[This is a presentation (slightly revised) that the Expansionist Party of the United States ("XP") prepared to suggest to the Government of Iraq the kinds of information it needed to put before the American people after its takeover of Kuwait but before the Gulf "War" (amBush) started, to explain why Iraq 'invaded' Kuwait and to appeal for understanding. The Government of Iraq did not, at the time, care to make any such plea for understanding, which might even have turned to U.S. popular support for its retaking of its lost province of Kuwait. Now Iraq faces violence from the United States Government again, and really does need to make points like these about its stance, lest more Iraqis die than the quarter million who have already died at the hands of vicious American politicians in the service of Zionism. This presentation was an enclosure to its companion piece, a letter to then-President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.]  [Home] [End]

  [c. 6,200 words, 11 illustrations]

The Historical Basis
for Our Claim to Kuwait

  Sargon of Akkad, 2300 B.C.This ancient sculpture
   immortalizes the first Iraqi to create an empire that
   included Kuwait — 4,300 years ago.

George Bush has attacked Iraq as a barbarous state and implied that Kuwait, by contrast, was much more civilized. Nothing could be further from the truth. We won't trouble you with an exhaustive history of Iraq, just enough to demonstrate that it is Iraq, not Kuwait, that is civilized, and to prove that Iraq's claim to Kuwait is ironclad. As you will see, the history of the United States is a mere snap of the fingers as against that of Iraq.  Located at the crossroads of three continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and having nothing in the way of significant geographical barriers against invasion, Iraq has been part of many different countries, some based on Iraq, some elsewhere.

But throughout this long and complicated history, one thing emerges clearly: Kuwait has always been part of Iraq. Check the maps below.

"Iraq's history reaches back to the very origins of civilization, for it was here in the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that the world's first urban, literate civilization was born."

— Encyclopaedia Britannica

"The Cradle of Civilization".  Iraq is the modern name for the bulk of Mesopotamia, which Western historians agree is the oldest civilization on Earth. Mesopotamia is a Greek term that means "the land between the rivers" Tigris and Euphrates, at the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent, a great arc of farmable land surrounded by deserts, stretching from the Nile up thru Palestine and Syria, and down the valley of Mesopotamia. The two great rivers (Tigris, 1,150 miles long; Euphrates, 1,700) water a region where intense agriculture made possible by irrigation gave rise to the world's first cities, in the part of southern Iraq known as Sumer. The very first entry under "Daily Life" in The Timetables of History, in the box dated "-5000 to -4001", says "Earliest cities in Mesopotamia (carbon-test dated)." The first three entries under "Literature, Theater" all relate to Iraq. Two tell of Iraq's greatest contribution to world culture: "Sumerian writing, done on clay tablets, shows about 2,000 pictographic signs" (4000 to 3501 B.C.); and "Sumerian wedge-shaped (cuneiform) writing, the earliest known" (3500 to 3001 B.C.). Yes, writing, which fairly defines "civilization", was invented in Iraq. From there it spread west to Egypt and Canaan (Palestine), then thru Phoenicia (northern Canaan), into the Greek and eventually Roman alphabets. Sumerian writing even went the same direction as modern Western languages read, horizontally, from left to right.

Civilization: "the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained"

— Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

Mesopotamia was the site of the world's first empire, created by a king of the Sumerian city Uruk, whose conquests stretched from Eridu and Ur, two cities near the ancient shoreline of the Persian Gulf, up the two rivers and across to the Mediterranean. (The ancient shoreline of the Persian Gulf was probably about 150 miles farther north than it is today, but nobody knows exactly where. Everyone does seem to agree, however, that the southern shore of Kuwait Bay was pretty much as it is today. The maps below use the modern coastline. To the extent that any part of northern Kuwait was undersea in ancient times, it is literally the land of Iraq, washed a grain at a time from the hills and valleys of the interior to the shores of the Gulf by the rains of Iraq, and even of southern Turkey, in the great rivers of Iraq. Every year the Persian Gulf retreats a bit as nature makes Iraq lower but larger.)

"The Sumerians invented the potter's wheel and were among the first people to brew beer and make glass. Their system of counting in units of 60 is the basis of the 360-degree circle and the 60-minute hour."

— World Book Encyclopedia

   Empire of Agade, 2300 B.C.

Kuwait Enters Iraq, 2300 B.C. The first empire builder in history was defeated by the second, Sargon, a great King of Akkad (central Iraq) who united the entire region from Kuwait up the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and across Syria to the Mediterranean. Sargon's empire fell to a people called the Gutians, from the mountains east of the Tigris, who maintained its substantial unity for a century until they were displaced by the kings of Ur, who also kept most of the old empire together for a century. After Ur crumbled, the empire split into two kingdoms, north and south, in which the city-states exercised considerable self-rule. Then came Babylon.

   Old Babylonian Empire,
   about 2000 B.C.

Old Babylonia. Babylon was a village about 150 miles north of Ur on the Euphrates, which is about 60 miles south of modern Baghdad. A desert people, the Amorites, moved into Sumer from the west and made Babylon their capital. Some authorities believe the Amorites were an eastern branch of the Canaanites. They assimilated to Sumerian culture, then united all of Sumer, Akkad, and buffer regions, including Kuwait north of Kuwait Bay, to create the first Babylonian Empire and with it, the ideal of a single kingdom for all of southern Mesopotamia, including Kuwait.

It's not hard to locate Kuwait. At the north end of the Persian Gulf there are two inlets of the sea, one at 11 o'clock, which is a river that used to define part of the Iraq-Kuwait border, and one at 9 o'clock, which is Kuwait Bay. Kuwait Bay is almost halfway down the length of Kuwait. As you look at the maps in this presentation, note that some or all of Kuwait has been part of the same political entities with Iraq almost continuously for 4,300 years. Sometimes Iraq lost Kuwait for brief periods, but we always got it back. It's back now. To stay.

Hammurabi the Lawgiver. From about 1800-1757 B.C., the king Hammurabi ruled over the Old Babylonian Empire. He codified the commercial and criminal law of the Sumerians in writing, so that the same rules could apply to everyone and everyone would know in advance what was expected of him and what penalties would attach to violations of law. This was the first step to a government of laws, not men, in that kings were expected to act in accordance with the law, not arbitrarily or by whim. Hammurabi's Code is not the oldest written law, but it is the most thorough and best-known of ancient codes, which builds upon the very oldest codes known to man, and those did originate in Iraq.

Hammurabi's family ruled for about 200 years, then fell to the kings of another mountain people from east of the Tigris, the Kassites. They too assimilated to Sumerian culture, and ruled a united Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia) for around 500 years, vying toward the end with the parallel kingdom of similar culture in northern Mesopotamia, Assyria.

   Assyrian Empire, about 630 B.C.

Dreaded Assyria. In the north of Iraq lived a fierce people who were to build the greatest empire the world had yet known, centered on their capital of Ashur and thus known as "Assyrian" (Ashur-ian). When they conquered a hostile territory, they tended to deport the population, scattering them across the empire as to prevent them from mounting counterattacks later. The "lost ten tribes of Israel" are among the unlucky peoples scattered across Assyria, where, presumably, they gradually assimilated to their neighbors and lost their separate identity.

Despite their fierceness and harsh treatment of conquered peoples, the Assyrians achieved a very high level in the arts, especially in the relief carvings in stone with which they decorated their palaces. They also collected cuneiform documents from all over the Near East in a great library at Nineveh, their last capital. When the Assyrians were finally defeated in 612 B.C., these documents lay undisturbed for almost 2,500 years, because no ancient people dared to venture into the site of "cursed" Nineveh. Thus did a magnificent treasure of ancient writing come down to nineteenth century archeologists intact.

   New Babylonian, or Chaldean,
   Empire, 600 B.C.  This was the
   Babylonia of the Bible.

Babylonia Reborn. What defeated Assyria was an alliance of Babylonia and the Medes, a people of northwestern Iran, attacking from both south and east. Assyria asked for and received help from Egypt, but to no avail. Media and New Babylonia divided Assyria's realms agreeably but managed to live at peace for only 72 years. What a time it was, though.

Babylonia had been reinvigorated by the Chaldeans ("Kal-DEE-ans"), a people from the west who had moved into Babylon fairly recently. The Chaldeans got the bulk of the Assyrian Empire and in pacifying the outer provinces conquered Jerusalem and instituted the Babylonian Captivity by carting off the Jewish leadership to Babylon. Once the boundaries of the empire were secure, the kings, especially Nebuchadnezzar II, turned their attentions to restoring the glory of Babylon, a square city built on a grid which they filled with temples and palaces, a tall ziggurat (step-sided pyramid) called, in the Bible, the Tower of Babel; the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (plantings on terraces of the royal palace that were one of the Seven Wonders of the World); and the Ishtar Gate, a magnificent structure that has been rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The Gate, over 36 feet tall, is covered with blue, glazed bricks and was decorated with some 575 glazed-brick dragons and bulls. Leading to the Gate, which guarded a northern entrance to the walled city, was a processional street of stone and brick over a mile and a half long, lined by blue walls of glazed brick decorated with about 120 brick lions. So magnificent was Babylon that when Alexander the Great conquered all of Persia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, as well as Greece and modern Turkey, he planned to establish his capital at Babylon: Iraq. He died in Nebuchadnezzar's palace. But we're getting a little ahead of our story.

   Persia of the Achaemenid Dynasty, about 500 B.C.

Persia. Between the New Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Alexander there was another brilliant empire of which both Iraq and Kuwait were part: the Persian. In 555 B.C., Cyrus the Great, a Persian prince, revolted against his Median overlords and united the Medes and Persians, who were related, into the most powerful empire of the day. Cyrus and his descendants conquered New Babylonia, Afghanistan, most of present-day Pakistan, all of Egypt and modern Turkey, even parts of Greece. Beyond Kuwait, Persia also controlled the western shore of the entire Persian Gulf and northern Oman, as well as the northeast coast of the Red Sea. Persia welded these diverse lands into a single functioning unit, so that when Alexander defeated Persia in 330 B.C., he inherited the whole of its enormous empire. The first Persian Empire laid the foundation of all the others, which ruled much the same terrain, give or take a country or two.

Alexander didn't live to govern that vast empire. After his death it broke up into three kingdoms under Greek rulers. Iraq (and Kuwait) were part of the enormous Seleucid Kingdom, which comprised about 2/3 of the old Persian Empire, lacking only Greece and northern Asia Minor to the north and Egypt and Palestine to the west. Even so, it extended from the Mediterranean to modern Pakistan. Its eastern capital was at Seleucia, a new city founded by the general of Alexander's after whom the city and kingdom are both named (Seleucus I Nicator), about 40 miles north of Babylon and 20 miles south of present-day Baghdad, on the Tigris. The Greeks used Babylon as a source of building materials, recycling Babylonian structures into Seleucian. (The western capital was at Antioch, Syria (now Antakya, Turkey), one of the great cities of the ancient world.)

Hellenistic Seleucia, the Second Persian Empire. The Greek-dominated Seleucid Kingdom was a major part of the Hellenistic world, that large cultural area of Greek thought and art south and east of Greece. The kingdom lasted about 200 years, that is, about as long as the United States has existed to date, when it was conquered by the Parthians.

Parthia, the Third Persian Empire. The Parthians were a people of northeastern Iran who came to control almost all of the original Seleucid realm, including of course northern Kuwait, and even extending down the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea much as the first Persian Empire had. Once the Achaemenid ("Uh-KEY-men-id") Persians had united the region, each successor state was able to reunite large parts of it. The Parthians established their capital at Ctesiphon ("TESS-if-on"), across the Tigris from Seleucia. In Iraq. It was during the Parthian years that Mesopotamia came in contact with the great western empire of the Romans. Parthia was the only empire the Romans clashed with that they could not crush. Quite the contrary, Parthia was a constant danger to Roman possessions in the East for centuries.

In 115 to 116 A.D. — yes, we are only now in the era after the birth of Jesus; everything thus far has been before Christ — the great Roman emperor Trajan, intent on breaking the power of Parthia, swept down the Tigris all the way to the Persian Gulf and thus to the region of Kuwait. Once there, however, he found himself surrounded by hostile forces and escaped only with great difficulty. He contemplated a future expedition to secure Iraq to Rome but died before he could do anything about it. His successor, Hadrian, abandoned the project, and Rome never held more than small areas of northwestern Iraq after that, though it did control a large part of the upper limits of Mesopotamia that are now in Turkey and Syria.

The Fourth Persian Empire. In 224 A.D., the Parthians suffered the same fate as the Medes 773 years before: a Persian prince revolted against his Parthian overlords and established a new empire, of roughly the same dimensions as Parthia, under the control of his family, the Sassanids. They replaced the Parthians' feudalistic realm with an efficient, centralized empire that was the most powerful state of late antiquity.

Within 250 years of the establishment of the Sassanian Empire, the Roman Empire split into two parts and the western half was lost to barbarian invasions. The Sassanians thought themselves strong enough to take on what remained. They drove across Anatolia (Turkey) and in 615 A.D. were camped on the Bosporus opposite Constantinople. The great Byzantine emperor Heraclius outflanked the Persians and drove them back in a long and exhausting war. But while the Byzantines and Persians were fighting each other to a standstill, a new power rose from an unexpected quarter to ravage both. The Arabs had arrived.

Islam Erupts. Small numbers of Arabs had been present in Mesopotamia since the ninth century before Jesus (perhaps 850 B.C.), in that Arabia lay right nextdoor, to the south and west. But the Arab homeland had always been on the fringe of things. The great empires passed them by because the land they lived in was, largely, inhospitable desert. The only parts of Arabia that most civilized peoples had ever interested themselves in were (a) the area adjoining the Mediterranean, because it was a crossroads for trade between Asia and Africa, and (b) the desert immediately south of Mesopotamia, primarily as a buffer to protect against violent desert nomads, who otherwise might swoop down upon settled peoples and rob them of their hard-won food and treasure.

This is what we meant when we objected to the characterization of Iraq as savage and Kuwait as civilized, because exactly the opposite is the case. Iraq was the home of the brilliant civilization of Mesopotamia, whereas Kuwait, to the extent it had any people at all for most of its history, was the home of utterly uncivilized nomads against whom Mesopotamia had to defend itself. (In August 1990, Iraq moved against the rapacious nomad mentality of Kuwait in self-defense against economic subversion. Kuwait was not just driving down the price of oil deliberately to hurt Iraq but was also tapping into Iraqi oilfields to steal our oil right out from under us. It was only in retaliation that Iraq took back not just its oil, but also its lost province of Kuwait.)

Prior to 600 A.D. no Arab empire had existed because jealous local chieftains quarreled endlessly among themselves. What no leader had been able to do by politics or family alliances, one great Arab leader did through religion. The Prophet Mohammed united the Arabs, and their primitive energy was now harnessed to the task of spreading his religion, Islam, by the sword if need be.

"There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His prophet." 

— The shahada, Islam's profession of the faith.

Their reward was not just the greater glory of God but all the booty that victorious armies could grab. We can say that; we're Arabs, now. But at the time when the Arab armies swept up from the south, they were desert barbarians to us, dangerous outsiders intent on destroying our great and ancient culture. Little could we have known that those barbarians would choose our country to be the center of their empire and that the high Islamic civilization they would create would be the richest and most fertile in the world for hundreds of years.

Holy War. The Prophet Mohammed was both a religious and a political leader. He saw the role of the state as being to help the people live by the laws of God. In that, he was much like the Pope in the Papal States of Europe, who ran the government as well as the Church. Mohammed united most of the tribes of Arabia, and on his death in 632 A.D., his successor continued the task of spreading the word of God ("Allah" in Arabic) by bringing ever more territory under Arab government. "Caliph" is the English version of the Arabic word for "successor", khalifah, and the title given to each of the men who served as head of both 'church' and state in the Arab Empire.

By the year 640, all Mesopotamia was brought under Moslem control, and it is the Arabs that gave Mesopotamia its "new" name:  Iraq. The empire continued to expand, and by 850 had gone as far as it would go, which is not much farther than shown in the map for the crucial year 750, when the hereditary office of Caliph shifted from one family, the Umayyads of Syria, to another, the Abbasids of Iraq.

To achieve this, the Abbasids killed every member of the Umayyads they could get their hands on, much as the Bolsheviks killed the entire Russian royal family to prevent any attempt to restore the monarchy. One Umayyad got away. He fled to Spain and broke it off as a separate state, the Caliphate of Córdoba, which the Abbasids never did manage to get back.

   The Caliphate in 750 A.D., the year the Abbasid family
   overthrew the Umayyads.  The inset shows the conterminous
  United States by comparison.

The Abbasid Caliphate was, in its day, the largest and most powerful empire on Earth. It touched both the Atlantic and China. At its height, the Caliphate was the equivalent in world terms of the United States today: the superpower of the age. It was also a melting pot. The Encyclopaedia Britannica observes, "With the rise of the 'Abbasids the base for influence in the empire became international, emphasizing membership in the community of believers rather than Arab nationality." Persians, Mesopotamians, Egyptians could all rise as high as their ability might take them.

The capital of this huge and tolerant empire was Baghdad, Iraq. Baghdad was the world's greatest city, the equivalent of Washington, New York, Paris, and Rome all rolled into one: the political, economic, cultural, and religious capital of all Islam.

City of Peace. Iraq's capital, which spreads along both banks of the river Tigris at its closest approach to the Euphrates, was originally a market town within the Sassanian Empire, only 20 miles north of Ctesiphon, the capital. For the first 110 years of Arab rule, Baghdad survived as a small provincial village far from Mohammed's capital, Mecca, and the Umayyads' capital, Damascus. But in 750 the Abbasid family moved the capital from Syria to Iraq, and in 762 chose Baghdad, which then occupied a small area on the west bank of the Tigris, as the site for a new, planned city, to be called Medinat al Salaam, "City of Peace". Using Ctesiphon as a quarry for building materials, 100,000 men built a great round city, 1.7 miles in diameter, with three concentric walls surmounted by 360 towers. Shortly after this central portion was completed, the city spilled over its walls and across to the east bank of the Tigris. By 814 Baghdad was the largest city on Earth. The Caliph at the time was the famous Harun al-Rashid, immortalized in the Thousand And One Nights, many of whose stories take place in Harun's Baghdad.

The Abbasid Caliphate flourished for a century, then began a long decline. Other, lesser, Moslem states arose, sometimes giving lip service to the Caliphate but exercising powers as if independent. Despite murderous political turmoil and military violence both internally and at the frontiers, the Moslem world was alive with commerce and ideas from all over its vast realms and every area touched. Stewart C. Easton, in his world-history survey text The Western Heritage, says:

"The Muslims were the heirs of all the ages up to their own time; ... they preserved the Greek and Persian heritages, added something of Hindu achievements, and even took a fundamental invention from China, paper. This heritage they handed on to Western civilization intact and improved. ... For many centuries they acted as the sole bridge between East and West. ... If the West had had to discover for itself all that the Muslims taught it, Western civilization might have been delayed for centuries."

Especially important were Moslem contributions to mathematics, without which the science we take for granted could not have developed. "Arabic numerals" and the concept of zero, both learned from India and dispersed to the world, revolutionized math in the West, as did algebra, a Moslem invention. Moslem medicine was the best in the world, and Moslem alchemy led to modern chemistry. A Moslem musician set out the elements of musical notation. Moslem navigators invented the astrolabe and perfected the quadrant and mariner's compass that made possible the great voyages of the Age of Discovery — as, for instance, the one by Columbus that eventually led to the formation of the United States.

Our Dark Ages. What the Germanic barbarians did to Rome in the fifth century A.D., the Mongols did to Baghdad in the thirteenth century — in spades. You may have heard of the Mongols, a nomadic people of east-central Asia who created the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world thru unprecedented violence, but you never experienced them. We did. Hulegu, grandson of Genghis Khan, attacked Baghdad in 1258, put the last Abbasid Caliph to death, and slaughtered an astronomical number of Iraqis: a minimum of 200,000, as Hulegu himself asserted, and perhaps as many as 800,000, the number tradition assigns to this cataclysm. The Mongol hordes also destroyed the irrigation system that had made possible the large population of Mesopotamia. A century and a half later, the Mongol conqueror Timur the Lame, known to literature as Tamerlane, "The Scourge of God", sacked Baghdad again, causing less devastation only because so much had been destroyed already. To give you an idea of what Tamerlane was like, we offer one evocative sentence from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"The revolts which broke out all over Persia during these campaigns were repressed with ruthless vigour; whole cities were destroyed, their populations massacred, and towers built of their skulls."

Such as remained of Iraq was part of a series of short-lived empires based on Persia but not extending west of the Euphrates. Only during these darkest days of Mesopotamia was Kuwait not part of Iraq. There was no central government over the area south of the Euphrates, which reverted to tribal nomadism. That didn't last.

   Ottoman Empire, 1683.

Ottomans Sweep In. In 1534 the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent took Mesopotamia, virtually without opposition, and incorporated it into the last of the great empires of the Near East. Eighty-one years earlier the Ottomans had achieved what the Caliphate never could: the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and capture of Constantinople, which they made their capital. In 1683, at its height, the Ottomans' was the greatest empire in the world, with a brilliant court in a bustling and beautified Constantinople but at best lackluster administration in the provinces. Iraq suffered Turkish domination for nearly 400 years, 1534-1914.

Backward Europe Moves to the Fore. As the Ottoman state declined and became "the sick man of Europe", West European empires rose. (Though in later years the Ottoman Empire was mostly in Asia, its capital was in Europe, and it is the ambitions of rival European empires that led to its downfall. It allowed itself to be drawn into World War I on the side of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) — who turned out to be the losers.) The greatest of the West European empires, the British, took special interest in Mesopotamia. Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain made Mesopotamia into virtually a British sphere of influence halfway between its African and Indian colonies. Which is how all the trouble we are now experiencing in the Middle East began.

The History of Kuwait. We have just summarized, in some 4,000 words, Iraq's enormously long and complicated history — thru virtually all of which Kuwait has been part of Iraq or its predecessor states. Now we can dispense in three paragraphs with Kuwait's history apart from Iraq:

"Kuwait had few settled inhabitants before 1700 [A.D.]. About 1710, some members of the Arab Anaza tribal confederation settled on the southern shore of Kuwait Bay, where they found fresh water. These people probably fled from their homeland in Arabia to escape a drought. They built a port that later became the city of Kuwait. Between 1756 and 1762, the group elected the head of the Al-Sabah family to rule them as Sabah I.

"In 1775, the British made Kuwait the starting point of their desert mail service to Aleppo, Syria. This route formed part of a system that carried goods and messages from India to England. Over the years, British interest in Kuwait grew. In 1899, Great Britain became responsible for Kuwait's defense." (World Book Encyclopedia)

In 1961 Britain gave Kuwait independence, whereupon Iraq immediately asserted its rightful claim to restoration of Kuwait to Iraq. Though one government decided not to pursue that claim, President Hussein had to reassert it because Kuwait was a thorn in our side and we realized that leaving a border between us would produce perpetual conflict between the house of Al-Sabah and the people of Iraq.

There you have it: the entire history of Kuwait.

The "Protectorate". Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines "protectorate" as "the relationship of superior authority assumed by one power or state over a dependent one". People not familiar with the way things worked in the old world may not understand the World Book's polite description, above, of Kuwait's involvement with Britain. What happened is that the Ottoman Empire exercised only weak control over fringe areas of desert, because they weren't important. They had almost no people and little or no resources, and required little or no services from government. Local tribes of nomads were pretty much left to fend for themselves. Fiercely tribal, they rejected central authority, be it from Baghdad or Constantinople. They set up their own local leaders, sheikhs, and gave only lip service, if that, to the national government.

But every now and then a strong leader in Constantinople would want to teach these upstart sheikhs a lesson and reassert central control. So the sheikh would approach a foreign power to protect him from the national government's assertion of its rights. In exchange for such "protection", the foreign power demanded certain privileges from the locals, like controlling their economy; obtaining military or naval bases on their territory; running their post office, foreign affairs, and so forth. From the modern point of view, then, what happened when Britain established a "protectorate" over Kuwait in 1899 is that Britain made Kuwait a colony. Kuwaitis exchanged one faraway, foreign overlord for another, one even farther away and more foreign.

Why did Britain want Kuwait? You probably think of Britain as the little country off the coast of Europe that it is today. But in 1899 Britain controlled an enormous overseas empire, the largest in the history of the world, and needed harbors spaced strategically between colonies to protect British interests, both from internal revolt and from other empires. To appreciate how large the British Empire was, consider that at its height, it was about 12 million square miles in area — 1/5 the entire land area of planet Earth; 3 1/3 times the size of the 50 United States; half again as large as the Soviet Union — and contained a fourth of the entire world's population. It was no idle boast that "the sun never sets on the British Empire", because British colonies circled the globe. To hold this far-flung empire together, Britain needed ports for its immense navy. When the British Admiralty surveyed the maps of the Middle East, they saw in Kuwait Bay a magnificent harbor large enough to hold all the ships of the British Navy, strategically placed midway between British Africa and British India, and close to a crumbling Ottoman Empire that was certain to lose all its Arabian colonies sooner or later. Britain wanted to be there to pick up the pieces, especially since it was already apparent that large reserves of oil lay under the previously worthless sands of the Arabian Peninsula. (In 1931, before Kuwait's oil reserves were found, an atlas listed the products of Kuwait as "horses, wool, pearls, and dates". That was it, the entire list.)

Look at the map of the Near East in 1914 and you will see that the Ottoman Empire was a bone in Britain's imperial throat, interfering with the sweep of British colonies from Egypt to India and holding the bulk of Arabia against British oil exploitation. Britain no more cared about the human rights of Kuwaitis then, than the international oil companies do now. The ruling class of the British Empire merely wanted to rip Arabia from the Ottomans to enlarge its dominions and wealth, and improve the geographical continuity and defendability of its Empire. So it provoked the Al-Sabah family into a complete break from the Sultan in Constantinople.

   Middle East, 1914.  The Ottoman
   Empire is solid black, British Empire
   striped.

Kuwait Stolen. Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 350 years. The Turks administered it as part of the province (vilayet) of Basra, which in turn was one of three vilayets into which Mesopotamia was divided, the others being Baghdad and Mosul. Whenever Turkish control was lax, local power filled the vacuum. But always the legitimate government was that of the Sultan in Istanbul, who was also to be respected as titular head of Islam.

Britain didn't "liberate" Kuwait from anything. It merely elevated to the position of "national" leader a petty sheikh who was little more benevolent than the Sultan. Though posing as "protector", Britain was actually colonial overlord, and it is from Britain that Kuwait finally gained independence in 1961. Britain doesn't like other societies to succeed, so it made a point of sowing distrust among its colonies, to prevent them from getting together against Britain, either to demand independence or to become commercial rivals after independence. Whereas the great Asiatic empires of which Iraq was part left behind major states, Britain left behind ministates scattered along the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea coasts, as it did in the Caribbean and Oceania. Some of these ministates have tried to get together, with varying degrees of success, as for instance the United Arab Emirates. All that Iraq has done is to restore a natural political and economic order to its neighborhood by taking back its stolen province. What's the big deal?

Try to See Things Our Way. Our tradition is very different from yours. We have had thousands of years of rule by strong leaders. Some of them were elected by tribal councils, but most came to office by heredity or murder. Yes, the history of the Moslem monarchies is a history of murder of one ambitious man by another, and another, and another. The Ottoman Sultans often killed or perpetually imprisoned in the palace everyone who might legitimately challenge for the throne, including their own brothers. That is our Turkish legacy. As for our Arab legacy, three of the first four Caliphs were murdered, and many more thereafter. Often the clash of would-be caliphs has led to clashes of armies. Remember that for thousands of years Arabs were nomadic, tribal people, short-tempered, quick to take offense, and long even to calm down, much less forgive. Family and tribal loyalties moved them to fight it out among themselves, and woe be to him who got caught in between.

Don't get us wrong: we're not proud of this. But you must understand that massive violence is nothing new to us. Although peaceful political change by elections rather than coups, and peaceful merger of adjoining countries by plebiscite rather than invasion might be a nice way to go, it's not the way things have been done in this part of the world. Ever. We are a warrior people, and you forget that only at your peril. We know the United States is a superpower. But we have been a superpower ourselves and were nearly destroyed by a superpower. We survived. Our history gives us a perspective that enables us to persevere. We are not Panama. Not Grenada. Not Egypt in 1967. This will be no Six-Day War.

"There is no greater calamity than to underestimate an enemy."

— Dowager Empress in Samuel Bronstein's film 55 Days at Peking

Attitudes. The United States and Iraq have very different attitudes toward war, because of our very different geography and history. The United States is isolated from other powerful countries by oceans thousands of miles wide. Iraq has no natural barriers to protect it from invasion from all around, so has been the victim of invasions for thousands of years. We have fought over and over again because we had to, because we have been invaded over and over again. There is nothing novel about the impending invasion by the United States, so it holds no unique terror for us.

Human Costs. The history we have outlined above is missing one crucial element that might help you understand us and what you face when you make war against us: blood. Except for mention of what the Mongols did to us, we have omitted the enormous cost in human life and grief exacted by the multitudinous wars we have fought over the ages. You may not have known our history, but we have. And we know that war, though tragic for families and occasionally disastrous for nations, is the way the world has been built and changed for thousands of years. That's how Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and the Arab and Ottoman Empires were built. We think the magnificence of those empires was worth the price in blood. The world remembers the empires, not the wars that built them. If we are not as courageous as our ancestors, when it comes time to write our history, there will be nothing to say.

A country that has suffered the Mongols is not afraid of Americans; George Bush is no Tamerlane. We have the stomach for mass violence in defense of our rights. And we know what we're fighting for. Do you? [Top] [Home]

Assyrian King Killing Lions, about 860 B.C.  Bas relief on wall of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud, Iraq.

A presentation by the Expansionist Party of the United States,
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