George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

encouraged by the British. Later, the British secretly encouraged Chinese intervention
into that same war. The Argentinian seizure of the Malvinas Islands during 1982 was
evidently preceeded by demonstrations of lethargic disinterest in the fate of these islands
by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran in
1980 had been encouraged by US and British assurances that the Teheran government
was collapsing and incapable of resistance.
As we have seen, the Pentagon knew of Iraqi troops massing on the border with Kuwait
as for July 16-17. These troop concentrations were announced in the US press only on
July 24, when the Washington Post reported that "Iraq has moved nearly 30,000 elite
army troops to its border with Kuwait and the Bush administration put US warships in the
Persian Gulf on alert as a dispute between the two gulf nations over oil production quotas
intensified, US officials and Arab diplomats said yesterday." The Iraqis had invited a
group of western military attaches to travel by road from Kuwait City to Baghdad, during
which time the western officers counted some 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles moving south with
a further reinforcement of two divisions of the Republican Guards. [fn 30]
If Kuwait had been so vital to the security of the United States and the west, then it is
clear that at any time between July 17 and August 1 --and that is to say during a period of
almost two weeks-- Bush could have issued a warning to Iraq to stay out of Kuwait,
backing it up with some blood-curdling threats and serious, high-profile military
demonstrations. Instead, Bush maintained a studied public silence on the situation and
allowed his ambassador to convey a message to Saddam Hussein that was wholly
misleading, but wholly coherent with the hypothesis of a British plan to sucker Saddam
into war.
On July 24, press releases from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon
were balanced between support for the "moderate" Kuwaitis and Saudis on the one hand,
and encouragement for an Arab-mediated peaceful settlement. Margaret Tutwiler at the
State Department stressed that the United States had no committment to defend Kuwait:
We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait and there are no special defense or
security committments to Kuwait. We also remain strongly committed to supporting the
individual and collective self-defense of our friends in the gulf, with whom we have deep
and long-standing ties.
An anonymous US military official quoted by the Washington Post added that if Iraq
seized a small amount of Kuwaiti territory as a means of gaining negotiating leverage in
OPEC, "the United States probably would not directly challenge the move, but would
join with all Arab governments in denouncing it and putting pressure on Iraq to back
down." Two US KC-135 air tankers were about to carry out refueling exercises with the
United Arab Emirates Air Force, it was announced, and the six ships of the US Joint Task
Force Middle East based in the Persian Gulf were deployed Monday July 23 for
"communications support" for this air exercise, according to the Pentagon. Two of these
US ships were in the northern Gulf, near the coasts of Iraq and Kuwait. [fn 31] But there
was nothing blood-curdling about any of this, and Bush's personal silence was the most