, Triscuits, beer, sausage, and bread.  Everything was fine and humid where we were.
     Eight days earlier, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had cabled Saddam Hussein: "We [the U.S.] have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.  Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."
     Kuwait was regarded by ambitious Iraqi leaders over the years as "the Nineteenth Province," a name deriving from a time before that region was sliced off of Iraq by the British.  Kuwait's strategic location on the Persian Gulf, its numerous oil fields, made it a sought after prize in Hussein's set of goals.  The recently ended war with Iran, a conflict sustained by the cynicism of First World politicians and arms providers, left Iraq in bad straits, needing revenue and, in Hussein's case, I'm guessing, a renewed swelling of pride.  He'd been a U.S. ally since his takeover of Iraq in 1979.  He had no reason, in my opinion, to believe George Bush would offer a hands-off viewpoint on Kuwait, and then have a problem with it.  This misunderstanding and underestimation by Hussein of the duplicity of President Bush and Secretary of State Baker in 1990 has written many chapters of the violent world saga we now live in.
     Hussein sent his army into Kuwait, a nation ill-prepared to withstand such force.  Bush, meanwhile, condemned the invasion, not mentioning his own role in letting it happen.  His own presidential library has provided the Glaspie text quoted above.  It's not a secret that Baker and Bush knew, in late July 1990, that Hussein wanted to act on his "dispute" with Kuwait.  What did our leaders think Hussein was planning?  This begs the question: Given their knowledge of Hussein's upcoming attack against Kuwait, did Baker and Bush allow it to happen?  Would they have been able to stop Hussein with the warning, "We will go to war with you over Kuwait"?
     We know they didn't warn Hussein of the terrible possible consequences of his planned invasion.  Were Bush and Baker looking for an excuse to go to war in the Middle East?  Can the same be said of Bush's son, George W., when 9/11 gave our leaders the excuse to attack a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with the fall of the Twin Towers?
     That Baker and Bush had "no opinion" about Hussein's "Arab-Arab conflicts," is unbelievable.  Considering the region's oil wealth alone, it's not credible that power brokers like James Baker and George Bush regarded the Middle East as a lacuna in their minds.
     The Coalition, brought together by Bush, included many Arab countries glad to slap Saddam Hussein.  Hafez Assad, father of Syria's current leader Bashir, was, like his son, a dictator who killed a lot of his own people.  He'd been marginalized by the United States until Bush brought him into the Coalition.  I remember watching the two on television, sitting together, not saying anything, smiling.  Not Bush's finest gesture towards humanitarianism, and not his worst.
     In 1991, the Iraqi army folded like crumpling, burning paper.  Coalition air forces bombed Iraq to the extent there was, as one American pilot put it, "nothing left to bomb."  The country's infrastructure smashed, the Iraqi people, victims of their leader's oppression and the Coalition's unloving attentions, had to subsequently experience U.N.-enforced sanctions until 2003, when another war, from another Bush, lit up their country.
     Abuse of the Iraqi people by their own bad governments and First World powers is not much focused on in the U. S. news media.  U.N. sanctions, enforced mainly by the United States, led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, mostly children, women, and the elderly, deprived of basic medicines and health care in a demolished country.  Bill Clinton presided over eight years of the sanctions and is largely responsible for letting children die in massive numbers.  Maybe he's trying to atone with his Clinton Global Initiative, but I still say, "Fuck you, Bill Clinton."
     Clinton's heaping of misery on Iraqis, along with the two Bushes militarily destroying their country in two wars, shows how bipartisan the practice of American war crimes can be.

                                                                            Vic Neptune