Invading Saudi Arabia

SOMEBODY SAID, BRILLIANTLY "Most of the nine-eleven criminals were Saudi. Why don't we invade them?" She may have intended the question to be rhetorical, and sarcastic. These days, one never knows. Sometimes I leap before I look, so I responded: "We did, in 1991". Like Pilate did to Jesus after he asked "what is truth", I did not wait for her response to me, if any. In early 1991, the United States landed a half million member military force in Saudi Arabia under General Schwarzkopf, and it stayed there for a long time. The "invade Saudi Arabia" advocate probably did not know that, might have been a youngster or unborn in 1991. I'll never know. Had she known, she might have argued that Operation "Desert Storm" was no invasion of Saudi Arabia, they the Americans were "invited" and "welcomed", that it fired nary a shot at the host country in anger, and that it left in peace. All that is true, but not exactly, not the whole story. American forces were neither invited nor welcomed by the Saudis. The United States cajoled, coerced, and bought its way in, as usual, wanting to use the kingdom as a military base for staging its forthcomeing war against Iraq. I had several friends who were in the infantry, and were stationed in Saudi Araba douing Desert Storm, and who sat in the desert for month after interminable month, bored terribly, waiting for orders...or for anything. They became angry, with much impatience, boredom, and confusion. They wrote me letters saying things like: "If George and Barbara Bush want this war so badly, why don't they get their asses over here and fight it themselves?" A valid point, perhaps, but you can almost hear the anger, despair, boredom, and impatience. I still wish I had seved the letters, instead of burning them out of respect for my friends, not wanting to make them look bad in retrospect. My infantry friends were unamimous in their assessment. The Saudi people hated them, hated the American invaders, hated the American's sinful, debauched lifestyle, with their drinking, smoking, lust, cursing, and so forth. The Saudi people very much regarded the half million member American army camped out on Saudi soil as an invading force, whether or not Americans thirty years later do. In a very real sense, considering the extreme reluctance of the Saudi government to allow it, (for America's second war against Iraq, a decade later, they flatly refused the same offer) and considering the attitude of the Saudi people about it, it was an invasion, no doubt about it. Those unafraid of the truth about this period in American and world history might consider googling the name "April Glaspie". Scroll down to where it says "conversation with Saddam". She was the American ambassador to Saddam Hussein in 1991. Sitting in Saddam's palace, she looked him in the eye and flatly told him that the United States did not care whether he invaded and conquered Kuwait or not, so, he smiled at her, and later, one week later, he invaded and conquered Kuwait. The rest, as we like to say, is history. Carrot and stick. The depths of depraved diplomatic deception. George Bush forty one, luring Saddam into a bloody war with a false promise, as a pretext to get the American military heavily involved in the Middle East, for...oil? Yes, for oil. And, for eternal shame.