Did Saddam Hussein think the US Ambassador had expressed indifference to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in July 1990?
One of the most debated questions of modern diplomatic history
Here’s some history about the Gulf War that most Americans, especially those under 55 do not know. It features information about:
How Saddam Hussein misinterpreted US Ambassador April Glaspie as expressing indifference to Saddam Hussein’s invading Kuwait.
Congressman Lee Hamilton undermined confidence in the US support for Kuwait by asking if the US had a “mutual defense pact with Kuwait that would obligate us to come to their defense in the event they were invaded by Iraq?” The answer was “no”, which was interpreted as a signal, because the question was posed in a public hearing in a very politically charged time.
How Kuwait’s ambassador enlisted his 15-year old daughter to make false allegations (Atrocity propaganda) that Iraqi soldiers took premature babies out of their incubators and left them to die.
How fear of a “unipolar moment” after the fall of the Soviet Union and Israel and the US’s actions toward Iraq, influenced Saddam Hussein’s actions.
If the US had better managed its affaiars, could it have avoided the Gulf War?
GEMINI SUMMARY:
The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait resulted from a catastrophic mix of diplomatic miscalculation, economic desperation, and geopolitical paranoia.
While long debated whether U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie gave Saddam Hussein a “green light,” the historical consensus is that Saddam did not receive explicit approval, but rather concluded that the U.S. would remain a passive bystander. This calculation was reinforced by a decade of U.S. support during the Iran-Iraq War and public statements from Congress and the State Department disavowing security commitments to Kuwait.
Furthermore, declassified research reveals Saddam’s actions were driven by a profound fear of a “unipolar moment” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He viewed Kuwait’s oil overproduction not just as economic greed, but as a U.S.-led conspiracy designed to cripple Iraq ahead of an anticipated, preemptive Israeli military strike.1 Ultimately, the invasion was viewed by Baghdad as a defensive, preemptive move against an existential Western plot.
Q: Did Saddam Hussein think the US Ambassador had expressed indifference to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait?
A: Gemini Response
Whether Saddam Hussein truly believed he had a “green light” from the U.S. remains one of the most debated questions of modern diplomatic history. The consensus among historians and intelligence analysts is that Saddam did not receive an explicit endorsement, but he likely left the meeting believing the United States would not intervene militarily if he took action against Kuwait.
This misunderstanding stemmed from a mix of standard diplomatic boilerplate, mixed signals from Washington, and Saddam’s own miscalculations.
The Meeting: July 25, 1990
Just eight days before the invasion, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie was unexpectedly summoned to a meeting with Saddam Hussein. Iraq had massed over 100,000 troops on the Kuwaiti border, furious over oil overproduction and border disputes. (LA Times)
According to both declassified U.S. cables and Iraqi transcripts, Glaspie used standard State Department language to emphasize that the U.S. wanted a peaceful resolution. However, two specific quotes from the transcript became infamous: (LA Times)
“We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” (New York Times, 23 September 1990 )
“Secretary [of State] Baker has directed me to emphasize... that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” (New York Times, 23 September 1990 )
Glaspie was delivering the official U.S. line of neutrality on inter-Arab border disputes. But to a dictator like Saddam, this hands-off language sounded less like neutrality and more like strategic indifference.
Why Saddam Miscalculated
Historians argue that Saddam’s belief that the U.S. wouldn’t interfere wasn’t just based on one meeting with Glaspie. It was reinforced by several factors:
Years of U.S. Backing: Throughout the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, the United States had quietly supported Iraq with intelligence, economic aid, and political backing to counter Iran. Saddam assumed Washington still viewed him as a vital regional bulwark.
Public Mixed Signals: Just days before the invasion, State Department spokesmen in Washington publicly stated that the U.S. had no specific defense treaties or security commitments to Kuwait. Saddam took this as further proof of U.S. apathy.
The “Vietnam Syndrome”: Declassified records show Saddam and his top aides (like Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz) believed the American public and politicians were still too traumatized by the Vietnam War to risk American lives over “a piece of desert.”
Saddam’s Echo Chamber: Saddam operated in a brutal dictatorship where advisors rarely contradicted him. He had already resolved that Kuwait’s economic policies were an “act of war” against Iraq, and he actively filtered out diplomatic warnings that didn’t fit his narrative.
The Alternate Perspective: Did Saddam Even Care?
In later years, Iraqi officials (including Tariq Aziz) downplayed the idea that they were looking for a green light. They claimed the decision to invade had already been made based on Iraq’s desperate economic straits, and they weren’t seeking permission from an American ambassador. (Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training)
Furthermore, Glaspie later testified to Congress that she had warned Saddam that the U.S. would defend its vital interests and that the dispute must be settled peacefully. She argued that Saddam deliberately deceived her during the meeting by promising that negotiations with Kuwait were ongoing and that “nothing serious” would happen in the interim. (LA Times)
Ultimately, Saddam didn’t necessarily think he had America’s blessing—he thought he had America’s bystander status. He bet that the U.S. would confine its response to verbal condemnation and economic sanctions, a miscalculation that directly led to the Gulf War.
“It was pretty clear that the goal was to scapegoat April Glaspie”
After her meeting with Saddam just a few days before the invasion, Glaspie reported on it; she mentioned that she had advised Saddam that she was going away for a brief period, but asked him whether she should cancel her plans. He told her to proceed and go to see President Bush to report orally what Saddam had said. In a separate cable, she told us that Saddam said that she should go on vacation, but asked for confirmation by the Department. I decided to let her go, after weighing all the pros and cons, because I knew of the mother’s condition and furthermore I did not think that Glaspie’s whereabouts would make much difference to Saddam’s plans.
QUESTIONS:
Why did Saddam believe Washington viewed him as a vital regional bulwark?
If you were Iraq, would you believe the US intended minimal objection to an Iraqi invasion if you had heard the US Ambassador say “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait” and “Secretary [of State] Baker has directed me to emphasize... that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America”.
Presidential Candidate Ross Perot is quoted here as commenting on the Gulf War diplomacy. Had you ever heard claims that Iraq thought the US had expressed its indifference to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait?
Would the identity of the Kuwaiti ambassador’s 15-year-old daugher stay secret in today’s social media age? What prevented her identity from being known in 1991? Did anyone in the media know about the ambassador’s daughter?
To what extent was Saddam Hussein’s fears of US and Israeli antagonism rooted in reality?
MORE DETAIL:
The Baltimore Sun, Baghdad story writes Glaspie out, Hussein in, Oct 25, 2018.
LA Times, Was the U.S. Signal Red or Green on Kuwait? Nov 22, 1992
Meetings with Saddam Hussein | April Glaspie ( US Ambassador)
Wikipedia:
Glaspie summarized the meeting as follows:
Saddam told the ambassador on July 25 that Mubarak has arranged for Kuwaiti and Iraqi delegations to meet in Riyadh, and then on July 28, 29 or 30, the Kuwaiti crown prince will come to Baghdad for serious negotiations. “Nothing serious will happen” before then, Saddam had promised Mubarak. (Wikipedia citation needed)
One version of the transcript has Glaspie saying:
We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threats against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship — not confrontation — regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders? (Wikipedia citation needed)
Later the transcript has Glaspie saying:
We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
Another version of the transcript (the one published in The New York Times on 23 September 1990) has Glaspie saying:
But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 1960s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi (Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League) or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.
When these purported transcripts were made public, Glaspie was accused of having given tacit approval for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which took place on August 2, 1990. It was argued that Glaspie’s statements that “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts” and that “the Kuwait issue is not associated with America” were interpreted by Saddam as giving free rein to handle his disputes with Kuwait as he saw fit. It was also argued that Saddam would not have invaded Kuwait had he been given an explicit warning that such an invasion would be met with force by the United States. Journalist Edward Mortimer wrote in the New York Review of Books in November 1990:
It seems far more likely that Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he believed the US would not react with anything more than verbal condemnation. That was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting with US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly disavowing any US security commitments to Kuwait, but also from the success of both the Reagan and the Bush administrations in heading off attempts by the US Senate to impose sanctions on Iraq for previous breaches of international law.
In September 1990, a pair of British journalists confronted Glaspie with the transcript of her meeting with Saddam Hussein, to which she replied that “Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”
In April 1991 Glaspie testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She said that at the July 25 meeting she had “repeatedly warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein against using force to settle his dispute with Kuwait.” She also said that Saddam had lied to her by denying he would invade Kuwait. Asked to explain how Saddam could have interpreted her comments as implying U.S. approval for the invasion of Kuwait, she replied: “We foolishly did not realize he [Saddam] was stupid.” In July 1991 State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said at a press briefing:
We have faith in Ambassador Glaspie’s reporting. She sent us cables on her meetings based on notes that were made after the meeting. She also provided five hours or more of testimony in front of the Committee about the series of meetings that she had, including this meeting with Saddam Hussein.
The cables that Glaspie sent from Iraq about her meeting with Saddam are no longer classified. Glaspie’s cable on her meeting with Saddam reports that President George H. W. Bush “had instructed her to broaden and deepen our relations with Iraq.” Saddam, in turn, offered “warm greetings” to Bush and was “surely sincere” about not wanting war, the cable said.
Glaspie herself for years remained silent on the subject of her actions in Iraq. But in March 2008 she gave an interview to the Lebanese newspaper Dar Al-Hayat. In the interview, she said she has no regrets. “It is over,” Glaspie said.
Nobody wants to take the blame. I am quite happy to take the blame. Perhaps I was not able to make Saddam Hussein believe that we would do what we said we would do, but in all honesty, I don’t think anybody in the world could have persuaded him.
Congress telegraphed indifference, Dave Deckert, Quora
“Developments in the Middle East, July 1990: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs,” House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, Second Session (July 31, 1990)
During the course of that session Lee Hamilton asked a question to which he obviously already knew the answer or he could have found the answer by asking the Congressional Research Service. The question was: “Do we have a mutual defense pact with Kuwait that would obligate us to come to their defense in the event they were invaded by Iraq?”
John Kelly gave the correct answer, which was: “No, we don’t.”
It was the wrong question to ask in public session, very clearly. For those who point fingers at who lost Kuwait, to me that was the defining moment because the U.S. Congress forced the U.S. Executive Branch to say that we have no legal obligation to come to the defense of Kuwait in the event of an invasion by Iraq. That was far more than anything that April Glaspie might said in her meeting with Saddam Hussein.
.. Then Kelly testifies. His testimony goes all over the world at sort of lickety-split speed. April by this time has left Baghdad. She left the day after she met with Saddam on a long-planned leave which included home leave, medical leave for both her and her aged mother who was living with her at the time as well as consultations in Washington.
This was consistent with what other diplomatic missions were doing. Most ambassadors were out of town during the months of July and August, and indeed at the time of the invasion of Kuwait almost all of them were out of town.
US and Kuwait used Atrocity Propaganda as Pretext for the Gulf War
The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who was publicly identified only as Nayirah at the time, and presented herself as having been a volunteer nurse at a Kuwaiti hospital at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and falsely accused Iraqi soldiers of killing Kuwaiti incubator babies.
The ambassador’s daughter was coached by a US public relations agency Hill & Knowlton, presumably at the direction of the US and Kuwaitis. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.
The Origins of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Reconsidered, University of Texas at Austin, Texas National Security Review, Summer 2023
(This is a summary of a May 2023 Harvard Ph.D thesis, by Daniel Chardelly)
GEMINI SUMMARY:
1. Re-evaluating the Conventional Narrative
For decades, the dominant scholarly and popular narrative held that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait out of simple greed to seize its oil, escape extreme post-war debt accrued during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War ($80 billion total), and resolve a long-standing border dispute. A secondary narrative blamed the U.S. for inadvertently giving Saddam a “green light” via ambiguous diplomatic signaling. However, this text argues that the invasion was deeply intertwined with Saddam’s calculations regarding the end of the Cold War and a rapidly changing global balance of power.
2. The Fear of a “Unipolar Moment”
Following Soviet retrenchment and the collapse of communism in late 1989, the Iraqi leadership realized the world was entering a brief period of unchecked American supremacy, or “unipolarity”. Saddam hypothesized that this unipolar phase would last about five years before rising powers like Japan and Germany restored a multipolar global equilibrium.
Until that balance returned, Saddam genuinely feared that the United States would seek hegemony over Middle Eastern oil to weaken its future economic competitors. Because Iraq emerged from its war with Iran as the strongest regional power, Saddam believed his regime stood as the primary obstacle to America’s designs and was thus a prime target for destabilization.
3. Terrors of a Preemptive Israeli Strike
Saddam’s Baathist worldview was highly suspicious of Western imperialism and Zionism, which he believed conspired to keep Arab nations weak, divided, and technologically backward. Starting in late 1989 and early 1990, Iraq received an influx of intelligence reports suggesting that Israel—bolstered by a massive influx of Soviet Jewish immigrants and a retreating Soviet Union—was planning a surprise preemptive strike against Iraq’s military and unconventional weapons facilities.
This anxiety was deeply informed by historical trauma:
The memory of the 1981 Israeli airstrike on the Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad.
The Iran-Contra affair, which validated Iraqi fears of hidden U.S.-Israeli duplicity.
Saddam tried to establish a deterrent by escalating his rhetoric, famously threatening in April 1990 to “make fire eat half of Israel” using binary chemical weapons if Israel struck first.
4. Deteriorating Relations with the U.S.
Though the Bush administration initially favored a policy of constructive engagement with Iraq, a series of incidents in early 1990 fueled Saddam’s belief that a U.S.-led conspiracy was underway:
Voice of America Editorial (Feb 15, 1990): Broadcasted an editorial calling for the removal of “secret police” and dictators, explicitly grouping Iraq with fallen Eastern European communist regimes—which Saddam viewed as a direct U.S. incitement to overthrow his government.
Human Rights Reports & Financial Freezes: The U.S. issued a scathing human rights report and froze agricultural credits (due to the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro investigation). The Iraqi bureaucracy assumed this was political sabotage driven by Zionist pressure on Congress.
Military Rumors: Saddam received reports that U.S. officials were actively telling Gulf neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to beware of Iraqi military aggression.
5. The Pivot to Kuwait
By the summer of 1990, Kuwait was overproducing oil well beyond its OPEC-assigned quota, which actively suppressed oil prices and crippled Iraq’s already moribund post-war economy.
Given his existing conviction that a U.S.-Israeli plot was in motion, Saddam concluded that the Kuwaiti royal family was not merely acting out of economic self-interest, but was actively complicit in an American-led conspiracy to choke Iraq economically ahead of the anticipated Israeli military strike. Therefore, invading Kuwait and seizing its oil was not viewed by Saddam as an aggressive expansionist end in itself, but rather as a desperate, defensive preemptive strike to break up a broader, existential Western plot before Iraq could be “gradually eaten up” or destroyed.
Credit: Daniel Chardell received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in May 2023. This article is adapted from his dissertation, “The Gulf War: An International History, 1989-1991.” In September 2023, he will join Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy as a Henry Chauncey ‘57 postdoctoral fellow.
Footnotes:
Footnote 117 Sciolino, The Outlaw State, 173–74. As detailed below, when an Israeli minister threatened to attack Iraq with chemical weapons in late July 1990, Hamdun informed the U.S. embassy that Saddam had made his threat in April to deter precisely such an Israeli attack. Embassy Baghdad to State, “Demarche on Israeli Statement on CW,” July 30, 1990, Richard N. Haass Papers, CF01937, Folder 3, BPL.