What If April Glaspie Had Never Given Saddam The Green Light?

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Here's a link to the transcript:

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So journalists supposedly had this in hand in 1990? Yet it is coming to light now? Color me dubious, but I guess I'd have to hear the tapes, and see video of the Ambassador-Journalists exchange for myself.

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So journalists supposedly had this in hand in 1990? Yet it is coming to light now? Color me dubious, but I guess I'd have to hear the tapes, and see video of the Ambassador-Journalists exchange for myself.

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Yeah. I guess nothing is entirely outside the realm of possibility, but this seems pretty implausible. I gave the issue a quick look and there appears to be several versions of the transcript for the conversation in question. Maybe someone with more familiarity with the issue can help to flesh it out.

Better website that adds more context to the time period and these types of discussions:

LINK

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Yet it is coming to light now?

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I heard about this in the 90's. I think you are a few years late finding this out.

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Yet it is coming to light now?

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No. Its old news. Its a Bratwurst sitting in a glass boot of Octoberfest beer in a Bavarian village.


WTF. Seriously?

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I remember this coming to light not too long after the Kuwait invasion.

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That's when I remember hearing about it too, and both Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf backed up this version of events in their autobiographies. I thought that some of the youngers posters may not have heard about this, and it looks like I was right.

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Back to the OP, would Saddam still be in power? Would Iraq still be a U.S. ally? Would 9/11 have happened? After all, the Iraq sanctions and the prescence of American troops in Saudi Arabia were the primary reasons Osama bin Laden gave for attacking the U.S.

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Too many variables to game that one, Track. There's a decent chance that even if we were able to dissuade him in 1990, he would have fricked up enough at some point in the 90s to justify some kind of intervention. Dude was a bit of a loose cannon with delusions of grandeur. Interestingly, he had been relatively quiet for a while by the time we did get rid of him.

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He wasn't so loose that he didn't have sense enough to seek permission before invading Kuwait, and remember, the U.S. was egging him on when he attacked Iran. I also think Saddam may have been emboldened by Reagan's willingness to use his veto at the U.N. Security Council to protect him on a few occasions, such as when he used chemical weapons on Iran and the Kurds. EDIT: I also wonder if the fact that Saddam and Glaspie had to rely on a translator to communicate might have contributed to this, because languages have a lot of subtleties and no two languages translate perfectly from one to the other.

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I honestly don't have a lot of background on what kind of support Saddam enjoyed within our government following the Iran-Iraq war. I know we still considered him "one of ours", but I'm of the mind that we were pretty wary of him by the time Bush took office in 1989. I don't know if the Bush admin would have protected him. And the fact that we so strongly and unequivocally condemned the invasion into Kuwait just makes the language in some of the transcripts seem curious. Some read as though Glaspie sort of subtly said "we're watching your build-up along the border, but it's not really and American issue (concern?)). Others kind of tepidly do indicate that we are concerned by the developments. You've obviously looked into this more than I have, but I am interested in it now. Have to do some digging, though.

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No, this has been well known for over 20 years.

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Hardly.

Trust me, if folks here are hearing it for the first time, it was far from """well-known""".

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Saddam became an evil dictator the moment he shunned the Petro Dollar and failed to bow to the advances of the international banking cabal.

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You really beat that drum, don't you?