Word: kuwait
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Happy anniversary, drivers! Just a year after Iraqi troops conquered Kuwait and gasoline prices began spiking, a new study by oil historian Daniel Yergin says pretax, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices are at their lowest point since 1947. Even with recent increases in federal and state fuel taxes, gasoline costs Americans 44% less in real terms than it did in 1980, and, surprisingly, 24% less than it did in the halcyon days of 1960, before anyone had heard of Saddam Hussein or OPEC. Of course, what consumers pay at the pump does not factor in the real environmental and military costs...
Iraq has ample money to spend on medical needs, if Saddam so chooses. By Washington's reckoning, Saddam has access to as much as $1 billion in foreign accounts. Baghdad is also believed to have $2 billion worth of stockpiled gold and an additional $1 billion worth looted from Kuwait's Central Bank. "Saddam has enough for vital imports at the moment, if he were to define vital imports as including food and medicine," says Patrick Clawson, an expert on the Iraqi economy and editor of the Philadelphia-based foreign-policy journal Orbis. "Instead, he's buying luxury goods...
Last year at this time the world worried about German unification, a U.S. appeals court overturned Oliver North's Iran-contra conviction, and Pete Rose was headed for jail. Saddam Hussein was ranting about Kuwait's excessive oil production, but few believed even he would choose the sword so soon after the end of Iraq's eight-year conflict with Iran. In fact, Saddam's bellicosity ("O God almighty, be witness that we have warned them") was barely noted. The big news from the Middle East was the possibility that Syria's Hafez Assad might finally be serious about negotiating...
...what of Kuwait, the city-state built on oil and ease in whose name the entire enterprise was waged? The government that failed to anticipate the war now lacks the leadership to manage the peace. Outside the oil sector, there is little if any sense of emergency. most ministries are only skeletally staffed, and the country would probably still lack power and water if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had not overseen their restoration -- illustrating a dependency of little consequence to most Kuwaitis, who rarely lift a finger except to point it. Those who had hoped...
Next time he has a quiet moment at 35,000 ft., he should put aside his briefing books long enough to sample a spate of recent articles and speeches that all say the same thing: Come home, America. Now that the Red Menace is history and the Emir of Kuwait is back on his throne, many of Bush's constituents would like him to do more to save their schools, hospitals, banks, jobs and pensions...