Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nearly everyone is worried that a prime victim of the crisis is the Western-Arab coalition mustered in 1991 to combat Saddam. Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Qaysi chortled to TIME, "Where is it now? I don't see any coalition." In Washington last week, CIA Director John Deutch told Congress he believed Iraq's political position in the region had improved. He also found it "a little bit shocking" that for the first time there was initially "no support for U.S. air strikes." Yet after a whirlwind trip around the alliance, Secretary of Defense William Perry declared...
Vigorous diplomacy was required to shore up allied support for U.S. actions. The most egregious snub seemed to come from Kuwait, the very nation the coalition rescued from Saddam's grasp, when the U.S. Administration's plan to deploy an added 3,500 Americans was publicly put on hold for a day. But officials admit the show of pique was Washington's fault: an army officer misread an order to prepare to deploy as the final go-ahead, prompting the Pentagon to announce the troops were going before Perry could seek permission from Kuwait. U.S. diplomats scrambled to repair...
...bigger debate was whether what Saddam had done warranted Washington's response. "A Western whack on an Arab state, however unsavory, causes twitchiness," says an official in Kuwait, "and if the reason is not immediately apparent, the twitchiness increases." To calm the twitch, Perry spent three days in five Arab and Middle Eastern capitals. Perry's argument, according to a Western official in Kuwait: "Saddam showed his capacity to do reasonably complicated military operations effectively in a short time, and if he got away with such actions in the north, he would be emboldened to try the same where...
That case was intuitively apparent in Kuwait, where hundreds of stagnant black lakes of wasted crude oil still cover miles of desert, bearing permanent witness to the threat from Iraq. Kuwait's government, says a Western official, "always asks why the U.S. can't do more against Saddam--though they know the policy the U.S. is pursuing is the only practical...
Farther afield and five years after the war, other coalition members watch Iraq through a more complex lens. Gratitude for defeating Saddam back then is tempered today by new interests and demands. Turkey's Islamist government is keen to revive relations with its old trading partner. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are mindful of growing fundamentalist and dissident oppositions that demand Muslim solidarity above all. Frustration over the lack of peace progress colors the reaction elsewhere in the Arab world. Fearing the impact of a real rift, Kuwaiti officials fanned out to make sure the rest of the gulf understood their...