No not at all. I just think we did not send him the right signals from the very beginning. If we had maybe all this could have been avoided. See below:
As April Glaspie rushed to her meeting with Saddam on July 25, 1990 (she had gotten only two hours' notice), the July 18th "talking points" from Washington, now declassified, governed her discussions. "The United States takes no position on the substance of the bilateral issues concerning Iraq and Kuwait," it directed. The day before the snap meeting, in fact, Glaspie got yet another secret cable from the State Department. "The U.S. is concerned about the hostile implications of recent Iraq statements directed against Iraq's neighbors," it read. Yet it repeated the now standard "we take no position" line, merely imploring Iraq to be mindful of the fact that use of force was contrary to the United Nations charter.
Were threats against Iraq emanating from other quarters? On July 19, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was quoted publicly as saying that the U.S. defense commitment extended to Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq war was still valid. Later that day Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said that Cheney's remarks had been taken "with some degree of liberty." Five days later, when Secretary of the Navy Lawrence Garrett told a congressional committee that "our ships in the Persian Gulf were at a "heightened state of vigilance," his spokesman said that he had made a mistake.
The day before Glaspie's meeting, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler said "we do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait." Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on July 30 that the United States was not obligated to come to the military aid of Kuwait if Iraqi forces crossed the border.
Did the U.S. military leadership think an Iraqi invasion likely? Conventional wisdom right to the 11th hour was that if the Iraqis moved south, they would perhaps take the Bubiyan and Warbah islands off the Iraqi coast, and possibly the southeastern sector of the Rumaylah oil fields, which extended into Kuwait.
Up to the very last minute, while analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA argued that a full-scale invasion seemed imminent, U.S. military leaders didn't believe it. Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Gen. Colin Powell: "They're not going to invade. This is a shakedown."
On July 31, Chairman Powell chaired a meeting in the "tank," the Joint Staff's secure conference room, to discuss the situation in Iraq. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the region, had flown up from his Tampa headquarters to give his assessment of the situation. DIA hard-liners said there was little doubt that an attack into Kuwait was imminent. Schwarzkopf didn't agree. Like Kelly, he thought Saddam was bluffing, seeking to extort concessions from Kuwait. A senior Kuwaiti military official had told Schwarzkopf that they weren't even going to go on alert so as to not "play Saddam's game and give him an excuse to attack."
According to an Air Force oral history, "Heart of the Storm," when the meeting broke up, "The mood around the table was `Ho hum, thanks for the briefing, Norm. We'll try to attend your retirement next summer.' Seven thousand miles away in sand and darkness, Iraqi tankers were fueling for the push into Kuwait. When dawn broke, they would be rolling south."
William Hung is to American Idol as Sarah Palin is to the Vice Presidency
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