The Threatening Storm [antikvár]

PREFACE The first time I really smacked my head against U.S. policy toward Iraq was in July 1990. At that time, I was the junior military analyst on the IranIraq account at the Central Intelligence Agency. Ever since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, my colleagues and I had had a series of scrapes with the policy makers on the other side of the Potomac. We kept raising Saddam's increasing military capabilities, his bellicose rhetoric, and his pursuit of all manner of weapons of mass destruction, and the State Department in particular kept accusing us of exaggerating the threat. But in July 1990, everything came to a head. On July 17, U.S. satellites began to detect the lead elements of the Hammurabi Republican Guard Armored Division-the most powerful division in all of Iraq-arriving near Safwan, just north of Iraq's bordér with Kuwait. The previous day, Iraq's then foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, had accused Kuwait of trying to undermine the Iraqi economy by producing oil beyond its OPEC quota, and that same day, Saddam had himself delivered a speech attacking Kuwait for waging economic warfare against Iraq. Over the next couple of days the Iraqis continued their rhetorical attacks while information continued to mount that Baghdad was moving the entire Republican Guard-120,000 men and almost 1,000 tanks, the elite of the Iraqi armed forces-to the bordér with Kuwait in an unprecedented deployment.