Word: kuwait
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Apparently, Iraq's General Abdul Karim Kassem had thought he was only offering an Arab pleasantry when he announced his intent to "liberate" oil-rich Kuwait. He was amazed when alarm bells went off all over the Middle East. At Sheik Abdullah as Salim as Sabah's cry for help, Britain in a matter of hours poured 3,000 crack troops, with their tanks and troop carriers, into Kuwait from bases in Kenya, Aden and Bahrein. A British aircraft carrier and a fleet of warships appeared offshore; another flotilla steamed toward the area from the Mediterranean. After...
Storm & Drink. The troops swiftly dug in along the scorched ridge of sand that separates Iraq from Kuwait. But the Iraqis made not a move. Faced by a no-show foe, the troopers concentrated on survival in the searing heat (120° in the shade) and blinding sandstorms. Cracked one bare-chested trooper: "To qualify as a royal marine, all you have to do is be able to drink 19 Cokes daily." British and Kuwaiti officers shuttled companionably between neon-bright Kuwait City and the front in Sheik-supplied Cadillacs and Chryslers. Declared Brigadier General Derek Horsford, Britain...
Most Arab governments were still annoyed that Kassem had brought on "imperialist" intervention. Nasser allowed a British aircraft carrier and five other warships to pass through the Suez Canal en route to Kuwait without a word of protest, but finally decided he disliked the British more than Kassem. "Kassem is only a bad cold, but British imperialism is a cancer," wrote Nasser's favorite journalist. The U.A.R. forthwith sponsored a Security Council resolution urging an immediate British withdrawal from Kuwait. With support only from Russia and Ceylon, the resolution was defeated...
...Both Britain and Iraq had their minds on oil. Connecticut-sized Kuwait sits on a sea of it - a quarter of the world's proven reserves and half again the U.S. reserves - though the British did not know that back in 1899, when the ruling Sheik asked them to take Kuwait under their protective wing. The motive at the time was to stop the pro-German Ottoman Empire from expanding southward along the Gulf. But in 1938, the Kuwait Oil Co. (jointly owned by Gulf Oil and British Petroleum), drilling down through Kuwait's sands, hit what proved...
...worst had come to pass: six surveyors, after 260 measurements, gravely announced that there was a 2-in. sag and assorted undulations on a wicket at hallowed Lord's Cricket Ground in London. The sober London Daily Telegraph splashed the unsettling news on Page One, easing Kuwait into the background, while the London Daily Express blared: BY GAD, SIR, IT'S FULL or BUMPS...