George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

mother's love. But to do something for the Anglo-Saxons in their hour of need, George
would have to be selfless and staunch and not think of himself, just as mother Dorothy
had always demanded: he would have to risk his entire political career by deploying US
forces in overwhelming strength to the Gulf. This might have been the underlying
emotional content of Thatcher's argument.
On a more explicit level, Thatcher also possessed an array of potent arguments. Back in
1982, she might have recalled, she had fallen in the polls and was being written off for a
second term as a result of her dismal economic performance. But then the Argentinians
seized the Malvinas, and she, Thatcher, acting in defiance of her entire cabinet and of
much of British public opinion, had sent the fleet into the desperate gamble of the
Malvinas war. The British had reconquered the islands, and the resultant wave of
jingoism and racist chauvinism had permitted Thatcher to consolidate her regime until the
present day. Thatcher knew about the "no new taxes" controversy and the Neil Bush
affair, but all of that would be quickly suppressed and forgotten once the regiments began
to march off to the Saudi front. For Bush, this would have been a compelling package.
As far as Saddam Hussein was concerned, Thatcher's argument is known to have been
built around the ominous warning, "He won't stop!" Her message was that MI-6 and the
rest of the fabled British intelligence apparatus had concluded that Saddam Hussein's
goal would be an immediate military invasion and occupation of the immense Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia, with its sensitive Moslem holy places, its trackless deserts and its
warlike Bedouins. Since Thatcher was familar with Bush's racist contempt for Arabs and
other dark-skinned peoples, which she emphatically shared, she would also have laid
great stress on the figure of Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed to Anglo-Saxon
interests. The Tavistock profile would have included how threatened Bush felt in his
psycho-sexual impotence by tough customers like Saddam, whom nobody had ever
referred to as little Lord Fauntleroy.
At this moment in the Gulf crisis, the only competent political-military estimate of Iraqi
intentions was that Saddam Hussein had no intent of going beyond Kuwait, a territory to
which Baghdad had a long-standing claim, arguing that the British Empire had illegally
established its secret protectorate over the southern part of the Ottoman Empire's
province of Basra in 1899. This estimate that Iraq had no desire to become embroiled
with Saudi Arabia was repeated during the first week of the crisis by such qualified
experts as former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Aikens, and by the prominent
French military leader Gen. Lacaze. Even General Schwarzkopf though it highly unlikely
that Saddam would move against Saudi Arabia.
In her public remarks in Aspen, Thatcher began the new phase in the racist demonization
of Saddam Hussein by calling his actions "intolerable" in a way that Syrian and Israeli
occupations of other countries' lands seemingly were not. She asserted that "a collective
and effective will of the nations belonging to the UN" would be necessary to deal with
the crisis. Thatcher's travelling entourage from the Foreign Office had come equipped
with a strategy to press for mandatory economic sanctions and possible mandatory