Bush refused to check Iraqi agression before August (1st Gulf War)

Inquiring minds want to know!

The world will never know whether decisive American diplomacy and military action before Aug. 2 could have prevented Hussein from invading Kuwait. What is known is that American diplomacy during the first six months of 1990, as documented by Waas, reveals an administration eager to accommodate Saddam. The low points of this diplomacy follow:

--On April 25, in testimony before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Secretary of State James Baker declined to criticize Saddam's threat that he would use chemical weapons to deter nuclear attack.

--On April 26, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly, before a House foreign affairs subcommittee attended by an Iraqi embassy officer, excused Saddam's threats to Israel as mere rhetoric.

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1991/02/02-08-91tdc/02-08-91dops-column-01.asp

It is now more than fifteen years since that fateful meeting on July 25, 1990 between then-US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie and President Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi leader interpreted as a green light from Washington for his invasion of Kuwait eight days later.

The US State Department, which is said to have placed a gag order on Glaspie in August 1990 prohibiting her from talking to the media about what had transpired at that meeting, is apparently still keeping her under wraps despite the fact that she retired from the American Foreign Service in 2002. .

In all the years since her meeting with Saddam Hussein, Glaspie has never spoken about it to the media, never appeared as a guest on a TV talk show, never written an article or a book about her time as the US’s top diplomat in Baghdad. The question is: why? What has she got to hide?

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/dec2005-daily/25-12-2005/world/w2.htm