In a TV documentary broadcast by ATV on Sunday 9 September, Nicholas Owen claimed that Kuwait was formerly part of Iraq. This is not the case. Iraq itself was the creation of the colonial carve-up after the downfall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, put together from three distinct Ottoman provinces. It did not exist as a country before that time. Kuwait, on the other hand was a separate principality (a trading and pearl-fishing community) since before the time of the Ottoman Empire. During the Ottoman period, Kuwait was subordinated by the Turks to the province of Basra for administrative purposes, though remaining a principality. This in no sense constitutes its having been ‘part of Iraq’.
Owen also stated that Saddam had the support of millions of Iraqis. Under totalitarian regimes, such statements are hrd to verify, and it is not even clear what ‘support’ means in those circumstances. However, the Egyptian press reported in the first week after the seizure of Kuwait that Saddam had ordered the execution of some 120 senior Iraqi officers for opposing the invasion. According to the report, these executions had been carried out. If Saddam can confront the level of opposition which this event implies even within the army, what is one to suppose may be the view of the man in the Baghdad omnibus who knows that he is being denied a better standard of living by a government which squanders its very large oil revenues on maintaining the world’s fourth largest army, and whose cousins may very likely have been killed in a brutal and costly war with Iran the ‘irrevocable’ territorial purposes of which has now been revoked?
Tim Moore