Soccer Dad

Pieces of april

Former Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie has broken her silence.

During the run-up to the war, the Iraqi government released a transcript of Glaspie's meeting with Hussein on July 25, 1990, which suggested that she gave tacit approval for an invasion. Glaspie managed to convince lawmakers that the transcript was inaccurate and that she had forcefully warned Hussein not to invade. But her credibility eroded after the leak of her classified cable to the State Department about the meeting, which suggested a more conciliatory conversation with Hussein.

In the interview, Glaspie insisted that the Iraq transcript "was invented by Tariq Aziz," the deputy prime minister. "Tariq was a master of words as a previous Minister of Information and editor of a newspaper," she said. Glaspie asserted that she told Hussein to "keep your hands off this country."

Glaspie's cable was declassified after a Freedom of Information Act appeal by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The cable, along with others obtained by the archive, suggests that she was largely carrying out a policy, pushed by State at the time, of seeking to improve relations with Iraq.

Glaspie's cable says that President George H.W. Bush "had instructed her to broaden and deepen our relations with Iraq," adding that Hussein in turn offered "warm greetings" to Bush and was "surely sincere" about not wanting war.

Whether or not Amb. Glaspie warned or encouraged Saddam Hussein, it's pretty clear that she read him wrong. And if in the runup to the invasion of Kuwait the American government was still looking to improve relations with Saddam, the government was ill informed about Saddam's intentions. One could guess that there was an intelligence failure then.

She acknowledges that she was misled by Saddam:

Glaspie said the Mubarak call was crucial in convincing her that any sense of crisis had passed. She said that she was "foolish" to believe that Hussein would not lie to both her and Mubarak, and that she left Baghdad to go on a short vacation. Before she left, she sent another cable titled "Iraq Blinks -- Provisionally," also obtained by the archive.

Hussein, "a megalomaniac," thought "that my government did not have any guts, that we would not fight and certainly not for that little [piece] of desert that was Kuwait for him," Glaspie told al-Hayat.

It's unclear from this reported interview whether Glaspie's failing were hers alone, or whether the Bush administration as a whole didn't take Saddam's threat to Kuwait seriously enough.

Unsurprisingly we're also told that Glaspie didn't think that the Iraq war was a good idea.

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