Originally posted by Titan
Many years ago, we helped Hussein fight a war against the Soviets or someone like that (or was that Afghanistan?) and we trained Husseins troops and provided him with armament. We created this monster and we realized that he became a threat now. According to my last years history teacher, Hussein called us up to ask for permission to invade Kuwait and we said yes to give the US an excuse to go after him. We did and since then, we\'ve been trying to kill the monster.
Just to clarify things a bit,
the story goes like this;
it all started with the islamic revolution in iran, the then American government saw this as a threat as they feared the revolution would spread thru out the reigon (which btw would never had happened since not all neighbouring countries liked Irans government and their way of ruling), and that it would put the oil resources in the reigon out of their reach.
now at this time saddam was ruling Iraq and and it was no big secret that he hated the Iranians and their regime, now as i remember saddam wanted to put down this revolution and wanted to remove Iran from its position as the dominant state at that time, and since he thought that iranians were badly equipped and lacked leadership he thought that a war with with Iran would be easy, so he launched his attack on Iran, now the americans saw this as their big chance to eliminate the Iranian threat, so they helped the Iraqis by supplying them with intelligence, weapons (including bio/chem weapons) and when iraq used these weapons the american govenment turned a blind eye.
oh.. one more thing about the war, France was involved in it too they supplied the iraqi\'s with weapons (i guess thats why France is against the war now), and i even read somewhere that Israel supplied Iran with weapons. also the country which gained the most from this war was not America, but RUSSIA as they sold a huge shit load of weapons to Iran, iraq, egypt, syria, jordan......now coming to the second gulf war, iraq claimed that Kuwait was stealing oil from them (Kuwait denies this claim) and thats why it invaded Kuwait, now personally i find this reason idiotic (for lack of a better word), iraq could have easily solved this problem by bringing it to the "Arab council" and many other coalitions which present at that time, instead the iraqis invaded kuwait (and if the invasion was coz kuwait stole oil, why did the iraqis keep on going south, and even according to some reports enter saudi territory).
now america saw themselves facing a new threat to the oil resources in the reigon their old buddy saddam has become their enemy, now the americans knew that the armies in the middle-east were not as well equipped as the iraqis and that they wouldnt stand a chance against them (which is why the U.S. government saw no other way than to get directly involved) the only that could face iraq were jordan, syria, egypt & Israel but all did nothing (the reason for this as some say is that all these countries were in kahoots with iraq with the exception of Israel).
::Long story short saddam wanted total control over the reigon but instead got his ass whooped by the Americans.::
btw their is much much more to these wars than what i have written.
*disclaimer- all this info was obtained from my personal experiences when asking various people (some who were in the military at that time, my kuwaiti and iranian friends) and thru alot of article reading, i make no assurances that this post is an exact account of what happened**Damn thats a whole lot of writing
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