The Gulf War 1991 – Part 1: Lines in the Sand
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network. And as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. You are listening to the first episode in a three-part series about a topic that I've had on my list for a very long time. The one, the only, Gulf War.

Except, it's not really the one and only Gulf War. In fact, as long as there have been people living near the Persian Gulf, there have been armies fighting over it. Since men figured out how to sharpen a few sticks and stand side by side in neat little rows, there have been battles fought over that very old...

very fertile, very strategically located region that we call Mesopotamia. But our Gulf War, the one we're going to be talking about for the next few episodes, took place way back in the distant, misty days of 1991. Back when cars had tape decks, phones had cords...

and Dwayne Johnson had hair. On the surface, it's a pretty simple story. In August of 1990, Saddam Hussein, the infamous dictator of Iraq, invaded the tiny country of Kuwait. The United States quickly assembled a coalition to kick him out. And in less than a year, Saddam's powerful army had been transformed into white flags and pink mist. Cue the victory music, roll credits. But underneath that deceptively simple morality play is

is a churning, tessellating landscape of murky motives, competing agendas, and unintended consequences. The conflict known as the 1991 Gulf War goes by several different names. Sometimes it's called the Kuwait War, the First Iraq War, or just Operation Desert Storm. But no matter what you call it, one fact remains. It is one of the most consequential things to happen anywhere in the world in the last half century. And

And yet, in the annals of modern history, the Gulf War is often downplayed, de-emphasized, or dismissed. Because, at least in the US, the Gulf War is a sort of historical middle child, living in the shadow of two longer, larger, and arguably more destructive conflicts. Behind it is the Vietnam War, and in front of it is the 2003 Iraq War. As a result, the Gulf War is treated as a kind of patriarchy.

pit stop on the timeline, a prelude to more important things. But it still lives in our cultural subconscious as a series of highly iconic images. Burning oil wells. Fuzzy CNN footage. Not to mention some very quotable presidential soundbites.

This will not stand, you know? This aggression will not stand, man. But for the most part, the Gulf War is always a part of something else's story, rarely examined on its own merits. But that is exactly what we're going to do today.

And honestly, the reason that I find this conflict so fascinating, and the reason I think you will too, is because it is an intersection point of several seemingly unrelated historical threads. Little strands of influence and money and nationalism and sheer coincidence that all get tangled up together for a few months in the Kuwaiti desert. And for better or worse, we've been living in that Gordian knot for

for the last 30 years. It is also a story chock full of amazing, larger-than-life historical figures. We'll meet the big ones, of course. Saddam Hussein, George H.W. Bush, Norman Schwarzkopf, all those guys. But we'll also meet an absolutely incredible cast of supporting characters. People who shaped events, reacted to them, or just sat back and watched.

We'll meet dictators and diplomats, teenage soldiers and aging cold warriors, boots on the ground, guns in the sky, and civilians hiding in the basement. And through all of that, we will assemble a centrifuge of dozens of different vantage points, and at the center, hopefully, is something approximating the truth of what happened out there. But the Gulf War does have one other name.

Sometimes it's called the video game war, for reasons that we will see later. But that description works on a couple levels, because even now, our popular understanding of it has been flattened into this 2D caricature. Good versus evil, heroes versus villains, cops and robbers in the desert. Simple and clear-cut, easy to understand, and easy to forget.

But hopefully, over the next few episodes, we can bring that story into three dimensions. So, with that quick introduction out of the way, I think it's time to get started. Welcome to The Gulf War 1991, Part 1, Lines in the Sand.

It's April 29th, 1975. We're in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. For the last 20 years, this city has been the seat of American power and influence in Southeast Asia, a red, white, and blue bulwark guarding against the steady creep of communism. But today, it is ground zero for one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of the United States. The Vietnam War, a conflict that has been raging in some form for decades, is a great

is lost. It is over. Outside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, 10,000 South Vietnamese men, women, and children are pressing against the gates, begging for help. They are scared. They are desperate. And they all want one thing. To get out.

They don't know if the Americans are going to help them. They don't know if they'll be able to find a spot on one of the helicopters swooping down into the embassy parking lot every 10 minutes. But they have to try. They will bribe and beg and call in every favor they have because they really, really do not want to be here when the North Vietnamese Army arrives. Many of these people in the crowd have collaborated with the Americans for years as clerks, cooks, and tailors,

advisors and attachés. In rosier times, getting a gig with Uncle Sam was a guaranteed meal ticket. But now, it's little more than a death warrant. South Vietnamese Army officers are burning their identification cards, their documents, paycheck stubs, anything that connects them to the American government and its puppet regime. Anything that could be used to brand them as enemies of a new communist Vietnam. As one lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army remembered, quote,

It was chaos in Saigon at that time. Everybody was looking for a way out. Inside the embassy, American Marines are also frantically cleaning house. As artillery rounds boom in the distance like an arrhythmic war drum, the soldiers cram classified documents into shredders, transforming decades of intelligence into pulp. They've even been ordered to burn the $1 million in cash that the embassy keeps on site for contractor payments. In a process that takes eight hours,

Lincolns and Grants and Benjamins shrivel into wisps of worthless black ash. On the American Armed Service radio, an eerily unseasonal song provides the soundtrack to this rising panic. Bing Crosby's White Christmas croons over the airwaves, serving as the prearranged signal for all American personnel that the evacuation of Saigon has begun.

"Get out while you can." For many of the 5,000 Americans still in Saigon, it was a surreal ending to a surreal war. As a journalist named Peter Arnett wrote that very same evening from his hotel room, quote, "Ten years ago, I watched the first U.S. Marines arrive to help Vietnam. They were greeted on the beaches by pretty Vietnamese girls in white silken robes who draped flower garlands about their necks. A decade has passed.

and on Tuesday, I watched the U.S. Marines shepherding Americans out of South Vietnam. They were the same clean-cut looking young men of a decade ago, but the Vietnamese were different. Those who didn't have a place for them on the last helicopters, and there were thousands left behind,

hooted, booed, and scuffled with the Marines trying to secure the landing zones. Some Vietnamese threw themselves over the walls and wire fences only to be thrown back by Marines. Bloodshed was avoided, seemingly only by good luck and bad aim, on the part of some angry Vietnamese who shot at a few departing buses and helicopters." By 7:58 AM the next morning,

the evacuation is over. When the last Americans were airlifted out, Washington pulled the plug. No more helicopters, no more rescues, no more free rides. The South Vietnamese left behind were on their own. As one American military man lamented, quote, I felt absolutely awful. It was just so serious and deep, a betrayal, end quote.

And when the last helicopter ramp slammed shut, a sad, shameful chapter in American history closed with it. That afternoon, North Vietnamese tanks rumbled through the streets of Saigon, cementing control over the city following an unconditional surrender by the South Vietnamese government. That's it, Peter Arnett told a colleague.

It's over. And halfway across the world, a relatively unknown American diplomat named George Herbert Walker Bush absorbed the news with a nauseous mix of shock and anger. For the first time in its 200-year existence, America had lost a major war. Bush remembered a Canadian diplomat turning to him and saying, quote, The American people must understand that as soon as America doesn't stand for something in the world, there's going to be a tremendous erosion of

of freedom. Those words would be ringing in George Bush's ears for the next 20 years. Next time America faced a challenge on the world stage, he believed, whoever was at the helm would need to take a stand. The fall of Saigon was the last death rattle of a quagmire that had cost 2 million Vietnamese lives, $120 billion, and the dignity of three administrations. The American public had been lied to, the Vietnamese population had been brutalized, and

and any sense of trust people had in the U.S. government had evaporated like yesterday's tear gas. All that blood, and all that treasure, and all we'd gotten for it was 58,000 dead names scratched into a wall of black granite in Washington, D.C. With the loss of Saigon and the fruitless war that had preceded it, the United States had been brutally spanked on the world stage. You could

You could practically hear the laughter ringing from the Kremlin. But alas, in a global Cold War, superpowers do not have the luxury of licking their wounds. The show must go on. Southeast Asia was a dead scene, but in other corners of the world, the United States scanned the horizon for exciting new partnerships. Promising Talent

Fresh meat. And it wasn't long before the U.S. found just such an opportunity. An opportunity that presented itself in the form of an up-and-coming young politician from the troubled nation of Iraq. He was a tall, strapping guy with a pearly smile, dark eyes, and a very impressive mustache. His name was Saddam Hussein.

Now, if you're the kind of person who enjoys history podcasts, or just a person with a functioning nervous system, you've probably heard the name Saddam Hussein before. He is one of the most famous people on the planet. Well, was one of the most famous people on the planet. And odds are you have a crystal clear mental image of him already forming in your head.

Somewhere, standing on a raised platform in your subconscious, there he is. The fearsome megalomaniac of Iraq. He's probably wearing his trademark dictator costume, olive green fatigues, a black beret perched on a head of oil slick hair. Maybe he's waving some kind of gun around, a pistol or an AK-47, while crowds cheer below and jets scream overhead. He is the butcher of Baghdad.

The man, the myth, the mustache. But underneath that two-dimensional cartoon character is an absolutely fascinating individual. One that we will get to know very well over the course of this series.

Because, the truth is, discussing the Gulf War without a deep understanding of Saddam Hussein is a little bit like baking a cake without sugar. You could do it, it just won't turn out very well. And in a story full of weird and wonderful characters, Saddam is the Shakespearean centerpiece of it all. The doomed protagonist of this entire fiasco. So, who is he? Who is Saddam Hussein?

Over the past four decades or so, there have been enough biographies, books, articles, and op-eds written about Saddam to fill a large aircraft hangar. But if you had to boil it down to a single idea, if you had to condense all the anecdotes and analysis, the memes and the mythology into one key takeaway, the most important thing to understand about the man is this. Saddam Hussein is a survivor. Over the course of his life, Saddam was able to sense danger and dodge threats with a kind of Looney Tunes elasticity.

He was shrewd, manipulative, and very hard to kill. Through a combination of ruthless pragmatism and streetwise paranoia, Saddam bobbed and weaved through the dog-eat-dog world of Iraqi politics to arrive at the top of the heap. And to millions of Americans watching CNN in the fall of 1990, the totalitarian strongman of Iraq was the embodiment of everything wrong in the world. A war criminal, a Hitler reborn, a Baghdad Baba Yaga.

But the truth is a little more complicated and interesting than that reductive snapshot. Because Saddam Hussein was not always Saddam Hussein. Everybody comes from somewhere, even global pariahs. Unlike his future adversary George H.W. Bush, Saddam Hussein was not born into privilege.

In fact, it's a minor miracle he was born at all. In 1939, or 1937 depending on who you ask, Saddam's mother brought him screaming into the world and onto the floor of a mud hut in backwater Iraq. At that time, in that place, infant mortality was something like 30%. And many children died young from disease, neglect, or just bad luck. But Saddam did not. He survived.

That said, life was not easy for the little boy whose name meant clasher, confronter, or collider in Arabic. Saddam's dad died of cancer shortly before he was born, which made him a target for the other kids in the village. In Iraqi culture at that time, not having a dad was like not having a left foot, and they teased him mercilessly, picked on him, beat him up. As the biographers Ephraim Karsh and Inari Rautzi wrote, quote,

He had no friends among the village boys, who often mocked him for being fatherless, and he used to carry an iron bar to protect himself from attacks. End quote. And so for the first ten years of his life, Saddam was a lonely, angry little boy. He worked in the fields, endured regular beatings from his asshole stepdad, and avoided local bullies as best he could.

And the sad, sour cherry on top of the shit sundae was that because of a lack of educational opportunities, Saddam could not even spell his own name. And his memories of childhood poverty were vivid, as Saddam himself reflected, quote, "...life was difficult everywhere in Iraq. Few people wore shoes, and in many cases they only wore them on special occasions. Some peasants would not put their shoes on until they had reached their destination, so they would look smart."

And as for the bullies and the beatings, Saddam preferred not to elaborate, simply summing it up, quote, "...I was never young."

But this Dickensian existence would not last forever. Around 1947, Saddam went to live with a benevolent uncle who made sure he got an education. He learned to read, write, and spell his name. He even became a bit of a class clown, delighting his fellow students with practical jokes. On one occasion, for example, he snuck a live snake into his Quran teacher's robes. You know, classic pranks.

But Saddam Hussein was destined for more than small-town hijinks, and when he turned 18 around 1955, he and his uncle moved to the capital of Baghdad. Yes, the country boy was heading to the big city, and like an Iraqi Oliver Twist, he quickly adapted to his environment. To quote the late great author Terry Pratchett, "...sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds. It has more to prove."

In those early days, Baghdad was a roiling hotbed of political activism, of feuding gangs, cutthroat conspiracies, and a prevailing attitude of f*** the government. The city of Baghdad itself is over a thousand years old, but the nation-state it resides in, Iraq, had only existed for about 30 years. As one historian put it, quote, Iraq was a fabrication of outsiders who had little understanding of the region, its culture, or its politics. The

End quote. See, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed like a tired old grandpa in the aftermath of World War I, the Middle East was overrun with a clown car of cartographers and bureaucrats from the British Empire, who proceeded to chop up the region like a prize pig. The resulting borders were little more than arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. This part over here, we'll call that Jordan. This part over here, that's Lebanon. This chunk over here, that's gonna be Syria.

And so on and so forth. And in the year 1921, people in Mesopotamia woke up one morning to discover that they were now citizens of a brand new country called Iraq. And in demographic terms, it made more sense on paper than in reality. As the first British-installed monarch of Iraq cynically observed in 1933, quote,

End quote. And rise they did. By 1941, just 20 years after the country was created, Iraq's government had already experienced seven coup d'etats and

and about 12 different cabinets. Iraqi politics evolved into a murderous game of musical chairs, with factions rising and falling and rising again. The perpetual cycle of coup and counter-coup became a cherished pastime,

a sort of national sport. But it was our buddy Saddam Hussein who would elevate political betrayal to an art form. On the mean streets of Baghdad, Saddam found himself. Like Mozart putting his fingers to a piano for the first time, Hussein discovered his calling, his natural habitat. At the age of 20, he joined an up-and-coming political faction called the Ba'ath Party. That's B-A-apostrophe-A-T-H, Ba'ath.

An organization dedicated to, among other things, the eradication of all Western influence over the Arab world. And in those heated sessions, the country boy realized that not only did he like politics, he liked hurting people in the name of politics. It made him feel powerful. It made him feel alive. It made him feel in control. And Saddam liked being in control. If his troubled childhood had taught him anything, it was that the only way to be safe was to be in control.

I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. So when he wasn't in school, at party functions, or selling cigarettes on street corners, Saddam built his rep as a brawler, a bruiser, and a hitman. A pitiless enforcer of the party line with a gangster's intuition and a lupine sense of creativity. As the writer Saeed K. Al-Burish describes, quote,

Saddam now became a student leader of anti-government demonstrations. A sign of worse things to come, he relied on alley boys and criminal elements and talked them into joining the student protesters. He set up roving gangs of thugs who specialized in beating up their opponents, including shopkeepers who refused to shut their businesses in protest at government policy. End quote. The only way to survive in a cruel world, Saddam believed, was to be crueler than everyone else.

Now, the next several years could probably be expanded into several full-length episodes, but we cannot hang around the back alleys of Baghdad forever. We gotta keep this thing moving. Suffice to say, over the next couple of decades, Saddam Hussein went through several seasons worth of character development. He participated in a botched assassination attempt on the Prime Minister of Iraq, barely escaping the country with a bullet in his leg. He spent years in exile, enrolled in law school, dropped out, got married, and had some kids.

Then, he came back to Iraq, got busted, and did a two-year stretch in prison. Then he pulled a Shawshank and escaped from prison, participated in yet another coup, this one successful, and eventually found himself riding the coattails of a mentor in

into the halls of power. But the bottom line was, he survived. When so many others found themselves on the wrong end of a gun, Saddam Hussein kept his head above the waves, kept air in his lungs, and eventually came out on top. Like a seabird riding thermals, he climbed higher and higher and higher in Iraqi politics. And by 1969, he was the second most powerful person in the country.

The friendless, fatherless kid from a backwater hamlet had traded peasant rags for pinstripe suits. As Karsh and Routsy describe his rise to power, quote, "...he had effectively purged all potential contenders for the leadership, tightened his grip over the military, and maintained the security apparatus as his personal preserve. His imprint was on every major domestic and foreign policy decision."

And as the number two man in Iraq, Saddam bided his time and slowly drew all the levers of power into his hands. To great acclaim, he nationalized Iraq's oil industry, injecting the country with an unprecedented wave of wealth. Before Saddam took the reins, Iraq was making a measly $476 million a year from oil sales, but in less than a decade, he had raised those profits to $24 billion, and

annually, and he used that cash to buy weapons and beef up infrastructure but also to make life better for ordinary Iraqis, according to Karshen Rautsy, quote, "Major efforts were invested in education, including massive campaigns to eradicate illiteracy. Free education, from kindergarten to university, was hammered down by an official law, and a special coordinating body for the eradication of illiteracy among the adult population was established.

Heavy emphasis was also placed on the emancipation of women, including legislation ensuring equal pay and outlawing job discrimination on the basis of sex. End quote. By 1979, Saddam had eclipsed everyone else in the Ba'ath Party. After years of patient plotting, he was ready to take the big job. And that summer, he made it official. The president of Iraq, Saddam's former mentor, was quietly shuffled out of power for quote-unquote health reasons,

And shortly after, it was announced on the radio that there was a new president of Iraq. And his name was Saddam Hussein. But even with the keys to the kingdom clenched firmly in his hands, even with the grudging respect and performative adoration of his countrymen, Saddam never felt completely safe. Even in those early days, Hussein's decision-making was driven by an almost pathological paranoia. He laid awake at night, always worrying about being ousted, clipped, or replaced.

And so, in July of 1979, he took one final, extraordinary step to purge all dissent and rid himself of enemies, real or imagined. To put it bluntly, Saddam Hussein had done a lot of ruthless shit in his life. But what he did in the summer of 79 was his claim to fame, his masterpiece, his stairway to heaven. And it took place in a crowded conference room in Baghdad, in front of a live audience. On

On July 22nd, 1979, Saddam calls a meeting of all the top leadership in the Ba'ath Party. All the most important people in the government, the brass, the senior cadres, hundreds of people. But none of them are told what this meeting is about. They're not sure what to expect or why they're there. They just file in, take their seats, and look at the results.

and look to the front like kids in a school assembly waiting for the principal to speak. And while they wait, some of them start scanning the room and they notice something kind of weird. There are cameras, television cameras, positioned strategically around the conference hall. And they realize this meeting is being recorded. Something is about to happen.

Eventually, Saddam Hussein takes the stage, wearing a crisp suit and puffing on a fat Havana cigar. After a few preliminary announcements, a little bit of housekeeping, Saddam becomes deadly serious. Then, he drops the bombshell. He reveals that he has uncovered a conspiracy to overthrow him. A fifth column of traitors at the highest levels in the Iraqi government. And what he says next sucks the oxygen out of the assembly. The

The conspirators, he says, are all in this room. Before anyone can absorb what's happening, a prisoner is hauled on stage to give a forced confession. The man, a former secretary general of the command council, has been tortured, threatened, and coached. He was speaking, but Saddam was doing the talking.

And the shaking confessor goes on to list, name by name, each and every one of the so-called conspirators, more than 60 people in all. Ice-cold panic starts to take hold of the assembly. They raise their voices in applause, trying to outperform each other with professions of loyalty. They wipe crocodile tears from their eyes, lamenting this horrible plot, screaming out their undying devotion to Saddam Hussein. Long live Saddam, they say.

And here is a snippet of that actual audio. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Saddam, meanwhile, is drinking all of this in, chomping on his cigar like Tony Soprano. And after the performance is quiet down to a whimper, Hussein walks up to the podium and takes the mic. His heart is broken by these betrayals, he tells them. He can't believe that after all he's done for Iraq, after all his benevolence, after all they've been through together, his closest colleagues would betray him in this way.

It hurts him deeply, he says, but there is only one way to deal with traitors. And then he asks the assembly a rhetorical question. And how shall we treat these betrayers? You know the answer. Nothing less than the sword. Saddam lets that sink in, takes a long drag on his cigar, and says...

Anyone whose name I read must stand up and leave the room. Then he starts reading. Fahir Ahmed Amin, Ismail Ibrahim Al-Najjar, Bidan Fadl, Majid Abdel-Sattar, Salman Dawood Najris, Waleed Saleh Mohammed, Ghazi Ibrahim Ayyub, Ghassan Marhoon.

Like a deadly game of duck-duck-goose, Saddam calls out the names of the alleged conspirators in the assembly. And one by one, they are led away by armed guards. Within a matter of minutes, the room is filled with empty chairs and terrified survivors. Many of the accused men were surprised to hear their names called, which made sense because the truth was, there was no plot. There was no fifth column. It was all a fabrication, an

an excuse cooked up by Saddam to conveniently eradicated anyone who he deemed a threat. Anyone who'd stood up to him or challenged him so much as questioned the color of his tie. After a series of show trials, 21 of the condemned men were taken to the basement and shot. It was a page straight out of Joseph Stalin's playbook, but Hussein put his own cruel twist on the proceedings.

As Saeed K. Al-Burish describes, quote, "...the way the execution of his opponents among the party leadership was carried out is an original Saddam invention. The victims were taken to the basement of the building where the plot was announced and executed by their comrades, Saddam and his supporters in the RCC and the cabinet. Saddam gave every member of the ad hoc execution squad a handgun and asked them to participate in carrying out the hideous act."

Of course, he led the way. So all of his inner circle were implicated in an act of murder, which guaranteed their loyalty to Saddam. End quote. Within the party, these political killings were euphemistically called democratic executions. Democratic as in we elect to shoot you in the face. In the weeks to come, hundreds of other party members would follow those 21 men into the grave.

It was, Karshen Rautzy described, quote, the most brutal, far-reaching purge in his entire career. Yet still, there were visible cracks in Saddam's tough-guy veneer as a cold, calculating dictator. Saddam had actually been close with several of the executed men. These were guys that he'd worked with for years. He knew their wives, their kids, their families. And in his most private moments, the decision clearly weighed on his conscience.

According to a Lebanese journalist, detailed here in a biography of Saddam by Saeed K. Abarish, quote, "...the new president locked himself up in his bedroom and would not come out for two days. When he finally emerged, his eyes were so bloodshot and swollen that he could hardly open them, and he had difficulty speaking."

The part of himself that felt remorse and regret, that little boy he'd left behind in the countryside, could still occasionally slip through the totalitarian veil. But as Saddam went about ruling his new domain, there was no time for tears or weakness. According to Karsh and Rautsi, "...he headed a country with enormous oil riches. He commanded a rapidly expanding and modernizing army, and he wielded a fearsome control over his subjects. He could

He could boast of developing Iraq where health services and education were free and where basic foodstuffs were in good supply and low in price. And he was only 42 years old. Here was a man in his prime, full of ambitious plans and above all, grim determination to keep his hold on the levers of power at all costs. End quote.

But just as Saddam Hussein had finished cementing a new dynasty, something happened that would turn it all upside down, setting him on a collision course with a superpower.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

It's February 14th, 1945, Valentine's Day. We're in Egypt on the deck of an American battle cruiser anchored in the Suez Canal. The ship's name is the USS Quincy, and it has been polished to a supernova shine. The deck is spic and span and gleaming under the hot Egyptian sun. The U.S. Navy historically has always been an authority on the subject of spic and span, but today the boys in white put a little extra elbow grease in.

because they are about to receive two very important guests. Under a bright blue sky, two empty chairs have been placed on the deck. No one knows it yet, but the USS Quincy will be the site of one of the most important meetings of the 20th century. Eventually, a wheelchair is pushed out onto the deck. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has arrived.

In the closing months of a world war, the second in his lifetime, the President of the United States has traveled 13,482 miles to be here today. Across the world, war was raging. From the coral reefs of the Pacific to the snow-dappled forests of Germany, America's

American war machines crawled and soared and chugged into battle in service of the Allied cause. Tanks and planes and aircraft carriers, trucks and trains and submarines, and all of these machines, all of these tools that win wars, required two key ingredients. Men to use them and oil to fuel them. Of the first commodity, Roosevelt had no shortage. There were over 12 million American men and women in uniform in 1945.

It was the second ingredient, oil, that had brought FDR all the way to a secret meeting in Egypt. The Allied war machine would use 7 billion barrels of petroleum in 1945, and the democracies of the West would need a lot more of it, not only for this war, but for all the wars to come. And eventually, the second guest arrives at the USS Quincy. His name is Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud.

In the West, he is simply known as Ibn Saud. He is the king of Saudi Arabia, and consequently, he owns about 20% of the world's oil supply.

Over the next five hours, FDR and Ibn Saud hammered out a relationship that would define the foreign policy of both nations for the next 75 years. On the surface, it seemed like an odd match. Saudi Arabia and the United States had virtually no overlap in cultural or political values. One was a pluralistic democracy, the other was a theocratic monarchy. But they each had something the other wanted.

America wanted cheap access to Saudi oil, and Saudi Arabia wanted Uncle Sam's protection in

in an increasingly volatile region. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a talent that few politicians then and now seem to possess: the rare ability to think beyond his own lifespan. And in 1945, that lifespan was getting progressively shorter. At this meeting with Ibn Saud, FDR was already paralyzed from the waist down, and in a few weeks, he would be dead. But he knew that oil was going to be the lifeblood of any future superpower, and the Saudis were holding the spigot.

The geopolitical love affair that FDR and Ibn Saud kindled on Valentine's Day in 1945 would be reaffirmed by every Saudi king and every American president in the years since. Saudi Arabia, one historian noted, remains, quote, America's oldest ally in the Middle East. Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. ♪

And so, for the next three decades, America kept a watchful eye on the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Persian Gulf, that quote, imperial petrol station, as one historian described it.

The region could never be described as calm, but it was contained. Like an attentive gardener tending to a fragile plant, the United States government trimmed and snipped and pulled weeds when necessary. A coup here, an arms deal there, all the cloak-and-dagger theatrics that the CIA and other sinister acronyms excel at.

There was, of course, the occasional crisis, the odd war from time to time. The Soviets meddled and the Israelis blustered, but for the most part, the Persian Gulf remained aligned with American interest.

As long as the oil continued to flow, as long as the Saudis stayed fat and happy and rich, well, that was all that really mattered. But then, in 1979, the very same year Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq, something happened that flipped the chessboard upside down. The special report that we planned to bring you tonight was about domestic politics, the battle among the Democrats. But we think the crisis in Iran is more urgent right now than the campaign here at home.

Some 60 Americans, including our fellow citizen whom you just saw bound and blindfolded, are now beginning their sixth day of captivity inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It's Friday morning there now. But throughout this night in Washington, officials will continue their search for some way to negotiate the hostages' freedom. That search was not successful today.

The nation of Iran, one of America's closest allies in the Gulf, experienced a full-on storm-the-gates, burn-the-flags revolution. Two years earlier, President Jimmy Carter had lauded Iran as a, quote, "...island of tranquility in one of the more troubled areas of the world." But now, it was the wellspring of a fundamentalist Islamic regime that wanted to burn down America's carefully tended garden.

Less than five years after American helicopters had evacuated half of Saigon, yet another U.S. embassy had fallen. But this time, all the Americans did not get out. Islamic revolutionaries stormed the embassy and took 52 hostages. Back in the States, TV dinners went cold as Americans watched hooded captives paraded like trophies in Tehran. The disaster in Vietnam had been a black eye, but at least they'd seen it coming.

What happened in Iran was a humiliating sucker punch for Washington. Initially, there were hopes that the revolutionaries could be bargained with, but it soon became clear that the new Iranian regime wanted to do more than just redecorate the U.S. embassy. The clerics in Iran looked out on the modern Middle East and saw a sea of corruption, awash with Western money, foreign entanglements, and post-colonial decadence. Only the purifying flame of religion could burn the corruption out.

And the territorial aspirations of the Iranian government, articulated by its new leader Ayatollah Khomeini, were clear. Quote, We will export our revolution throughout the world until the calls, there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God, are echoed all over the world. End quote. And that revolution was going to start with Iran's next-door neighbors, oil-rich monarchies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait.

These kingdoms, the Iranian clerics declared, were fundamentally un-Islamic. Rich kids and Gucci sheiks paying lip service to God between trips to Vegas. It was a perversion of their faith that they called, quote, golden Islam. As the Ayatollah himself thundered, quote, Islam proclaims monarchy and hereditary succession wrong and invalid. Islam is fundamentally opposed to the whole notion of monarchy, end quote.

All of a sudden, phones were lighting up in Washington with some very nervous calls from the Gulf. A nightmare scenario started to cohere in the imagination that the revolution in Iran would spread like a contagion to neighboring countries, toppling the Western-friendly monarchies. In other words, threatening the oil. There was, however, one person in that rough neighborhood that was not going to take this Islamic revolution lying down.

Saddam Hussein, the newly minted dictator of Iraq. As you probably know, Iraq and Iran are next door neighbors. Separated by a single letter and a 900 mile border, the two nations have a very long history of bad blood.

dating all the way back to times when armies fought with chariots instead of tanks. American country singers may not know or care about the difference between Iraq and Iran, but the discrepancies between the two nations were very clear in 1979. Saddam wanted to lead the Arab world, when the mullahs in Tehran wanted to burn it down and rebuild from scratch. Unstoppable force meet immovable object. And in the

And in the Ayatollah's view, Saddam Hussein had no place in this new Islamic world order. He was just as bad, if not worse, than the Gucci sheiks in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. As Efrem Karsh writes, "Given Iraq's position as the largest and most powerful Arab state in the Gulf, it was viewed by the revolutionary regime as the main obstacle to Iran's quest for regional hegemony." In the words of one influential member of the Iranian leadership,

End quote. Having recently seized the presidency in a blood-soaked purge, Saddam Hussein was not about to bow his head and supplicate to a handful of upjumped clerics in Tehran. He had spent years maneuvering, murdering, planning, surviving. He'd killed friends to be where he was. End quote.

And now, when he'd finally settled into the big chair, when he'd finally gained control, when he'd finally become safe, the Iranian regime wanted to take it all away. So, long story short, the two nations went to war. Saddam, unsurprisingly, struck the first blow. On September 23rd, 1980, Iraq launched a massive offensive in

into Iran.

At a time when American teenagers were dancing to Thriller and hoarding quarters for Pac-Man, Iraqi and Iranian teenagers were shooting, hacking, and bombing each other in one of the nastiest conflicts to ever stay in a textbook. Saddam had initially envisioned a fast-moving lightning war that would be over before the Ayatollah could even put on his slippers. What he got instead, according to historian Saeed K. Abarish, was, quote, "...the longest organized war of the 20th century."

Saddam never did have a mind for military strategy. As a much younger and mustache-less man, he had failed the entrance exams to the Baghdad Military Academy, and over time, that chip on his shoulder became a lead weight. When he

When he finally did have an opportunity to move troops around on a map, he became an absolute control freak, turning the war effort into a micromanagerial hellscape. In short, Saddam had an iron-fisted monopoly on terrible decision making. But the Iraqi army did have something that Iran did not: rich and powerful benefactors.

The Gulf oil states, places like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, loaned Iraq billions and billions and billions of dollars in an effort to kneecap the revolutionary ambitions of the Ayatollah. For the oil sheiks, Saddam...

was the attack dog that would keep the mullahs safely outside the fence, a long-term investment to preserve their power and private jets. Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., the newly ascendant Reagan administration was also eager to thwart revolutionary Iran by any means necessary. As bearers of the torch that had been lit by FDR so many years ago, Reagan and co. were not about to let a fundamentalist regime in Tehran endanger the global gas pump.

And if that meant holding their noses and backing Saddam, the guy who'd ventilated his rivals in a basement a year earlier, well, that's just realpolitik. It was a classic case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Saddam Hussein had no love for the United States, of course. His conspiratorial mind found CIA plots in his morning coffee. But if the Western devils were willing to help him fight the zealots in Iran, then so be it.

As Karsh and Routzi wrote, quote, If Saddam's political survival was at stake, anything necessary to guarantee his well-being was permissible.

The Soviet Union, a long-time sponsor of Iraq, naturally protested this new partnership with the Americans, but Saddam basically laughed in their face. He didn't care about Cold War tribalism or team jerseys or who paid the bills. If the combat boot fits, wear it. As he told an incredulous Soviet foreign minister, "...I do not care where my weapons come from. What counts is that these weapons will serve my purposes."

And they most definitely did. The United States was willing to give generously, and Saddam received hungrily. As one historian put it, quote,

and the forward movement to Iraq of weapons systems provided to allies in the region, including Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. There were further symbolic actions taken by the Americans that might have lent comfort to Saddam in difficult times. In February 1982, for example, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the list of countries accused of supporting terrorism, a list upon which Iran sat very high." End quote.

Now, the US didn't want Saddam to lose the war against the Ayatollah, but they didn't exactly want him to win either. The ideal outcome was that both nations just crippled each other in an inconclusive war, preserving relative stability in the Gulf. This viewpoint was perhaps best articulated by Henry Kissinger, who once mumbled something to the effect of, quote, "...it's a pity both sides can't lose."

Let them fight. Well, Kissinger's words turned out to be oddly prophetic. Because in a way, both sides did lose. After eight years of gas attacks, trench warfare, and futile offensives that would make a World War I general blush, the Iran-Iraq war ended in a stalemate. According to one historian, quote, On July 18th, 1988, Khomeini, the Ayatollah,

accepted the UN Security Council's Resolution 598 to end the war. The borders of Iran and Iraq were largely unchanged, but their economies were shattered. An estimated 360,000 Iraqi and Iranian citizens had been killed and 700,000 more injured in a war that cost over $600 billion. But according to Saddam Hussein, he was victorious. End quote.

Saddam was never one to let a national disaster get in the way of a good victory parade. 3% of the Iraqi population was dead and the Ayatollah's regime was still intact in Tehran, but the streets of Baghdad were thrumming with some serious Times Square 1945 energy. As Karsh and Routzi write, quote,

The most extravagant demonstration of the alleged Iraqi victory was the imposing Arc de Triomphe which appeared in central Baghdad in the immediate wake of the war. It consists of two pairs of giant crossed swords held by huge bronze fists embedded in concrete. Not surprisingly, the sense of power and grandiosity embodied by the monument has been inextricably linked to Hussein. The fists holding the sabers were actually modeled on those of the Iraqi president.

But underneath the pomp and propaganda, Saddam Hussein was facing an unprecedented level of political danger. The most pressing issue was the financial hangover from the war. The country was essentially bankrupt. As Karshin Rautzi put it, "...Iraq had emerged from the war a crippled nation. The Iraqi economy was wrecked. Economic estimates put the cost of reconstruction at $230 billion."

End quote.

And not only were the bank accounts dry, but Saddam had racked up debts all over the globe. According to Saeed K. Abarish, quote, the financial losses were staggering. Iraqi reserves had disappeared. $35 billion was owed to the West, $11 billion to the USSR, and in addition to outright cash grants and gifts of oil produced in the neutral zone, more than $40 billion to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. End quote. End quote.

Throughout the 1980s, Saddam had been swiping his credit card at every embassy in town. Paying that money back, that was a problem for "future" Saddam. Well, by 1989, the future had finally arrived, and all those creditors were coming to collect. The oil states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait especially wanted their money back. But with Iraq's economy in tatters, Saddam had no way to pay them. Like a drunken online shopper waking up to an inbox full of Amazon receipts, the dictator was starting to sweat.

"The financial consequences of the Iran-Iraq War were undeniably dire, but the social impact was even more concerning. In the war against Tehran, Iraq had mobilized over a million men. Now there was no war to fight, no enemy to kill, no reason to have a million guys in uniform just standing around. An entire generation was being wasted," Karsh and Rautze write. "Hundreds of thousands of young conscripts who had been 18 when the war started were

were 26 by its end and still under arms. They had no private life, they could not study, they could not work, and could not get married. Now that the war had been "won", they began questioning the necessity of their continued mobilization." But demobilizing a massive army into a bankrupt country with a destitute economy and limited job prospects is a lot easier said than done. As Said K. Albarish describes,

A demobilization program which released 200,000 soldiers was halted when discharged men, desperate for jobs, started street brawls with Egyptian workers in which dozens died. End quote. And all these concerns did not just live in the abstract. Saddam was beginning to feel all this pressure in a very personal way. After all, the only thing more dangerous than an army at war is an army not at war, especially one you cannot afford to pay.

In the two years following the ceasefire with Iran, Saddam foiled no less than four assassination attempts, many of them originating in the ranks of his own army. Saddam was in trouble, and he knew it. If he didn't figure something out, and fast, it

it was going to be him looking up the barrel of a gun in some Baghdad basement. To borrow yet another line from one of my favorite writers, Terry Pratchett, quote, Always remember, the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

With the creditors calling and assassination plots sprouting like mushrooms, the old survival instincts reawakened in Saddam Hussein. Saddam had always viewed life through the cracked prism of gangster morality, and from that vantage point, the geopolitical arena wasn't all that dissimilar from the streets he'd cut his teeth on back in the day.

Strength and violence were the only thing people seemed to really respect, the only language they seemed to understand. And so in the spring of 1990, Saddam realized he was going to have to lean on some people. If he was going to get out of this jam alive, he was going to have to threaten, cajole, and intimidate the nations who were standing in the way of Iraq's return to prosperity. And at the very top of that unlucky list was Iraq's obstinate little neighbor to the south,

the very tiny, very wealthy, very well-connected emirate of Kuwait. Raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, George Herbert Walker Bush, do solemnly swear... I, George Herbert Walker Bush...

I solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God. Congratulations. Thank you.

It's January 20th, 1989. On the cusp of a brand new decade, the United States has a brand new president. As millions of people gather around their television sets, there is a sense of cautious optimism in the air.

For the last four decades and seven presidents, America's political reality has been defined by an ongoing rivalry with the Soviet Union. They were the ultimate enemy, just a press of a button away from bringing the world to a fiery finale. But as George Herbert Walker Bush put his hand on a Bible and stammered out his oath, the Cold War appeared to be ending. Not cooling off, not easing into a short-lived detente, but actually ending.

Every president since Eisenhower had been haunted by nightmares of launch codes and casualty figures and ringing red phones. But in 1989, the Soviet Union was unraveling, teetering like a punch-drunk prizefighter in the 12th round. Over the course of the next 18 months, the world watched a superpower implode. The Red Army was chased out of Afghanistan. The Berlin Wall was cracked apart by sledgehammers.

Pundits like Francis Fukuyama were writing articles with titles like The End of History, portending the ultimate and final triumph of liberal democracy. By late 1991, the Communist Party would be literally outlawed in Russia. The United States was the last superpower standing. It

It was a bizarre moment. Political theorists were so accustomed to what they called a bipolar status quo that even their terminology had to contort itself to accommodate the new situation. In this new unipolar world, they said, America was unchallenged, unfettered, and unmatched. A caretaker of the hard-won peace. But this new world order, as President George H.W. Bush would later call it, was about to be tested in

in the most serious way. And the epicenter of that challenge wasn't in Moscow, or Beijing, or Havana, or Hanoi. It was in a small patch of desert, slightly smaller than the state of New Jersey. An oil-rich emirate nestled on the Persian Gulf, a place called Kuwait. I think it might be helpful at this point to step back and draw ourselves a mental map. Mental

Mental maps are, of course, no substitute for actual maps, but it'll have to do. So close your eyes, unless you're driving, and picture the Arabian Peninsula in your head. And if you need help getting there, it's that massive chunk of desert to the east of Egypt that punches down into the Indian Ocean. Arabia is huge. 1.2 million square miles of rock, sand, and dunes. The

The lion's share of this aesthetically challenged landmass belongs to the House of Saud, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But if you were to hop in your car and drive along the northern coast of Saudi Arabia, eventually the signs would start saying Kuwait. That's K-U-W-A-I-T Kuwait. Kuwait sits right at the tip of the Persian Gulf, like a gold-plated barnacle on the landmass of Mesopotamia. To the immediate north is Iraq. To the east, across the Gulf, is Iran.

In a neighborhood of large, powerful countries, Kuwait was the little guy who somehow got a seat at the table. And like Iraq, Kuwait's borders were a result of the orgiastic map-making that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and it owed its continued independence to the protection and favor of Western democracies, first the UK, then America. But what Kuwait lacked in geographic mass, it more than made up for in financial clout.

It only takes about two and a half hours to drive across Kuwait, but underneath your wheels, deep beneath the ground, is a massive proportion of the world's supply of fossil fuels.

In 1990, Kuwait had the sixth largest oil reserves in the world. And these oil reserves, along with a dizzying portfolio of private investments around the globe, had made Kuwait fabulously wealthy. Or, to be more precise, had made the Kuwaiti ruling family fabulously wealthy. According to historian Dilip Hiro, quote, "...the Kuwaiti ruling family controlled directly or indirectly $160 billion."

Sometimes referred to as Kuwait Inc., the tiny emirate often seemed, quote, more like a multinational corporation than a sovereign country, according to a 1990 article in the Washington Post. From real estate in Singapore to dockyards in London to paper companies in Spain and engineering firms in California, the Kuwaitis had $100 billion in investments around the globe. Most of these investments had been pretty good bets. The Kuwaitis had a notoriously conservative financial philosophy, but

Even the Warren Buffets of the world occasionally make poor investments to come back to haunt them. And for Kuwait, that bad investment was Saddam Hussein. When the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979, the Kuwaitis were alarmed as anyone. The Ayatollah had a grand vision for the future, and the sheiks of Kuwait...

weren't in it. So when Saddam Hussein, the strong man to the north, rose to challenge Tehran, they were eager to bankroll him to the tune of 14 billion dollars. But eight years later, when the war finally wrapped up and the Kuwaitis held out their gold-plated palms, Saddam said no.

As it happens, trying to collect money from a man like Saddam Hussein is easier said than done. Back in Baghdad, Saddam was facing national bankruptcy, biannual assassination attempts, and a population that was starting to catch on to his bluster. He was simply not in a position to pay the money back. But he also wasn't entirely convinced that he should have to pay the money back. As the British academic Lawrence Friedman articulated Saddam's argument, quote,

The war had not been Iraq's private business, he told them, but rather a defense of the eastern flank of the Arab world against fundamentalist Islam. While the Gulf states were not asked to pay with rivers of blood for the protection of their own security, since Iraq did that on their behalf, they could not be paid for it.

They could not expect to take a "free ride" on Iraq's heroic struggle." "We saved your asses," Saddam was saying to Kuwait. "For eight years we fought and killed and bombed and destroyed and now, before the bodies of our young men are cold, you're calling in the debt?" Saddam's perspective, unsurprisingly, was shared by many of the Iraqi people. As one university student in Baghdad seethed, "The Kuwaitis boast of their aid to Iraq.

But it was Iraq that defended their thrones and wealth with blood. We sacrificed our brothers, fathers, and sons to let them enjoy life." At first glance, the Kuwaitis did not have a way to pressure Saddam or punish him for his refusal to pay his debts. They didn't have an army, and they didn't have an arsenal, at least not one that could hold a candle to Iraq's million-man war machine.

But Kuwait and its fellow Gulf states did have one weapon to put the squeeze on Iraq's dictator. Something more powerful than any tank or shell or scud or mine. The oil industry, write Karsh and Rautsy, accounted for 95% of Iraq's income. Oil revenues were the slender black thread tethering Iraq to financial liquidity. So, the sheiks decided to cut the thread.

As historian Dilip Hiro describes, quote, Saddam did not take this well. Even a $1 reduction in the price of oil was a body blow to Iraq's economy.

As Hussein himself explained, quote, for every single dollar drop in the price of a barrel of oil, our loss amounts to $1 billion a year, end quote. And Saddam's anger was more or less legitimate. By flooding the market, Kuwait was flagrantly exceeding the production quotas that the region's oil-rich nations had all agreed to. As members of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, they were able to

they had certain limits on how much oil they could produce and export as a means of price control. Iraq, of course, regularly cheated on its quotas too, but that was beside the point. To flood the market now.

When Iraq so desperately needed to recover from the war with Iran, that was nothing short of betrayal. The Iraqis were dangling over a financial cliff, and in Saddam's view, Kuwait was stomping on their fingers. There were, of course, other reasons behind Kuwait's overproduction that didn't involve Saddam Hussein or Iraq.

Cheaper oil helped lubricate connections with the West and grease the wheels of diplomacy, but in Saddam's estimation of events, Kuwait and the UAE and the Saudis and all the rest were deliberately trying to destroy him. At a summit in May of 1990, the Iraqi dictator equated it with an act of war and all but begged the Kuwaitis to stop the overproduction.

"War is fought with soldiers, and much harm is done by explosions, killing, and coup attempts. But it is also done by economic means. Therefore, we would ask our brothers, who do not mean to wage war on Iraq, this is in fact a kind of war against Iraq. Were it possible, we would have endured. But I believe that all our brothers are fully aware of our situation. We have reached a point where we can no longer withstand pressure.

The Kuwaitis were unmoved. They did not respond to his appeal. And in Hussein's spacious Baghdad palace, the walls were beginning to close in.

Saddam, one historian wrote, felt like he was being choked. And it's at this point in the story where a switch appears to flip in the dictator's mind. His rhetoric sheds its conciliatory tone and becomes increasingly hostile. From this point on, Saddam's speeches about Kuwait could strip paint from a tank. The Kuwaitis, Saddam sneered, had quote, stabbed Iraq in the back with a poison dagger. In the

And the temperature only continued to rise from there. Saddam starts dusting off old territorial disputes with Kuwait, dating back to the sepia-toned days of the Ottoman Empire. He accuses Kuwait of literally stealing petroleum from Iraq's oil fields through the use of a technique called "slant drilling." And carrying this grievance further, he demands that Kuwait pay Iraq $2.4 billion to compensate for the theft.

But most alarming of all, Saddam begins moving the Iraqi army towards the border with Kuwait. 30,000 troops, with more arriving every day. Nervous minds in the region may have recalled something Saddam had said earlier that year, quote, Let the Gulf regimes know that if they do not give this money to me, I will know how to get it.

But as Iraqi tanks and troops and artillery inched closer to the border like a steel glacier, everyone from Langley to Riyadh thought the embattled Iraqi dictator was just posturing, rattling his saber like a homeless man rattles his tin cup, as one American diplomat stationed in the region at the time remembered, quote, all the Arabs were telling us this was a bluff. The Kuwaitis themselves were especially unconcerned, arrogant even, as Karsh and Rautzi write, quote, the

End quote.

In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that by the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein had pretty much already decided that he was going to invade Kuwait. And to be fair, it was an incredibly attractive option at a time when Saddam didn't have many other options. As Karsh and Routzi describe, quote, "...the temptations of the military option must have seemed irresistible to the hard-pressed president. By adding Kuwait's fabulous wealth to the depleted Iraqi treasury, Hussein hoped to slash Iraq's foreign debt."

and launched the ambitious reconstruction programs he had promised his people in the wake of the war with Iran. And given Iraq's historic claim to Kuwait, its occupation could enhance Hussein's national prestige by portraying him as the liberator of usurped Iraqi lands. Furthermore, the capture of Kuwait could improve Iraq's access to the Gulf and give it a decisive say in the world oil market. In short, in one stroke, Hussein's position would be permanently secured. End quote.

It was a clean, quick solution to all his problems. But in Saddam's cold calculus, there was one conspicuously unknown variable, a question

that he needed answered. If he invaded Kuwait, what would the United States do? And in mid-1990, as Iraqi tanks crawled closer to Kuwait's border, the answer to that question was a bit murky, even to people in Washington, D.C. The American government had always been a little confused about its feelings towards Saddam Hussein. He was not a close ally or even a reliable partner, but he was someone who, if controlled,

could help maintain U.S. interest in the Persian Gulf. Sure, he was a murderous autocrat, but maybe he could change. Maybe, with the right mix of carrot and stick, America could fashion him into something useful. And that room temperature position was tepidly articulated in the pages of National Security Directive 26, a presidential order released by George H.W. Bush in October of 1989. Quote,

And that was just a fancy way of saying, let's be friends. The diplomatic euphemism was that America had a tilt towards Iraq. But whatever you call it, when America is your friend, it is usually a friend with benefits. As Saeed K. Al-Burish writes, quote,

In 1989, the United States supplied Iraq with helicopter engines, vacuum pumps for a nuclear plant, sophisticated communications equipment, computers, bacteria strains, and hundreds of tons of unrefined sarin. That's what you need to make nerve gas.

But not everybody in Washington was so keen on getting cozy with Iraq's notorious dictator. The White House may have been insisting on a position of cooperation with Saddam, but representatives in the U.S. Congress were calling for sanctions on Iraq, citing an entire litany of offenses, including, but not limited to, Hussein's hostile remarks toward Israel, his execution of a British Iranian journalist, and his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988. We'll talk a little bit more about that next episode.

Essentially, there was a huge disconnect between American public opinion on Iraq and the executive branch's position on Iraq. And to make matters even more confusing, the American intelligence community seemed to have its own separate position on Saddam, allegedly conducting backdoor talks with the Kuwaitis and the Saudis on how best to destabilize Saddam's position.

As Saeed K. Al-Burish claims in his book, quote, the CIA was conspiring against Saddam at the same time that Bush was doing everything possible to use him as a guarantor of the American position in the Gulf, end quote.

But regardless of what was happening behind closed doors, from Iraq's viewpoint, the United States was talking out of both sides of its mouth, giving with one hand, taking with the other. It was a foreign policy bordering on incoherence. As historians Majid Khadouri and Edmund Garib write, "...small wonder the Iraqi leaders were often puzzled and bewildered as to what precisely the American objectives toward Iraq were."

So before he did anything drastic to Kuwait, before he pulled the trigger, Saddam wanted to clear all of this confusion up. He wanted to know exactly

democracy, what America's position was. He had a strong hunch, however, that the American government, schizophrenic and compartmentalized as it was, would not come rushing to the defense of the Kuwaitis. Any potential rebuke would come in the form of a stern press conference, not a tomahawk missile. Saddam, of course, was no expert on the West or the messy dynamics of democracy, but he was a student of history.

He knew that images of helicopters over Saigon were still branded into the corneas of many Americans. The United States just didn't have the stomach for a real war anymore. No one wanted another Vietnam. And so, on July 25th, 1990, Saddam Hussein summoned the American ambassador to Iraq to his office to get some answers.

What followed, historian Rick Atkinson writes, was, quote, a tale of mutual misunderstanding and blurred vision. It was to become, according to Saeed K. Abarish, one of the most controversial diplomatic encounters of all time.

It was a Wednesday, and when Ambassador April Glaspie received a phone call inviting her to the Iraqi Foreign Office for a quick conversation, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. After 15 years as an American Foreign Service officer in the Middle East, there wasn't much that could surprise Glaspie at this point. Fluent in Arabic, she knew the region like the back of her hand, with a resume that included postings in Kuwait, Syria, Tunisia, and Egypt. Those had not been easy gigs.

and she had the gray streaks in her brown hair to prove it. Since 1988, she'd been in one of the toughest postings of all, American Ambassador to Iraq. It was no small feat. April Glaspie was the first woman to be given an American Ambassador position in the Middle East. When she got the call on July 25th, Glaspie thought she was going to go meet with a mid-level Iraqi diplomat, just a normal meet-and-greet. But when she arrived at the foreign office, a car was waiting for her.

She stepped inside, the door closed, and she was whisked away. Buildings passed and minutes elapsed, and eventually the car pulled to a stop. Then Glaspy looked through the window and saw the presidential palace. She was not going to be meeting with a mid-level diplomat. She was going to be speaking with Saddam Hussein. Glaspy had never met the Iraqi president before, and as she sat across from him in a meeting room, it must have been a surreal sight.

Saddam was wearing his classic costume, the olive fatigues, golden epaulets, and all the ostentatious razzle-dazzle. The 48-year-old April Glaspie, by contrast, had her graying brown hair pulled back in a long ponytail. Visually, they were an odd pair. She looked like an art teacher, he looked like a Party City villain.

Then they got down to business. After a few minutes of empty pleasantries, the conversation quickly turned serious. Saddam detailed the economic peril Iraq was facing, a quote, disaster, he called it. It was all Kuwait's fault, he said. They were putting him in a very difficult position. Glaspy responded, quote, I know you need funds. We understand that.

And our opinion is that you should have the option to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflict, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." The long view of history has been relatively gentle with Glaspy, but in the months to come, that last sentence would come back to haunt her. The conversation eventually migrated to the 30,000-man elephant in the room: the Iraqi troops massing along the border with Kuwait. Glaspy continued,

Quote,

Saddam responded evasively, "...it is natural for you, as a superpower, to be concerned. We want to find a just solution, but at the same time, we want the others to know that our patience is running out."

No one can ever really know what kinds of thoughts were going through Saddam's head in that moment, but the bottom line is he did not walk away from that two-hour meeting with the feeling that he should not invade Kuwait. April Glaspie insisted that the U.S. would defend its vital interests in the region. Saddam assured Glaspie that he would pursue peaceful and diplomatic solutions to his differences with Kuwait, but in reality, he had already made his decision. As Karsh and Routzi describe, quote,

If there remained any doubts in his mind after the meeting concerning U.S. neutrality, they were probably dispelled three days later by a personal message from President Bush, which, apart from describing the, quote, use of force or the threat of using force as, quote, unacceptable, expressed his keen interest in improving relations with Baghdad. Apparently confident of American neutrality, Hussein proceeded to the last stage of his plan.

One week later, on the morning of August 1st, 1990, President George H.W. Bush was in bed, reading a newspaper. Nothing but, quote, doom and gloom, he confided to his diary later that morning. It was a relatively uneventful day, filled with meetings, a brief escape to the driving range, and a doctor's appointment. At about 8.20 p.m. Eastern Time, Bush's National Security Advisor burst into the room. "'Mr. President,' he said."

It looks very bad. Iraq may be about to invade Kuwait. Over the next several hours, the situation began to come into focus. At dawn, Kuwait City had woken up to the sounds of war.

As military historian Jim Corrigan writes, "...helicopters descended on the city like locusts, their beating blades announcing the invasion. They landed near government buildings and other key facilities, and from each chopper sprang Iraqi special forces. On the beaches, where pastel hotel lights bathed the sand, boatloads of commandos came ashore." The Iraqi army, the fourth largest military force in the world, had invaded Kuwait.

In the coming months, many angry eyes would turn on the ill-fated ambassador, April Glaspie. Her statement to Saddam that the U.S. had, quote, no opinion on Iraq's disagreements with Kuwait would be characterized as a green light to a warmongering dictator. Pundits and partisans called her feckless, accommodationist, and an appeaser. Some even went so far as to question the wisdom of placing a woman at such a prominent post in the Middle East, a region not exactly renowned for its gender equality.

But at the end of the day, Glaspie had merely parroted the established position of the Bush administration. After all the double talk and double dealing,

it fell on her shoulders to articulate America's disjointed stance on Saddam's ambitions. And that message carried all the weight and power that a bundle of bureaucratic euphemisms typically does. Even Saddam's foreign minister admitted, years later, that, quote, she didn't say anything extraordinary beyond what any professional diplomat would say, without previous instructions from his government. But of all the takes on the controversial Glaspie-Saddam meeting…

I think Saeed K. Abarish puts it best. Quote, Glaspy's statement did not give Saddam a green light to invade Kuwait. It just confirmed that the light was already green. To wrap up this episode, I want to close things with some of Glaspy's testimony to Congress in 1991. Next episode, the real war will begin, and we'll see what happens when a superpower gets its groove back. This has been Conflicted. I'll see you next time. So...

If there is something that we could have done, I admit I haven't thought of it and I've given it a great deal of thought. Our best chance was to tell him, draw a line in the sand. We did. And he walked right over it into defeat for himself and his country. Do you feel you told him as forcefully as possible...

that we would use every bit of our influence and force to prevent him from moving against any other nation in the Gulf. I certainly can't say, Congressman Gilman, that I said we would use everything in our arsenal, so to speak. I wouldn't do that. I used precisely the words that I gave to you. I am absolutely confident that he understood what I was saying.

And those instructions were to you that we would defend our vital interests in the Gulf? We would support the sovereignty and integrity of the Gulf countries. We would maintain freedom of navigation in the Gulf, the movement of oil through the Gulf. It's an inclusive list.

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