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It's far to say Saddam's aggression threatened other oil rich countires in the middle east.
It was all about oil and control of the Middle East. If Saddam invades Kuwait..then invades Saudi Arabia..then is back by Russia..then invades Iran....controls all the oil...what a mess! It was always about oil.
I had just gotten out of the Navy in early January of 1990. Right after the action started I received a letter from the Navy that came from Cleveland requiring me to call. I'm from Toledo and my MEPS station had been in Cleveland so I thought maybe I was being called back into the Navy, even though I had already served six years. Nope, was just the Navy trying to get me to join the reserves. The recruiter probably wasn't too happy when I told him I didn't do anything halfway, I'd consider going back in as active duty but not as a reservist. He said my rating was closed for active duty so I continued with my new civilian life.
From what I was told when I enlisted nuke school in the Navy had a 70% drop out rate. I almost went into that rating but the recruiter talked me out of it so I became a Cryptologist instead.
Was glad Bush 41 had enough sense to not continue on into Iraq. Wish his son had been born with the same amount of commonsense.
At the time I went to Nuke school it was divided into three schools. First school was an A school with high level math and other courses rating related. It was to ween out those not smart enough for the rest of the course. Saw several drop because of grades or getting into trouble. They’re held to a higher standard so it’s pretty easy to get in trouble and kicked out. When someone says they were kicked out just for nodding off in class or being late to class it was never just that one event. It was just the last straw.
Second school was Nuke Power School. All materials, including notebooks, are stamped confidential and cannot be taken out of the building. All class work and studies must be done in the classroom. The pace of the courses are also sped up. The purpose was to put the students under intense pressure. I had a nervous breakdown which is what led to me dropping out. Others too a more “permanent” way out. Some acted like they wanted to kill themselves. One guy stood on the side of a busy highway and took a few steps forward to kiss the grill of a big rig.
The third school was a nuclear power plant. You’re given a set of lessons to learn and you go learn and it’s completely self pace. The downside is there’s a time limit to qualify. It’s to see if you’re ire a self starter who can work responsibly with little to know supervision. That time limit is what catches some of them. What it’s like now I can’t tell you. They closed the boot camp and nuclear school that was in Orlando. I’m guessing someone thought putting it in Orlando would help attract Nuke recruits. They ignored the local bars and nightclubs that got so many in trouble.
It came out much later that the claims by US intelligence of Iraq's military massing on the Saudi border to be false.
Saudi Arabia and its allies sponsored the first Gulf war.
It was primarily Israel and its supporters in the US who were behind the second Gulf war. They provided some of the fake intelligence for supporting the invasion this time. They were told to lay low in order to get Arab support for the war.
The war preparations had already started right after 911. In March of 2002, there were already reports of US special ops and special forces on the ground canvassing the Iraqi opposition for staging a mass uprising to provoke the Iraqi government and serve to provide a pretext for the US to destroy the Iraqi military.
30 years ago Iraq invaded Kuwait setting the stage for Desert Storm. At the time I was in Orlando about to be dropped out of Nuke School.
I was in New York working at an investment bank.
I knew the response would be serious when the Turks agreed to close the pipeline.
Even President Hosni Mubarak saw the danger that, if not stopped right there, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army would have easily overrun Saudi Arabia and attempted to invade Egypt.
Hell, even Syria helped in the effort, probably for similar reasons.
Only Jordan tried to stay neutral against international pressure; I remember King Hussein saying something like "Sometimes it feels as though we were living in a dictatorship, a world dictatorship."
It was all about oil and control of the Middle East. If Saddam invades Kuwait..then invades Saudi Arabia..then is back by Russia..then invades Iran....controls all the oil...what a mess! It was always about oil.
Well, yes. The U.S. strategic interest in the Middle East is overwhelmingly based on access to oil. It should be noted that from which Gulf country the U.S. imports oil isn't particularly critical. Oil is a global commodity. When something happens to one source of oil, it affects the price of all oil. Basic supply and demand.
The problem in 1991 was several-fold. First, there was the real threat to the Saudi oil fields. While those resources under Iraqi control would still have been available to the world - Saddam Hussein couldn't eat oil, after all; he wanted to sell it - it would have given him a disproportionately large amount of the global market. This would be a problem because he was a less reliable, less stable, entity than the House of Saud. There was also the issue of one country gobbling up another. That's generally destabilizing (though the U.S. could be flexible there - ask the East Timorese). Anyway, seeing too much of the world's oil eggs in the basket of Saddam Hussein, who in 1990 clearly demonstrated his proclivity for serially invading his neighbors - would have been a dangerous thing.
As for the USSR (not Russian, per se) in 1991, they had little interest in getting involved. While they were obviously less than thrilled about the position of such a massive U.S. force comparatively near Soviet borders, they had within the previous two years pulled out of Afghanistan and stood by and allowed the Eastern Bloc to repudiate communism, including agreeing to a reunified Germany in NATO. More to the point, there was little the Soviets could do had they so wanted. The USSR of 1990 was economically weak and in need of western cooperation, its military was in the process of being largely mothballed, and it was beset by domestic disturbances. And the post-1991 successor state of Russia was significantly weaker. As for invading Iran (again), there would be little point. That had been a disaster, and most of Saddam Hussein's motivators from 1980 no longer applied ten years later (Iran wasn't as weak and disorganized as it was during and immediately after the revolution, the revolution clearly wasn't going to spread to Iraq, Iraq post-Kuwait would already have attained the regional dominance it had sought, etc.).
The caveat here is Saddam Hussein's nature. Moving into Saudi Arabia would have been extremely foolish, but Hussein had proven himself to be a risk-taker. He wasn't insane. He could be deterred. He scrupulously adhered to the line in the sand drawn in 1990 over the use of WMD (ie, chemical weapons in that case - it's silly to label them as being capable of 'mass destruction, but it is what it is). Still, the Saudi oil fields would be a classic high-risk/high-rewards move.
Now, 2003 is a completely different story. That was idiotic on every level.
It was primarily Israel and its supporters in the US who were behind the second Gulf war. They provided some of the fake intelligence for supporting the invasion this time. They were told to lay low in order to get Arab support for the war.
Nonsense. Israel warned the U.S. not to destabilize Iraq in 2002, but to focus on Iran as the real threat in the region. And they were right.
The Gulf War was a poorly conceived mistake. Though well executed, it only strengthened Iran. No one actually cared about Kuwait. Bush initially signaled that he wouldn't respond if Saddam moved on Kuwait, then changed his mind.
An intelligent President would have said, stay away from Saudi Arabia, and left it at that.
I was at work when I heard on the radio the bombing campaign had begun. I did know an Army captain that was killed during that war, but it was in a jeep accident (it rolled). I was close to being sent over there after the war ended to conduct damage assessments on Kuwaiti facilities, but up getting a new job with a promotion.
I do remember some of the press briefings conducted by Schwarzkopf. Reporters would ask the same dumb questions ("What is your next move?") over and over again, and he would get testy repeating the same answer ("I can't give you that information at this time.").
It was all about oil and control of the Middle East. If Saddam invades Kuwait..then invades Saudi Arabia..then is back by Russia..then invades Iran....controls all the oil...what a mess! It was always about oil.
2X3X29...documented a pretty good summary. You are correct as well but the problem I had with your original thread, if you meant it or not, was the appearance that in particular US oil companies or oil executives would directly profit from the Gulf War (first and second). That would be incorrect but maybe I read too much into it.
The world wanted to keep the status quo, the careful balance of power in the middle east that keeps the oil flowing. The middle east is an oil rich region and thus important for world stability - in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the US. The US actually is the worlds largest oil producer but even if we don't get as much oil from there it impacts the rest of the world stability and thus, because we are a global economy, it impact America. You can say it was a war for oil, it was more of a war to keep the status quo and global stability that potentially would result in more serious wars in the future. No one was getting rich.
I know we aren't discussing the later Iraq war but in terms of oil the biggest beneficiary from that was, ironically, China.
It was an interesting conflict because post-World War II there have been relatively few classic wars - ie, ones that were not internal or asymmetric disputes. Granted, there was significant disparity between the forces, both regarding technology and training. Still, it was a classic face-off between military powers. The only similar conflicts that come to mind are the Falklands War, a couple of Indo-Pakistani wars, and several wars involving Israel (Suez, Six-Day War, Yom Kippur).
I believe the largest tank battle of the last 75 years occurred in southern Iraq in 1991 - albeit a rather lopsided one (to put it mildly).
2X3X29...documented a pretty good summary. You are correct as well but the problem I had with your original thread, if you meant it or not, was the appearance that in particular US oil companies or oil executives would directly profit from the Gulf War (first and second). That would be incorrect but maybe I read too much into it.
The world wanted to keep the status quo, the careful balance of power in the middle east that keeps the oil flowing. The middle east is an oil rich region and thus important for world stability - in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the US. The US actually is the worlds largest oil producer but even if we don't get as much oil from there it impacts the rest of the world stability and thus, because we are a global economy, it impact America. You can say it was a war for oil, it was more of a war to keep the status quo and global stability that potentially would result in more serious wars in the future. No one was getting rich.
I know we aren't discussing the later Iraq war but in terms of oil the biggest beneficiary from that was, ironically, China.
I see what you are saying. Was just saying it was about oil from a larger perspective.
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