“Ever since the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the whole world has thought that [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein invaded it simply for oil and money,” Abdel-Ameer Al-Majar, a political analyst, told Al-Ahram Weekly.

But “there must be a new reading of this event that changed the shape of the region, since in the light of subsequent data it is difficult to limit ourselves to reading it in terms of what has been said about the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait,” he added.

Al-Majar said that international and regional influences played a major role in its manufacture, development, and production in the form that everyone saw in August 1990.

 “It is time for the world to know the extent of the injustices that have been inflicted on the Iraqi people as a result of international policies that were implemented through some countries in the region, including Kuwait,” he said.

He added that the Iraqi people, who paid the price for those policies, have found themselves paying many times over as a result of the repercussions of the event.

He said that his point of view, perhaps that of most Iraqis today who are aware of what happened to them over more than three decades and also to the region, is that “the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 revealed the hidden motives behind what happened [in 1990] and the strategic goals for it.”

Naji Sabri Al-Hadithi, foreign minister of Iraq until April 2003, also revealed in an interview with the Iraqi satellite TV channel Al-Tagheir on 16 July this year some of the actions taken by the US towards this end.

He said that after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in August 1988, the US Congress decided to impose an embargo on Iraq, notably halting a $1 billion agricultural loan on the pretext that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

 In February 1990, Congress, under pressure from the Zionist lobby in the US, imposed an economic blockade on Iraq and stopped all forms of economic cooperation. In April 1990, Israel began to threaten to attack Iraq, meaning that Iraq had to respond to those threats if Israel attacked it.

 However, the Western media and politicians began spreading what seemed to be an Iraqi threat without mentioning the threats against Iraq by Israel, he said.

In April 1990, according to Al-Hadithi, US Senators Bob Dole and Howard Berman visited Iraq and met Saddam Hussein in Mosul to discuss Iraqi threats against Israel. Berman began working on a strict unilateral blockade against Iraq that was then signed by then US president George Bush Sr.

Al-Hadithi said there was a premeditated US intention to destroy Iraq. He said that Iraq responded to UN Security Council Resolution 660 of 2 August 1990 by beginning to withdraw from Kuwait on 3 August, as Abdel-Ameer Al-Anbari, Iraq’s representative to the UN in New York, informed the Security Council at the time.

 Lt. General Ayad Al-Rawi, then in Kuwait, confirmed the withdrawal.

However, Al-Hadithi said that the US representative to the Security Council, despite Iraq’s official notification of its withdrawal and commitment to Resolution 660, insisted on a draft resolution imposing a total blockade on Iraq.

The worst resolution in the history of UN was then issued, UN Security Council Resolution 661, that banned food stuffs, medicines, and humanitarian supplies from being sent to Iraq and banned any kind of trade with Iraq.

The resolution was described by a US State Department spokesman as the most comprehensive  and hardest in history.

Daniel Chardell, a postdoctoral fellow in the Brady-Johnson Programme in Grand Strategy at Yale University in the US, wrote an article titled “The Origins of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Reconsidered” in the Texas National Security Review in summer 2023.

In it, he said that “for over 30 years, policymakers and scholars have taken for granted that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait simply to seize its oil. That narrative misleadingly suggests that the Iraqi invasion happened to coincide with, but was unrelated to, the dawn of the post-Cold War era. In fact, Saddam’s decision-making was inextricable from his interpretation of the end of the Cold War.”

“In late 1989 and early 1990, he posited that Soviet retrenchment portended a five-year period of American unipolarity, after which Japan and Germany would restore a global balance of power. Until that new equilibrium emerged, Saddam genuinely feared that the United States and Israel would use their unchecked power to destabilise his regime in pursuit of their hegemony over the Middle East.”

“In the summer of 1990, Kuwait’s oil overproduction persuaded the Iraqi leadership that the Kuwaiti royal family was complicit in the US-led plot that they believed was already in full swing.”

Such considerations must be taken into account when explaining the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

“As an eyewitness, Kuwait’s insistence on recovering its debts astonished me” at the time, commented political science professor Jinan Ali to the Weekly, adding that for the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War the Gulf states, especially Kuwait, supported the war. There were editorials in their newspapers praising the Iraqi role in protecting them.

But Ali does not only blame Kuwait for what happened. He also blames Saddam.

Saddam failed to read the US policy of the time that targeted controlling the Middle East during and after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and its allies. He failed again when he thought that he could defeat the Americans in the war, Ali said.

Saddam did not listen to anybody but himself, with the results that we are seeing now, he said. Any new reading to reveal the truth of the events then will not repeat history, he said, adding that we can only hope that the US goals have ended in the region, even if this is a vain wish.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly