Military History | How To Make War | Wars Around the World Rules of Use How to Behave on an Internet Forum
Iraq Discussion Board
   Return to Topic Page
Subject: Securing access to the oil reserves on the Arabian Peninsula
jonodavidson    9/4/2009 9:05:22 AM
We can dismiss the reasons we have been given for invading Iraq as BS. In July of 1990, Saddam Hussein demanded some exhorbitant amount of money in the tens of billions of dollars from the emir of Kuwait and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. He claimed that he had been guarding them from Iranian aggression since ascending the Presidency in Iraq in 1979. He demanded that they help him to foot the bill, and he threatened to invade their countries if they did not pay him in full. He went to both countries to speak with the king and emir in person. Then he went to Iran and negotiated an unconditional cease-fire that has remained in effect to this day. On August 2, 1990, his Republican Guard forces invaded Kuwait sweeping through the country and began massing on the border of Saudi Arabia. America responded to the threat to the Saudi oil fields by immediately deploying air and naval forces to the area. Kuwait was the number one oil exporting nation in the world at the time, Saudi Arabia was number two, and Iraq was number three. President Bush did not want Hussein to control the oil reserves of the three largest exporters of oil in the world. American forces were prepared to help defend the Saudis from an impending invasion that never occurred. Negotiations between Bush and Fahd initially resulted in a couple hundred thousand American ground forces being deployed to Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield. As Iraqi forces failed to initiate an attack against Saudi Arabia, American military forces increased their deployment to over half a million in preparation for Operation Desert Storm. Our purpose was clear. We were going to secure access to the oil reserves on the Arabian Peninsula for the whole world, and we requested the whole world to help foot the bill. We were told that Iraq presented a threat to our national security having ties to Alqueda, weapons of mass destruction, and delivery systems for their deployment. We were told that Hussein had intentions to arm Al Queda terrorists with weapons of mass destruction in order to target our country for attack. Now we know that was BS. Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor delivery systems for their deployment. Hussein also had no ties to Al Queda. We are told that we had bad intel, but we made the right choice. Having invaded Iraq and provided for our national security by ensuring that a threat that did not exist does not exist, now we are proclaiming that we are responsible for establishing a democratic government over the region for the good of their people. We imagine that this government will some day provide stability for the entire region all on its own. If we consider the purpose that we established for our forces in Desert Shield and Storm to be the same purpose we had for invading Iraq, then our military presence in Iraq begins to make sense. Hussein represented the greatest threat to the world's access to the oil reserves on the Arabian Peninsula, and we removed him from power in Iraq to eliminate that threat. Now we must maintain a military presence in Iraq in order to replace the military buffer between Iran and the Arab states that Saddam Hussein had previously maintained for us free of charge. We will maintain a military presence in Iraq until the oil reserves on the peninsula are depleted, even if, like Dick Cheney hinted, it takes a hundred years. In retrospect, this whole situation would have been better served if we had simply paid Saddam Hussein the money he had demanded from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait ourselves. That would have costed less than a hundred billion dollars. Which is quite a bit cheaper than the trillions of dollars we have spent fighting over the issue.
 
Quote    Reply

Show Only Poster Name and Title     Newest to Oldest



 Latest
 News
 
 Most
 Read
 
 Most
 Commented
 Hot
 Topics