Admiral Beez
Banned
Surely this has been done, so I welcome folks to post the links and shut me down here. But I find it fascinating the POD of keeping US forces out of the middle east via keeping Saddam out of Kuwait.
Reading that Wikipedia article the below caught my eye...April Glaspie (or whatever her name was). Late July 1990 she made a goof that convinced Saddam America wouldn't react if he invaded Kuwait. So he did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie
Kenneth Pollack
When has America demonstrated in its history that it would acquiesce to any conquest? Yes it's an attack on a pseudo-protectorate not USA soil, but surely there was some historian in Japan shaking his head at this....of the Brookings Institution, writing in the New York Times on February 21, 2003, disagreed with the views (previously cited) of observers like Edward Mortimer:
“ In fact, all the evidence indicates the opposite: Saddam Hussein believed it was highly likely that the United States would try to liberate Kuwait but convinced himself that we would send only lightly armed, rapidly deployable forces that would be quickly destroyed by his 120,000-man Republican Guard. After this, he assumed, Washington would acquiesce to his conquest.
When has America demonstrated in its history that it would acquiesce to any conquest? Yes it's an attack on a pseudo-protectorate not USA soil, but surely there was some historian in Japan shaking his head at this....
When has America demonstrated in its history that it would acquiesce to any conquest? Yes it's an attack on a pseudo-protectorate not USA soil, but surely there was some historian in Japan shaking his head at this....
Not only that, but Saddam should have been well aware that, if his prediction had come true and the lightly armed American forces had been overrun by the Republican Guard, that would require the United States to send in an overwhelming force and crush the Iraqi military like a pea under a sledgehammer, not the other way around.