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To start from the very beginning, one should take into consideration how everything commenced when Iraq invaded Kuwait within 3 days in August 1991. Saddam Hussein, the leader, or rather dictator of Iraq, justified that blitz attack with religious motives, although the economic aspect of his justification was apparent. He accused Kuwait, Saudi-Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of conspiring with western-orientated Israel and the USA. He used "(...) die tiefe Wut der breiten islamischen Massen gegen die Moderne, gegen einen sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Wandel (...)" as an instrument to focus this "(...) Haß auf den Westen (...)"2 with all its imperialism, "(...) Kapitalismus und Kommunismus, Demokratie und Aufklärung (...)"2.
Picture of the location of the Rumaila oilfield and the whole battlefield itself (from: Schwarzkopf, p. 395)
But in the same breath he also gave the real reason why he condemned his neighbour states in such a hard way. "Er warf ihnen vor, dem Irak einen giftigen Dolch [emphasized by the author] in den Rücken gestoßen zu haben, indem sie die von der OPEC festgelegten Förderquoten überschritten, und damit den Ölpreis nach unten getrieben hätten." For a better understanding, one must know that Saddam Hussein has always been a fighter for a higher oil price to amortize the debts he got out of the eight-year war against Iran, which amounted to some estimated $80 million. Therefore he always postulated a raising price per barrel of oil but stood fairly alone with this demand. As now the rest of the oil exporting Gulf states even wanted to force the price to go down, that was too much for Saddam Hussein. He proclaimed the "Holy War" against those "(...) derer sich Satan vom Scheitel bis zur Sohle bemächtigt hat."
But nobody really expected Iraq to attack Kuwait after it had supported Saddam Hussein with several billions of dollars in the war against Iran. The general opinion was that he could be kept under control with money but now, besides his disapproval of Kuwait`s conspiration with the West and its subversiveness of the "Arabian Brotherhood", he accused Kuwait of stealing oil from the Rumaila oilfield, which is located between both countries and could be tapped by both Iraq and Kuwait. To be honest, it has to be admitted here that Kuwait actually did a lot of oil thievery from the Iraqi part of the oilfield, which of course did not give Saddam Hussein the right of fighting a crime with another crime. The line "Saddam rasselt bloß mit dem Säbel, damit er bei der Debatte um die Ölpreise gegen Kuwait die besseren Karten hat" should be the best expression for the attitude of most countries towards Iraq at that time.
10 years ago, nobody could have imagined Saddam Hussein saying that he was "(...) von Allah auserwählt, die Führung der muslimischen Gemeinschaft zu übernehmen" , as he felt before the beginning of the Gulf war in 1991 and maybe still feels today. 10 years ago, Saddam Hussein rather seemed to be one of the best representatives of Western ideologies in the Gulf region, when he fought the "original" Gulf war from 1980 till 1988 against Iran`s Chomeini.
During that war, the whole world built up Saddam Hussein`s weaponry by exporting either weapons or raw material for the manufacturing of military equipment to Iraq.
At that time, a lot of Western and Western-orientated governments throughout the world thought Chomeini to be a dangerous and dreadful menace to the world. That reason has been sufficient enough for many countries to encourage their companies to do business with Iraq in order to keep it "as a necessary counterbalance to fundamentalist Iran" .
But instead of using all the weapons given to him to keep Iran down as he was supposed to, Saddam Hussein did not "consume" all of his imports. In fact, he just used up a small part of them and kept the rest; enabling him to play a game of chess with the rest of the world and even bring it to a stalemate by occupying Kuwait without any direct consequences apart from the UN intervention of course, which was carried out by the allies.
The main problem of that time, however, seemed to be ignorance: "Diese Ignoranz ermöglichte es, daß der Westen während des Iran-Irak-Kriegs den orientalischen Despoten Saddam Hussein massiv mit Waffen und Finanzhilfe unterstützte, ohne die geringste Ahnung zu haben, daß man damit zugleich den Aufbau einer Republik der Angst förderte."
As far as the other part of Iraq`s military arsenal is concerned, it was also built up by a number of countries all over the world throughout the years. Before and during the first Gulf war, in the late 70`s and early and middle 80`s, the main strategy of the weapon exporting countries like Germany, France, Italy, the former Soviet Union and the USA was to help Iraq against "dangerous" Iran. But after 1988, the year of the peace treaty between Iraq and Iran, there was no such justification anymore and it became clear that the Western World simply wanted to increase its gains by supplying Saddam Hussein with the latest inventions on the military market.
Germany played a important but still not decisive role in that war game called "Make-Quick-Money-By-Providing-A-Weak-Country-With-Important-Military-Equipment" because other countries also contributed to Iraq`s war machine, some even to a higher extent than Germany. "(..) France, Italy, Britain and other Western nations flooded Iraq with $13.4 billion worth of military equipment between 1982 and 1989."
Although new exporting restrictions had been enacted by many governments to stop the breaking of the embargo put on the imports to Iraq by the United Nations to prevent the risk of a military and economic growing of Iraq, only a few companies obeyed those new rules. The majority continued to send its "war toys" to Saddam Hussein and to get its money out of those trades. Together with their governments, they simply closed their eyes whenever there was a sign of Iraq getting too powerful in relation to the other Gulf states. Companies, under the protection of their governments because of economic relations between both of them, were only interested in making money by sending Western technology to Saddam Hussein and it was quite a lot of money they made.
The former Soviet Union, for example, provided Iraq with Scud missiles and since it was a short-range missile, the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) contributed the technology which made the missiles reach even more distant targets like Israel and Saudi-Arabia, two of Iraq`s main enemies. A lot of nuclear, biological and chemical warfare technology was built up by West Germany, whereas France supplied Saddam Hussein with Antiship and Antitank missiles. Italy also participated in building up the nuclear and chemical war machine of Iraq, while Great Britain constructed hangars for fighter planes.
This list could be continued with many other countries but the enumration of only these few shows that a lot of companies just intended to use "the silence before the storm" to sell their military goods before it was too late.
The embargo as well as the new laws were mainly ineffective because in the US, for example, some "(...) companies received licenses to export more than $1.5 billion in dual-use goods (military and commercial) to Iraq" and elsewhere governments, in spite of all restrictions, even seemed to encourage their companies to do business with Saddam Hussein, as German`s Otto Graf Lambsdorff, then leader of the Liberals and concerned with economic matters, put it: "Raketen kann man bekanntlich für friedliche Zwecke einsetzen, man kann mit ihnen zum Beispiel Satelitten nach oben bringen."
Other companies simply exported their goods to countries not being concerned with the embargo or any restictives and from there on to Iraq to cover up the way the weapons took.
Saddam Hussein for his part was able to pay for all the equipment because he had built up his own "(...) verdecktes, weitverzweigtes Finanzimperium" and put aside at least $10 billion, most of which he got from holding back 5 percent of the proceeds of the sale of Iraqi oil for himself. He was said to have had (and probably still has) accounts all over the world and to hold stocks of different companies. It is obvious that this could only have worked by operating under cover and commissioning mysterious or sometimes even fake firms, which means that they were not really existing to buy or sell stocks. Those obscure companies, if they were real at all, in most cases were almost totally controlled by Saddam Hussein`s intimate friends or relatives.
His strategy after having been armed by and at the same time against the Western world was to occupy Kuwait and keep it as the 19th province of Iraq. With that step he intended to change "(...) die Kuwaitkrise in einen arabisch-israelischen Krieg (...)" and further into an international conflict. While he had to give up his first two aims, mainly "(...) dank der israelischen Zurückhaltung (...)"16, he had achieved the third one but not to the extent he had intended to. It is true, indeed, that in the end it actually had turned out to be a multinational force fighting against him but firstly, he lost the war and secondly, it did not turn out to be a kind of third World War East versus West, as he had planned it. His fourth aim however, namely to banish all Western and therefore "evil" influence from the Middle East, had not only been missed but even been changed into exactly the opposite. Instead of getting rid of it, he had even contributed to strengthen this "evil" influence by giving the UN and the allies a reason to set up military bases in the Gulf and therefore to spread their "evil" influence more than ever.
But that "bad" influence was a vital necessity for Kuwait after Iraq`s occupation. Kuwait, small and weak as it was, was suppressed by its new adversary and could have done nothing but wait for help from an outside nation.
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