The real issue in Kuwait was not Kuwait but Saudi Arabia. It is fairly clear that Saddam's original plan was not to stop at the borders of Kuwait but to keep going on down the coast of the Persian Gulf to get the really big pools of oil such as al-Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, then under the control of a reactionary power in cahoots with the United States. It is unsurprising that the US leadership reacted to this threat. The best way to deal with it was of course to repel the Iraqis from Kuwait.
There is also, of course, the weird business noted by somebody of US diplomat April Glaspie more or less giving a wink and a nod at Saddam when he first made noises about his intentions. Hard to separate the incompetence out from the plain old imperialism on that one. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Sunday, September 19, 1999 11:00 AM Subject: East Timor, Kosovo, and Kuwait
>[bounced because of an attachment - that infernal winmail.dat]
>
>From: "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu>
>Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 06:26:56 -0400
>
>To avoid a bit of the beating the dead horse thing, I will try to be as
>unpolemical as possible in this post and hope for the same in the
responses.
>
>With East Timor, Kosovo and Kuwait, we have three key situations of a
larger
>local power seeking to dominate a smaller region with aspirations of
>independence, followed by some sort of multilateral intervention with US
>involvement. Now, there are folks out there who have supported
>interventions in all three cases - although only a marginal number would
>identify as leftists. There are also folks who opposed all interventions,
>even sanctions, in any of these cases - a few stray pacificists and maybe
>Pat Buchanan.
>
>Most self-identified leftists have opposed at least one of these
>interventions (most predominantly Iraq) and support some form of
>intervention against Indonesia over East Timor, if only economic sanctions
>against Indonesia (similar sanctions against Iraq being deemed forms of
mass
>murder by many of those same leftists).
>
>I frankly see large similarities in Kosovo and East Timor, where many of
>the leftists who condemned any NATO intervention as inherently unjust are
>denouncing FAILURE of the US and other Western countries to strongly
>intervene as a terrible thing. That some urge economic sanctions only goes
>so far as a difference, since economic sanctions against Iraq are denounced
>as imperialistic.
>
>Now, of course there are many views and ways to make consistent stories out
>of these differing positions, but it would ease polemics if folks could
>admit that the distinctions are confusing and often complicated, so we
could
>all be a little less quick to denounce as a betrayal either calls for
>intervention or a reluctance to support intervention in specific cases.
>
>But in the name of focusing discussion, I made up the following table
>comparing some aspects where the interventions in question differ, with
some
>hope that might explain some of the differences in reaction.
>
>Note: "Local Power" means Iraq, Indonesia and/or the Serbian government
>respectively, "population" refers to population in Kuwait, East Timor,
>and/or Kosovo
>
>
> KUWAIT EAST TIMOR KOSOVO
>Historical claim of distinct
>society Low Medium High
>
>Contempory Desire of
>population for Independence * High High
>
>Military Brutality of Local
>Power Medium Extreme Medium to High
> (disputed)
>
>Cultural Repression by Local
>Power ? High High
>
>Ties of population to US
>activists None-Low High Low
>
>Socialist tradition in Local
>Power High Low High
>
>Self-interest of US in
>Intervention High Low Low-to-medium
>(disputed)
>
>* Note that in Iraq, Kuwaiti CITIZENS had strong desire for independence,
>but many of the much larger category of residents such as Palestinians
>welcomed the invasion.
>
>? Little time to see what kind of cultural repression Iraq might have
>imposed.
>
>Kuwait has obvious failings as a sympathetic symbol of independence, from
>its exploitation of its internal foreign workers, its artificial history
and
>role in promoting inequality of resources within the region, and the
>relatively low level of violence by Iraq when it conquered the country
>(despite the propaganda). With the naked self-interest of the US
>intervention, the general left revulsion against the Gulf War is pretty
>clear.
>
>In some areas, on the other hand, Kosovo has a greater claim to
>independence, since the Kosovar Albanians have a long history as a distinct
>society, while the East Timorese like the Kuwaitis are more a product of
>artificial colonial divisions of the map than more historic divisions
>(although the high levels of Catholicism in East Timor give it a distinct
>cast from Muslim-dominated Indonesia). On the other hand, the extremity
of
>Indonesian violence there gives Kosovo one of the strongest bases for
>claiming "irreconcilable differences" with a home country.
>
>But I think it is also fair to highlight issues such as the "ties to US
>activists" as explaining some of the differences in attitudes towards the
>two areas. Given Chomsky's writings, the East Timorese figures of
>resistance are much more in left consciousness than folks like Rugova ever
>were, despite the fact that the Kosovar nonviolent resistance in the 90s
has
>much that was admirable. The US and other left activists' sympathy for
the
>socialist tradition of the Serb regime versus the distaste for the more
>capitalist Indonesian regime also play a role in this reaction, despite the
>fact that for the Timorese and Kosovars, the official ideology of the Local
>Power mattered little for the repressive police apparatus that really
>governed their lives.
>
>I would be interested to hear more general comments on these distinctions
>and if there are other categories worth comparing the three interventions?
>
>--Nathan Newman
>
>